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NEWS AND NOTES

General practitioners and psychiatrists are all too familiar with the social and medical consequences of violent marriages: patients visiting their consulting rooms, ostensibly with some minor or vague complaint, but in effect making a covert cry for help over physical assaults from their marriage partner. The problem has achieved the emotive label of "battered wives," and in 1975 a Parliamentary Select Committee issued a report on violence in marriage and asked the Government to report back. Some of the Observations on the Report from the Select Committee on Violence in Marriage (Cmnd 6690, HMSO, price 60p) are of particular interest to doctors. Prevention might seem the best answer, but, as the Government notes, "prevention of violence within marriage is as difficult as the prevention of violence in any other situation. Indeed," the report continues, ''violence in marriage is probably more difficult to prevent because of the reluctance of the partners to discuss their difficulties with outsiders." The original report recommended that medical schools and nursing colleges should give special attention "to the social dynamics of family life, and to the medical (both physical and psychiatric) correlates of marital disharmony." (Minerva interprets this phrase as teaching about what causes trouble in marriages.) It seems that the attention of the bodies responsible for the training of doctors and nurses has been drawn to this recommendation-no doubt causing groans from those faced with squeezing more into an already overcrowded curriculum. Perhaps the profession would also welcome some postgraduate instruction on this difficult social problem.