Sadly, a large amount of the business of the Police magistrates was taken up dealing with cases of domestic cruelty and abuse. The vast majority of these were for husbands cruelty towards their wives, although unmarried females were just as likely to be attacked or otherwise abused. It was rare for men to bring cases of assault against their spouses for reasons which have more to do with contemporary ideas about masculinity than any physical inferiority on the part of the women concerned.

Abused wives and violent husbands

• Yet more casual violence towards women in the East End
• Routine assault is punished but it unveils a darker problem in London’s crowded lodging houses.
• Did a ‘wife’ take poison to escape her abuser? Or did her cry for help go unnoticed?
• The battle of the sexes claims another victim
• An elderly lady is driven to despair in a society that didn’t care
• ‘Disagreeable’ but not quite mad enough to be locked up: a violent husband at
• ‘Matrimonial miseries’ in the East End of London
• Marlborough Street
• An astrologer fails to see his own future in the stars.
• A serial abuser gets his just desserts at the Guildhall

 

Domestic homicide

• ‘I found her insensible’: when domestic violence ends up in tragedy

Cruelty towards children

• Children are the victims as a mother who cannot cope lashes out