I’ve spent a lot of time on the problem of child abuse (see this thread). Eventually, I’ll publish something solidifying the case for potentiality within the praxeological framework of libertarian law, integrate theories on needs similar to those of Maslow and Max-Neef with a libertarian theory of jurisprudence, and show how it relates to the penal system (of all things).
Regarding a husband and wife, the case isn’t much different than any others of assault and battery. One noticeable difference between our solution and state approaches would be that there is no limit on punishment ex post facto, or after the fact. If the police have been called out to a beaten wife 10 times, but she only pursues punishment the 10th, and she can make a prima facie case for her feeling terrorized having been the reason for not pursuing punishment the last 9 times, the husband could be punished for all 10 instances of abuse, rather than just the last one.
The task of libertarian theory is to assign an allowable maximum punishment. It doesn’t tell a judge or security firm what it must do with it, or a victim that they must pursue it fully. A Tolstoyan pacifist victim could well totally forgive the aggressor. A big influence on this theory is the Apriorische Rechtslehre, or pure theory of right, of Adolf Reinach. What I have been looking into, though, is influences on Reinach, such as Ernst Beling and Rudolf von Jhering. These two are German legal philosophers whose concepts of delict-types (delict is similar to tort) closely resembles Reinach’s legal philosophy.
So, how this applies to the case of a battered wife is as follows. I’ll ignore the discussion of an underlying legal schema (Tatbestand or typus regens) and its praxeological basis for the sake of simplicity, but I’m sure that you are able to intuit it. If we can call a certain case “battery”, as a matter of necessity, the schema must be realized in certain actions on the part of the offender and certain consequences by the victim. Furthermore, the actions and results must go along with definite types of mental attitudes of both parties. The social act of forgiving or waiving a claim, has a certain type of psychic episode associated with it to be called such. So, we could anticipate a case where someone “forgives” another ostensibly, but the underlying mental state is not one of forgiveness but of fear. If a victim can make a case that such an attitude led to them representing forgiveness only out of fear, the whole case can be reevaluated.