Chapter 4 focuses on the situation of women. Like many previous health crises, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing gender inequalities. Most of the burden of caring for members of the family, particularly the children, fell on women during the pandemic, often with little or no support, and often while they tried to continue to engage in paid work. School closures also transferred much of the responsibility for overseeing the education of children to women. As women took on these family responsibilities, it affected their work participation. Health-care policies adopted during the pandemic disadvantaged access to reproductive care. Women also experienced greater mental health problems. Additionally, the unprecedented scale of stay-at-home advisories combined with pandemic-related tensions in the household and social isolation from family, friends, and support networks increased the risks of women experiencing heightened levels of domestic violence during the pandemic.

The feminist enterprise in law focuses on power imbalances related to gender and on unacknowledged, unrepresentative assumptions about what is reasonable and normal. On the hunch that the legally postulated “reasonable man” may not represent every reasonable person, feminist jurisprudence seeks out false (whether naïve or disingenuous) assertions of objectivity and neutrality in law and questions their premises. It rejects the retro-epistemology of evidentiary thinking, that is, the belief that there is an objective reality capable of discovery through neutral principles, logic, and clear thinking. Instead, feminist jurisprudence focuses on how language, emotion, and politics all can subtly influence law.

Chapter 4 compares two domestic violence cases: Mary Sunday v. The Federal Republic of Nigeria, and Mrs Sarah Kingsley Odoro v. ECOWAS Commission and 2 Ors. Although the Maputo Protocol safeguards the rights of domestic violence victims within international law, holding states accountable for such violations occurring in the private sphere remains a significant challenge. In Mary Sunday, the ECOWAS Court clarified its stance regarding the types of evidence needed to establish a state’s liability for domestic violence. Meanwhile, in the Sarah Odoro case, the Court reiterated the scope of defendants over which it would have jurisdiction in domestic violence matters. This chapter highlights the potential of the due diligence principle at the individual level to broaden the Court’s perspective on holding states accountable to individual victims, while also considering the implications of such an approach for domestic violence cases in international forums.

This chapter covers offences of violence, with the concept of violence encompassing both physical aggression (here termed ‘contact assaults’) and threatening behaviour (‘non-contact assaults’). The latter category includes stalking, intimidation and harassment, offending behaviours that have gained increasing social prominence and recognition by the criminal law in recent decades. Following this, the chapter turns to consideration of domestic violence, the response to which comprises a mixture of substantive and procedural law, and violence against children.Aside from the important common law principles of assault and battery, the offences under consideration here are primarily statutory and are largely, though not exclusively, contained in the states’ Crimes Acts (Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), Crimes Act 1900 (ACT), Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA), and Crimes Act 1958 (Vic)). The title of this chapter reflects the enduring use and influence of common law assault as the base offence of violence and an underpinning concept in many offences of personal violence and other forms of unlawful intimidatory and threatening behaviour.

This chapter calls attention to the violence of everyday life in the Roman world as the backdrop to the more extraordinary violence of war. Drawing specifically on archaeology, which is poorly equipped, it is argued, to reveal war violence but well situated to reveal the unusual volatility of living in the Roman world, it describes the ordinary upheavals of daily life. In particular, it examines the archaeological evidence for volatility in domestic circumstances, in how one made a living, and the physical trauma experienced by working bodies.

The case of Ms. Sykes demonstrates some of the ethical challenges that arise in determining whether a patient should be eligible for an advanced therapy, specifically a ventricular assist device (VAD). Ms. Sykes was in advanced heart failure and denied the VAD by the eligibility committee. The denial was out of concern that she lacked the requisite social support at home, as she had told the team her husband was medically abusive and neglectful. While some members of the team did not believe her reports, others were concerned she was being "doubly victimized" by the husband and then by not receiving the only advanced therapy available to her. Ethics was called to assist the team based on this tension. The haunting aspects of the case are relayed by a clinical ethicist who was early in her career and a senior clinical ethicist who was acting as her mentor at the time. The fairness of the eligibility decision, as well as the appropriate role boundaries of clinical ethicists, are central to what they find haunting.

Intimate partner violence is common amongst pregnant patients. It is associated with late entry to prenatal care, increased rates of preterm birth, depression, PTSD, and substance use during pregnancy. The USPTF supports screening of reproductive age individuals and ACOG supports the screening of all pregnant people. Screening is recommended at the beginning of pregnancy, during each trimester, and in the postpartum period to ensure those affected can be referred to resources for support. There are many validated screening tools but it is most important that patients are screened in private and they know their responses are confidential. Healthcare workers play an important role in helping to detect intimate partner violence and providing a safe healing environment for patients affected by intimate partner violence.

Florence Boos examines the proliferation of working-class writing in a variety of genres – poetry, fiction, autobiography, and journalism – at a time when there was a significant middle-class interest in forms of working-class culture. This led to the financing and production of publications such as Howitt’s and People’s Journal, Eliza Cook’s Journal, The Literature of Working Men, and the Dundee-based People’s Journal. The broadly class-based nature of the pervasive violence of the period is acknowledged here as a given in works which experiment with form in order to represent the authenticity of the working-class experience. As Boos concludes, ‘an integration of these writings into our conceptions of Victorian authorship can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the latter, as well as greater appreciation of the unique contributions of mid-century British working-class writers to the literary representation of the social issues of their time’.

Using Northeastern University School of Law’s Domestic Violence Institute’s (DVI) virtual clinic as a case study, this chapter contends that service design methods can address systemic and pernicious access to justice issues that have a chilling effect on survivors seeking legal services. It details foundational information about domestic violence survivors and the work of the clinic pre-COVID-19, before detailing the danger, disruption, and delays that the public health measures and Court closures had on survivors’ lives. It then details the process and outcomes of a rapid-response service design intervention that quickly overhauled DVI’s operations and created a survivor-centered framework that remains in place today, tackling systemic and pernicious access to justice issues while simultaneously amplifying the voices, experiences, and needs of survivors.

On Saturday, February 28, 1626, the Mansfeld Regiment’s second-in-command Theodoro de Camargo stabbed his wife Victoria Guarde twelve times for sleeping with other men and plotting to kill him. This chapter uses this incident as an entry into a discussion of sex, gender, and family life in seventeenth-century European armies. Before the Industrial Revolution, women and families traveled with armies in large numbers. Armies were sites of male violence against women as well as against other men; these intersected in Camargo’s attempts to assert his authority within a regiment that may not have respected him. Since Guarde described her own actions as attempts to be happy, this chapter also briefly discusses the history of happiness. Although Camargo was acquitted in a rigged trial, the regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner may have disapproved of Guarde’s murder. If so, he said nothing, but he intervened the next time Camargo tried to abuse one of his subordinates.

With a specific focus on violence and abuse, this chapter explores some the challenges that LGBTIQ people often experience, but also the strengths that LGBTIQ people display. The chapter reviews research on intimate partner violence experienced by LGBTIQ people (including identity-related abuse) and the violence perpetrated against animals in these contexts. Situating challenges alongside strengths is an important counter to the often negative messages and stereotypes that circulate about LGBTIQ people, as it encourages a focus on identifying sites of resistance and opportunities for change. The chapter therefore also explores the resiliencies that LGBTIQ people display in the face of adversity, including through relationships with animal companions.

Around 30% of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. In Europe, one in 20 women over the age of 15 has been raped. Meanwhile gross misogyny and sexual violence against women is becoming more normalised in society. When women have been victims of physical, sexual violence, emotional abuse or coercive control the impact on their mental health can be severe.The sense of shame can be overwhelming. Mental health problems are not an inevitable consequence of IPV but anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, substance misuse and getting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) are all more common. Domestic violence can also result in suicide and is linked to murder-suicide and ‘honour’ killing. However, women who have killed abusive men have been repeatedly denied justice. Mental health services need training about IPV and sexual violence and to make strong links with organisations in the community. Each of us needs to ensure that we would know what we would do to help a friend, family member or colleague who is experiencing domestic violence or sexual assault.