THE Court of Cassation's overruling of the Jeddah general court's sentence of 50 lashes for an abusive husband presents a number of questions which will have to be dealt with if the government's recent pronouncements on the need to confront domestic violence are to be taken seriously. First, since many details of the case have not been released, it is impossible to determine just how abusive the man was. If the case ended up in court, however, it is a reasonable assumption that the case was a serious one. Nevertheless, it is not at all certain that corporal punishment is an effective way to deal with abusers. It would certainly make the man think twice before he lashed out at his wife, again, but the emotional and cultural underpinnings of spousal abuse must be dealt with if any real progress is to be made. Violence flows from an emotional spring, one that the perpetrator must learn to control or, ideally, to dissolve if he or she is to refrain from violence in the future. Negative reenforcement in the guise of punishment is certainly part of the solution but punishment alone is not likely to solve the problem. Emotional outbursts are recognizably resilient behavior. Allowing the wife's option of forgiveness to trump a judicial determination is also of questionable value. Again, we do not know the circumstances under which the abuse took place, but there are any number of factors that a woman may “forgive” her husband, including children, extended family pressure, and social pressure to name just a few. Genuine forgiveness may be laudable but there is no guarantee that forgiveness will not simply enable repeated abuse. Recent campaigns to draw attention to domestic abuse touched on the complexity of the problem. It is up to the courts to perceive the complexity of the solution. Reconciliation on the part of the couple and forgiveness on the part of the victim are not really expansive enough to be sufficient solutions. Psychologists and social workers with real knowledge of the mechanism of domestic violence must be employed by the courts in order to map out an attainable solution. Certainly, the problem is not going to go away if handled in the simplistic manner that this one was. __
