‘Relative’ ill-treatment: from ‘sticks as thick as thumbs’ to the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 – and ‘reasonable’ [ugh] chastisement

Professor Chris Barton A Vice-President of the Family Mediators Association Academic Door Tenant Regent Chambers

This article considers the development of the law regarding ill-treatment committed by one family member on another specifically with regard to domestic partners and parent and child respectively.

With regard to domestic partners the law’s historical attitude to both physical and mental abuse is examined together with that towards different-sex marital rape. Wives are – now – as legally immune from husbandly imprisonment kidnap assault and rape as they are from such attacks by strangers and it is a long time since our law took an asymmetrical approach to spouse-murder. Today the protection first granted by the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976 followed by such as the Domestic Proceedings and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1978 and Part IV of the Family Law Act 1996 has now culminated in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. Surprisingly ...

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