Domestic violence and abuse within the family

By Nour Jaber
The relationship and the system of relationships inside the family represent the main axis of human life and of the existence of the human being and of humankind and their not becoming extinct.
So where is violence and why violence, and where is the psychological, physical, social, economic and sexual harm inside the family and how does it happen? Perhaps the most important cause of domestic violence and its intertwining is the intertwining of the characteristics of emotional intensity with the intimacy of personal relationships in family life. Family ties are usually charged with emotions, either love or hatred, so we usually find quarrels and disputes, or they may be the result of a shift from feelings of hatred to love or entirely the opposite. Perhaps the other cause is the tolerance and indifference towards these quarrels in society, which makes them disappear as a visible phenomenon while remaining beneath the surface, and children acquire them from their surroundings and from the rest of the family.
So domestic violence is a behaviour acquired from the family or from one of the members of the family, and it is not born with the genes a person is born with.
The child learns in life through acquisition, which then becomes a daily behaviour practised in life in a routine and habitual way. For example, the girl always likes to imitate her mother in her way of speaking and dressing, and the boy always looks for his father's behaviour in himself and likes him to be a model for him in the family, particularly in the early years from the third to the fifth year of age, which is called the (critical) period in acquiring behaviour.
So domestic violence is the product of social upbringing and of behavioural habits acquired first from the family and then from society. And if we want to change this phenomenon or make it vanish from society, that goes back to where we are, what we want, and where our own behaviour is, which is the inheritance of our children after us, and to looking at ourselves before we look at the phenomenon that has occurred, of which we were the principal cause.