While often referred to as domestic violence or domestic abuse, the preferred term today is intimate partner violence, because it can refer to current and former marital partners as well as separated marital partners or current and former cohabitaters and is gender neutral. Violence against intimate partners includes physical violence, sexual violence, and threats of physical and/or sexual abuse. There are still more kinds of violent behavior that victimize intimate partners that include psychological and emotional abuse. Learn more about this kind of violence that strikes at the heart of our families.
Maltreatment of children has been ignored throughout history. Today studies of the brains of children subjected to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are showing that the way a child’s brain develops may be fundamentally changed, with negative life-long results from exposure to maltreatment. Find out more about how the maltreatment of children can affect them, and shape them in ways that continues the cycle of violence in future generations.
Recently Muslims have begun to address one aspect of child abuse -- child molestation. Um Reem published a thorough examination of the topic on MuslimMatters.org. You can view the series here. More discussion of the issue has taken place on Zerqa Abid's blog, here. The Muslim fathers at MuslimFathers.com are also speaking up about the issue, in their post in March of 2010, "A Horrible Truth."
There is violence against some of our elders in the Muslim community. Shocking as it may seem, changes in economic conditions, family structure and family mobility, changes in cultural context, and the breakdown of traditional methods of elder care appear to have contributed to increasing rates of elder abuse. Violence against our elders is still an issue largely ignored in our community. Get more informed about this difficult topic, and the associated issue of violence against the disabled.
You can found sound, general information about elder abuse here.
Sibling violence is an issue that doesn’t get much attention, even though we know it goes back to Cain and Abel. Even experts have a hard time agreeing about the distinction between normal sibling rivalry and abuse. But the issue is real, and many children are shaped for life by the abuse they receive at the hands of a sibling. Consider too, that within some traditional societies, including some parts of the Muslim world, honor killings are often perpetrated by one sibling against another.