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and counting violent crime. Nowhere in the criminal law and in its administration is the social construction of violent crime changing more rapidly than in what constitutes family violence and society's responses to it.

Because family law is legislated and administered under different statutes and regulations in each state as well as by the federal government, there is no national legal definition of a family. Similarly, there is no standardized and generally accepted scholarly definition of what constitutes a family. Information on family violence is usually based on identifications of people by their current marital status (married, separated, divorced, or single), by their spouse status (spouse/ex-spouse; husband/wife), or by relationships among members of a household (e.g., cohabitants; child/parent; brother/sister; father/mother). Statistics about families are not collected according to theoretical constructs; rather researchers sample address locations and identify households; families are then designated within households either by respondents themselves or by interviewers. By this procedure, two or more families of several generations may reside within a household with a single head.1

Substantial recent changes in family structure in the United States, which may affect counts of violent behavior by "family" members, are disclosed by some contemporary statistics on marital status and living arrangements (Bureau of the Census, 1990, 1991):2

Trends in family violence must be interpreted against a decline in the fraction of households containing exclusively married couples and their natural children. Violence between growing numbers of same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting partners is increasingly regarded as family violence regardless of legal marital status. Those who record statistics may or may not classify violence between increasing numbers of divorced or separated ex-couples as family violence.