To Have and To Hit: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON WIFE BEATING

By Counts

This vitally important volume places the problem of wife beating in a broad cultural context in a search for strategies to reform societies, including our own, that are prone to this pernicious form of violence. Based on first hand ethnographic data on more than a dozen societies, including a number in Oceania, this collection explores the social and cultural factors that work either to inhibit or to promote domestic violence against women. The volume also includes a study of abuse among nonhuman primates and a cross-cultural analysis of the legal aspects of wife beating. By presenting counterexamples from other cultures, contributors challenge Western assumptions about the factors leading to wife beating. Through a close examination of societies where wife beating is infrequent or absent, To Have and To Hit identifies the factors--economic, social, political, and cultural--that must be explored and transformed in order to combat this violence and eventually eliminate it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252067975
• ISBN13: 9780252067976
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"