Violence Against Women

Ed Susan Bewley, John Friend, Gillian Mezey

RCOG Press, £35, pp 355

ISBN 1 900364 03 4

The family is consistently presented as the moral foundation of our society, and yet, apart from the police and the military, the family is society's most violent grouping and the home its most violent setting. At some time in their lives, as many as one in four women suffer violence at the hands of the men with whom they have intimate relationships. The 1992 British crime survey showed that violence against women by partners, former partners, and relatives is the most common form of physical interpersonal crime. The total number of …