LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Violence: Domestic Violence
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Gilligan (Center for the Study of Violence/Harvard Medical School) zeroes in on the pitch-black emptiness within America's murderers before inexplicably letting his target move out of focus. To stem the contagion of violence, Gilligan believes, America needs to understand both its root causes and the social pathogens that spread it. He points to civilization's patriarchal structure, which entails a code of honor that imposes a crippling burden of shame. When the author confines himself to the murderers he met in the ``underworld,'' or maximum-security prisons (he served as head of mental-health services for the Massachusetts prison system), Gilligan's theories gain strength. For instance, he notes that, despite more shelters for battered women, the proportion of domestic-violence deaths has doubled, because their murderers ``are precisely the men who experience a life-death dependency on their wives and an overwhelming shame because of it.'' He castigates the death penalty not just as cruel but as ineffective, since it feeds a killer's desire for punishment. Moreover, one of his prescriptions--eliminating the illiteracy that fosters many criminals' sense of shame--is practical. However, the effects of Gilligan's subtle studies of killers are lost when he applies his lessons on a broader scale to an America that he says imposes ``structural violence'' on the disadvantaged.
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Participants in the Program on Domestic Violence take a mixture of courses designed to build strong management and policy-making skills. Domestic violence courses provide an opportunity to develop extensive knowledge of the social, historical and psychological factors underlying violence against women. Topics include the impact of violence on children; strategies for intervention, prevention and change; intersections of violence with race, gender and class; and legal and policy implications.
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In a another study, Economic Costs of Domestic Violence, 2002, Lesley Laing and Natasha Bobic examined the relevant literature, defined the terminology and compare the estimated costs of domestic violence both nationally and internationally. The value of an economic perspective, as this report demonstrates, is that it provides a powerful angle from which to view the consequences of domestic violence and to argue for social policies to improve services and support victims.
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Reaching out to people across the nation, the Program on Domestic Violence (PDV) is available through a combination of online courses and five intensive class sessions in the Denver, Colorado area. Intensives are planned for no more than a week (4-7 days) per session in order to accommodate even the most demanding of schedules.
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Domestic Violence