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Contents

Dr. Júlia Spronz: Caught up in Law
Fruzsina Benkő: Domestic Violence as Reflected in the Statistics of NANE's Hotline
Gábor Kuszing: The Practice of Forensic Psychologists in Domestic Violence Cases in Hungary
Dr. Magdolna Czene, Mrs. Kapossy: Two Years of the Restraining Order in the Practice of Hungarian Courts

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Introduction

In strategic litigation we try to show, through specific cases, the way the effective Hungarian legal system treats, or rather fails to treat male violence in the family. We examine both the legal regulations and their application. We wish to contribute to the elimination of these problems by pointing them out.

Premises:

1. Male violence in the family is a nonexistent phenomenon for law. We have argued in several earlier publications that the soil on which men's violence against women thrives and the barrier to addressing it is the invisibility of violence against women. Through the cases in this publication, we wish to demonstrate how the law maintains and strengthens this invisibility.

2. Law (the framework of legal regulations and their application) is unable to grasp the reality of battered women. The legal system is based on the viewpoint of the powerful (white, middle class heterosexual men) therefore if applied rigidly, this framework cannot be applied, or can only be applied inappropriately, to domestic violence.

3. Discriminative application of law. In choosing our cases for strategic litigation, we strove to show in an unambiguous way, how authorities apply the same regulations to the advantage of men and the disadvantage of women.

To sum up these theses derived from our experiences and the professional literature: Conclusion: For battered women the justice system does not provide justice in Hungary at present.

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