Awareness of family violence developed during an era when social intervention in family life had gained widespread support and created a context for defining family violence as an urgent social problem. The resulting political and social influences led to significant reforms and experiments in the criminal justice processing of domestic assault cases. However, criminologists continue to define family violence as a separate crime rather than as a form of violence or aggression. As a result, crucial perspectives on wife assault are often overlooked in criminal justice policy. To address this problem, the development of hypotheses that integrate theories of family violence and violence toward strangers and research studies on strategies for organizational change and the use of research might increase the use of family violence research in policymaking.