In The Lancet today, Cari Clark and colleagues present a cluster survey in which they investigated whether political violence was associated with male-to-female intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory. They found that political violence was significantly related to higher odds of intimate-partner violence. Their report is a welcome addition to the scant literature that focuses on the sociopolitical context of intimate-partner violence, a subject that is under-researched, especially in the occupied Palestinian territory. The authors question the approach of isolating intimate-partner violence from political, economic, and social influences, and the assumption that domestic violence is about individuals and families, rather than also about the collective and the national. They link intimate-partner violence to chronic exposure to institutionalised structural violence, and thus contribute to a conceptual reframing of violence in terms of the inseparability of domestic and public spaces.
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