Drawing the family in the perception of violent and non-violent wives
Aleksandra Stelmaszak
Powiatowe Centrum Pomocy Rodzinie w OpoluAbstract
The main issue of the presented paper concernes the perception of marriage by wives who experienced violence from their partners. The marital relationship was presented to women by means of Family Drawings Test. Research included a control group which consisted of women who have not experienced violence from their husbands. The study involved 60 women (30 who have experienced violence from their husbands and 30 who had not). The survey was conducted by the use of a The Family Drawing Test created by M. Braun-Gałkowska. Because of the representativeness of the groups, research was conducted in the Specialist Support Centre for Victims of Domestic Violence in Opole. In order to verify the posed hypotheses, the following statistical methods were used: the Student's t-test for the analysis of quantitative data and the chi-square test for the analysis of the qualitative data. Results indicate that women who experience domestic violence perceive negatively their relationship in marriage. Moreover, victims of domestic violence pay special attention to the lack of a proper communication in their marriage relationship and evaluate their relationships with their husbands more negatively than the wives from the control group. However, women who experience violence from their husbands assess their relationship, as satisfactory, but not unambiguously positive. The presented study is only an introduction for further and future researches, since the phenomenon of marital violence requires a deeper exploitation.
