Abstract

Violent attacks on the public are almost unanimously condemned by the community, both informally by individuals and formally and collectively by the state through legal sanction, as a collective expression of societal distaste. Victims are given a civil right to seek redress for loss experienced as a consequence of an attack or attacks, in addition to injunctive relief for persistent or potentially persistent incidents. Society also seeks to regulate violence by the imposition of criminal sanctions against perpetrators of violence. This is its ultimate expression of revulsion through its tripartite concerns to punish, rehabilitate and deter future oþ ending. This survey of the legal response to violence begins to look less than straightforward when considered in the light of violent attacks on family members. Many commentators would express some reservations about the usefulness of civil remedies and criminal sanctions in domestic violence incidents and consider the civil law as merely a source of an injunctive remedy to prevent violence and the criminal law as a tool that is ill suited to domestic disputes. At least, of course, until the dispute leads to a loss of life. Legislation, case law and procedure, however, continue to dominate undergraduate legal education, with little time for an examination of the role of law in the context of domestic violence, or of ways in which the law could better suit the needs of abuser or abused. This article seeks to examine a number of the assumptions which underpin our treatment of domestic violence within the context of a law school undergraduate programme. It brie¯ y considers the way in which domestic violence is taught by family lawyers in the context of divorce and cohabitation and the juxtaposition of criminal law teaching of domestic violence. Its main focus is on the biographical method of understanding domestic violence. This provides an approach to learning and to teaching within the undergraduate criminal and family syllabuses which challenges legal responses to violence within families. The defence of provocation is considered here as an illustration of a primary manifestation of domestic violence.