Klaipėdos universitetas

The article analyses the dynamics of domestic violence in the city of Klaipėda during the period from 2010 to 2020. The analysis of reported cases of violence is intended to reveal the functioning reality of the Republic of Lithuania’s Law on Protection against Domestic Violence (LPADV) adopted in 2011, and to evaluate the fact that violence, as a conditionally marginalised phenomenon for a long time, is raised to the level of an actual social problem. In evaluating the dynamics of this phenomenon over the ten-year period, the authors reject the hypothesis that cultural traditions of violence have changed over the years. During the period analysed, domestic violence has established itself as one of the most widespread violent crimes in Lithuania, overshadowing other forms of violence. The article introduces four indicators of sociological assessment, which consist of the abuser’s family situation, gender, recurrent criminality, and associations between age cohorts, in a focused manner, which reveals the social effects of the adoption of the law, demonstrating ‘the disclosure’ of the known but deliberately ‘overlooked’ reality by the LPADV. The analysis of segments of violence presented in the article suggests the development of specific measures for the prevention of domestic violence and programme strategies, because not only is the legal regulation of domestic violence significant, but so is the identification of target groups that go beyond popular stereotypes of this phenomenon.

Gender terms have been used to interpret some aspects of the archaeology of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monuments. Frequently male and female inhumations are aligned cardinally and standing stones may be ‘male’ pillar and ‘female’ lozenges. However, the astronomical alignments at monuments are frequently on lunar standstills and solstices which bisect the cardinal alignments. The anthropology of gender suggests that the concept of a ‘gender of power’ is useful in explaining how ritual power is realised through the scrambling of sexual identities. Proficiency in aligning monuments on lunar-solar cycles may well have been a device to appropriate ritual power.

Scant attention has been paid in the social sciences to the problem of defining units of analysis. The problem of using culture as a unit of analysis is that culture is not a unit of analysis like a jury is a unit of analysis. It is also a more ambiguous unit of analysis than religion, ethnicity or gender, units which are possible to identify and define. It is concluded that the individual is the least problematic unit for analysis. The limitations of using the individual as the unit of analysis are that group characteristics and behaviors can only be measured indirectly and studies are prone to the ‘individual differences fallacy.’ It is dubious that one can generalize from individuals beyond the community. There are no ultimate primitive units of culture and whatever unit for analysis the researcher selects depends on the questions asked. Always however, a unit of analysis must be clearly defined, it cannot be used as a variable rather variables are extracted from the unit of analysis. Most importantly, there should always be a theory of analysis that justifies the choice of the units for analysis.