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Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Frontiers of Anthropology)
Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective - Frontiers of Anthropology Author:David Levinson Research on family violence has in general studied American or industrialized Western cultures. In this book, the subject is brought into global context, addressing such questions as: How prevalent is family violence outside the United States? Can policies and programmes designed to prevent family violence in one culture be adapted to other cult... more »ures? Does any relationship exist between general violence and family violence in a given society?Levinson uses ethnographic work on 90 societies collected in the Human Relations Area Files to develop a global picture of the incidence, causes and correlates of family violence. Through the use of both quantitative analysis and ethnographic description, he tests the efficacy of various current theories against world-wide family violence data.Among the author's more important conclusions are that women's economic equality and independence reduces family violence and that family violence is clearly correlated with more general violence in a society. Levinson finally argues that there are societies in which family violence is unknown or rare, and that we might learn from their patterns of interaction to develop policies and programmes to combat this social ill.« less