The section on "Images of Violence" contains four chapters that examine changes over the past two decades in the legal response to "private" violence. Feminist theory has been instrumental in combatting private violence, as scholars have analyzed how the abuse of women is endemic in patriarchal societies and how institutions such as the law tend to support men's violence. The chapters in this section scrutinize these developments, as they focus on concepts and images that have gained currency as the foundations for conceptualizing private violence. The section on "Feminist Theory and Legal Norms" contains five chapters that examine the assumptions that underlie legal images and norms that pertain to domestic violence. The authors develop new theoretical frameworks and alternative vantage points from which to view the problem. The section on "International and Comparative Perspectives on Domestic Violence" examines how various cultural and national perspectives influence analyses of domestic violence against women. The chapters also show the common difficulties facing women's global efforts to analyze domestic violence and to combat its structural causes and devastating effects. Common threads are the difficulty of naming domestic violence and the mismatch between the severity of the experience of abuse and the weakness of the legal and social tools that address the abuse. 576 references and court cases