Spouse beating

Prior to the mid-1980s, traditional police practice was to treat "domestics" as a no-win situation within a private family sphere where it is one person's word against another. This has gradually approached a position closer to that stated by the chief constable of West Yorkshire, UK in 1988: "All officers should act to enforce the law when an assault takes place within the domestic environment in exactly the same way that they would act in the case of an attack by a stranger or in respect of any assault outside the home". Women police officers, social workers and municipal officers, and judges are now more commonly handling incidents of domestic violence. There remains a divide amongst women's support groups between those who feel women can only be protected by punishing the offender and those who feel the woman should make the choice herself whether to prosecute.