Family Violence: A Sociological Analysis

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Recommended: Major theoritical perspective of sociology

Sociology as a field of science itself has a mess, if you will, of different theories, disciplines, and methodologies. When you delve a little deeper into these different subsections or disciplines such as family violence, there is a profound number of theories, for example, Exchange Theory, Feminist Theory, Classical Learning Theory, Operant Learning Theory, and Avoidance Learning Theory are just a taste of the abundance that the family violence discipline of Sociology has to offer. Like sociology and its many theories, family violence as a discipline is relative, the ambiguity of it makes it nearly impossible to be defined by one theoretical structure. To create a unified approach to understanding the different forms of family violence, …show more content…

“…the FBI defines rape as “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will” (U.S. Department of Justice, 2004).” (2011). The most current definition was changed in 2012 and is now “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without consent of the victim.” (fbi.gov, 2013.). This updated definition, while a major improvement, is still a struggle between being broad and specific. While being broad in some sense, the lack of stating that only females can be raped being regarded as an improvement; it gets specific in areas discussing that only penetration of the oral region with a sex organ is rape but penetration of the vagina or anus with any body part or object is rape. There are many circumstances that could lead to definitions like this one, or the definition of family, abuse, violence, or assault getting muddled or not being continuously updated causing a case of family abuse to be dismissed because it did not fall within the parameters of a specific definition. To get a unified approach to examining the different aspects of family violence, official, regulated definitions would be a need. This would eliminate conflicting definitions across all the academic disciplines there are that study family

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