NCJ Number
115205
Date Published
1986
Length
50 pages
Annotation
This paper examines the implications of the doctrine of family privacy for legal interventions concerning violent acts and analyzes the range of alternative Government responses to family violence and the legal theories they imply.
Abstract
Family-related legislation and caselaw have attempted to achieve a balance between the family's right to autonomy and privacy and compulsory State processes in the public interest. However, while privacy doctrines always apply when addressing relations among family members, their application varies across the range of behaviors. Certain behaviors such as murder, incest, and imminent threat to a minor's life are categorically excluded because privacy is outweighed by public interests. Other behaviors represent a qualified exclusion in which the law will not intervene if the family is intact, but will intervene retroactively once a family victim and the offender are no longer together. Finally, other behaviors, such as spouse rape, will be excluded from intervention in an intact family, although the same behavior may be sanctioned in a nonfamilial context. These three levels of application of family privacy doctrine are paralleled by the legal responses of compulsory intervention, contingent intervention, and privatization. Recent discussion of the use of criminal law has focused on two methods to control family violence. In the first, prescriptions against violent crimes could be extended to family violence with major modification in doctrine, enforcement strategy, or nature and severity of sanctions. The second, traditional approach results in the development of a separate and specific subjurisprudence within the criminal law. Implications of these approaches are discussed. 25 footnotes.