抄録
Although it has been 15 years since the Act on the Prevention of Spousal Violence and the Protection of Victims (Act No.31 of 2001) was enacted in Japan, we still have a lot of agendas to address for preventing domestic violence and protecting victims. It is partly because that the concept of domestic violence, which underlies the law, is not clear and there appears not to be any consensus about it in our society. Female victims of domestic violence have been told to endure their husbands’ violence on the reason that they are women. Additionally, they come to suffer from further difficulties after leaving their abusive partners; they lost their houses, jobs, communities and networks―the entirety of their lives. The problem of serious poverty imposes a heavy burden on these victims, especially those who have small children to maintain. They then face the degrading of their already degraded status as the second citizen in our gender unequal society. Domestic violence is a form of gender discrimination. But Japanese government and courts have not faced the fact so far. The tactics of abusive partners are subtle and complicated so that traditional framework of criminal violence or human-rights invasion cannot apply for them. Now we, as researchers, should explore the way of resolving domestic violence issue through understanding it as a problem of gender discrimination.
