Part I advises that the central concern of human rights analyses and policymaking now involves resolutions of when private violence counts as a human rights violation and determinations of the nature of responses mandated by international law. Part II briefly surveys the study of family violence from a cross-cultural perspective. The analysis argues that conceptions of family violence as solely a private matter ignore the important cultural moorings of violence and that cultural investigations confirm the public nature of private violence. Part III analyzes traditional distinctions between public and private behavior for the purposes of international legal regulation and concludes that the distinction remains both useless and increasingly spurious. Part IV underscores how various forms of international intervention inevitably impact both the public and private nature of cultural life in order to respond appropriately to family violence. The discussion then explores issues of cultural sovereignty in the context of approaches used to determine what constitutes a human rights violation and the form of intervention international law mandates. Part V details how human rights law works; it highlights the significance of looking to various levels of analyses that allow for different interpretations and applications of broad international principles so that they legitimately could infiltrate cultural life and private relations. 105 references