this page on the australian institute of family studies site (a gov body) provides a bibliography of recent articles on domestic violence. note the title of this entry:

Walther, V.
Intimate partner violence and child abuse: terrorism in everyday lives.
Children Australia v.27 no.4 2002: 6-13, table

Available from: Oz Child: Children Australia, PO Box 7020, Dandenong Vic 3175. Email ChildrenAustralia@latrobe.edu.au.
An american example, but really some thinking in the right direction.

and this site provides an article which is perhaps offering exactly the right sort of thinking. it opens with the following lines:

BRUSSELS - More Spanish women are being battered to death by their male partners than the number of people killed by Basque terrorists.

But while terrorism makes the headlines, domestic violence is not highlighted, either in Spain or elsewhere in Europe.

and contains this bit of text:

Globally, women between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely to be maimed or die as a result of male violence than through cancer, malaria, road accidents or war combined.

this page is interesting as it lists a whole heap of links to sites with information about personal safety. it's a guide to government resources in Western Australia. i like the intepretive link between the domestic violence and terrorism links encouraged by the layout of the page.

a link to discussion board posts on the abc's sites sees people making the same links i have, but with an eye to votes.

this somewhat dodgy article on the 'anti olympics alliance' site is interesting as it notes the use of the term 'domestic violence' in legislative documents, referring to incidences of violence on domestic soil. i have no cross-references for the use of this term, but it's an interesting term.

some of the more interesting things to note from my dodgy research:

the phrase 'patriarchal terrorism' and 'psychological terrorism' are used to refer to domestic violence.
the phrase 'domestic violence' is used to refer to violence on australian soil.

things that might be worth writing about in a paper on this topic:
a comparison of the government packages about terrorism and domestic violence: a study of 'official discourse' on the topic... or rather, official voices in public discourse. this might also involve some attention to public media discussions of the two topics (specifically, responses to the two packages in the mainstream media).

it's also worth exploring the public criticism of the howard government's scrapping of a more complex and useful anti-domestic violence campaign/package. particularly in light of howard's public, personal association with the 'be alert not alarmed' terrorism campaign and of course the australian government's deployment of australian troops in the middle east post september 11.

the mistreatment of prisoners by american/allied soldiers in the middle east also seems relevent to this discussion, probably because it's a very good example of the misuse of power and the ways in which institutional structures faciliate this misuse. patriarchal terrorism?