La violencia doméstica Authors Leonor M? Cantera Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Abstract Violence against women in couple relationships has a long history of gestation, development, justification and concealment. Recently, the topic is approached as a private affair and receives relevance as a social problem to be comprehended and prevented. In this work, we mention some current myths that make the understanding of the problem more difficult, we describe the descriptive model of the cycle of violence, we consider the scope and the limits of this model and we propose an alternative point of view, inspired in the orientation of the social community psychology, which associates gender violence with social violence and which represents the victim of domestic violence not as a helplessness person, caught in an unavoidable situation, but as someone able to break its vicious circle if he or she believes in the viability and desirability of change and he or she receives social resources to achieve this goal. Downloads PDF (Català) Published 2010-07-06 Issue No. 8 (2002): Psicoanàlisi i diferència sexual. Violència de gènere Section Dossier 2 License The Author retains ownership of the copyright in this article, unless the opposite is expressed, and all rights not expressly granted in this agreement, including the nonexclusive right to reproduce, distribute, perform, and display the article in print or electronic form, and grants, Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat the exclusive rights to print publication of the Article for a period beginning when this Agreement is executed and ending twelve (12) months after the first publicaton of the work in this Journal. After this time, the work will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license, by which the article must be credited to the Author and the Journal be credited as first place of publication. Beginning twelve (12) months after the article´s first publication, the Author is free to enter in seperate, additional contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the work as published in this journal. The Author is encouraged to post the work online (eg in institutional or subject repositories, or on their website) after the exclusivity period of twelve (12) months has expired, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as a greater citation of the published work (see The Effect of Open Access).