THE DEVELOPMENT OF NORMATIVE RESPONSES TO FAMILY VIOLENCE, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE PRACTICE OF THE ROYAL COURT IN RIJEKA – WHAT HAS CHANGED?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25234/pv/36367Keywords:
family violence, historical review, Austrian Criminal Code of 1852, Hungarian Criminal Code of 1878, Royal Court in Rijeka, case studyAbstract
Recently, a significant number of scientific papers have been written on measures to prevent and suppress family violence. Despite the interest of scholars, it should be noted that exceptionally few studies have been published on the early normative development of criminal law provisions prohibiting such behaviour, particularly those examining historical judicial practice. To fill this gap and encourage discussion, this paper analyses the emergence of normative solutions recorded in the earliest written legal sources up to the beginning of the 20th century, showing the development of societal responses – from the acceptance of violence as a means of disciplining family members to the introduction of separate criminal offences carrying severe penalties. In a separate section, the results of an analysis of the court records of the Royal Court in Rijeka, which were created between 1871 and 1914 due to murders of family members in the city of Rijeka, are presented. Since ultimately only three files were relevant to the research topic, a case study was conducted, and these files were analysed in depth. The analysis results show that the dynamics of the most severe forms of family violence, more than a century ago, as well as today, were characterised by jealousy and the culmination of violence when the victim decided to leave the perpetrator. These observations highlight the importance of developing prevention mechanisms that can change the long-established cultural patterns of behaviour that underlie violent offences within the family.
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