These are very complex tasks. For much of western history, domestic violence and abuse were not perceived as victimization prosecutable under the law because women and children were not sovereign entities, and thus not citizens, not protected from the right of a husband and father to administer justice to members of his household (Weitzman, as cited in Gelles & Straus, 1988). Thus, the phrases “domestic abuse” and “domestic violence,” as differentiated from “wife beater,” “battered wife,” or “child abuse,” are relatively new and significant shifts in language use. These phrases referring to people affected by violence and abuse result from volatile political and scientific debates about personhood and the rights of citizenship. Indeed, these political and scientific debates continue to shape how we see, let alone comprehend, the nature of being the victim (or survivor) of violence—whether that violence resulted from war, political oppression, criminal activity, natural disaster, accidents, or abuse in the hands of someone with whom the victim lived or saw as significant, such as a parent, step-parent, spouse, or domestic partner (Gelles & Straus, 1988; Herman, 1997). Despite women’s political gains in terms of the right to vote within the past century, fewer than fifteen years ago, police response to domestic violence, in which one spouse was doing more than pushing or shoving the other, was to pacify the violent spouse—ask him or her to calm down, to take a walk and cool off, or to kiss and make up (Gelles & Straus, 1988; Miller, 1995). In many areas, police did not respond to domestic violence because marital or partner violence was considered a private affair not subject to public scrutiny (Gelles & Straus, 1988). In other words, domestic violence and abuse had been permitted (ignored, turned away from, denied, and minimized) because, as private disputes reflecting (believed) inherent character defects of the participants, there were insufficient social sanctions against them.