Controlling domestic violence from law to ethics

Enforcing physical and spiritual violence against women at home is a reality whose acceptance may lead us to preventing and treating strategies. The Iranian legislator has provided legal description of physical and spiritual violence regardless of the gender of the offended person and the location of exercising such violence, and in a few cases, considered mitigation in the punishment of the offender with respect to the situation of the offended woman. And in some cases, the exercise of violence is legally considered an offense only if it is against women. In this paper, the behavioral violence of husbands_ e.g. physical, spiritual, and psychological violence_ against their wives, the relevant legal vacuums, and the statistics of violence at home have been studied, with some suggestions to remove violence against women being also proposed at the end. The result of the study shows that women and families should be specifically protected against violence and tensions. This becomes possible through codification of laws which punish the violator with the least interference in the private realm of husbands and wives.