Violence against women - in some fiction today and years back

Is it because last night I went to fundraiser for Sojourner House, which works to prevent domestic violence and violence against women, or is violence against women coming up a lot all of a sudden in fiction? Or at least the fiction I've come across? Yesterday I posted on Kevin Barry's New Yorker story about an Irish policeman near retirement who sets his sites on an evil young man who's seduced and beaten women all around the county for many years. One of the vivid scenes in the story is the cop's interrogation of one of the victims, beaten and bruised and sucking on a bottle of cheap whiskey. Then, I'm also reading V.S. Naipaul's first story collection, Miguel Street, about the neighborhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he grew up - and the idea of a man beating his wife, pretty brutally sometimes, is just endemic to these stories and, I guess, to this culture - gone, I hope, but maybe not. In almost every one of the stories a husband beats his wife (and sometimes his kids), and it's more or less not only accepted but even made light of, especially by the young boys, the narrator among them, who hang out on Miguel Street - some of the stories even have calypso or reggae music on the theme of wife-beating. Terrible - I know Naipaul is just trying to be honest about the world where he came from - we see some of the same thing in Dubliners, too - but there's a creepy voyeurism going on in these stories, too - unlike Joyce's stories, imbued with sorrow and regret. I'll see how Miguel Street develops - I am pretty sure it charts the course of the growth and maturity of the young artist and his eventual escape to greater prospects in Cambridge - but who wouldn't be troubled by the tone of some of these stories, far less acceptable today than at publication date (1959). The Naipaul (and the Barry) stories make a striking contrast with Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo series, which purports to be a polemic against domestic violence but in fact in my opinion wallows far too deeply in the ghastly and lurid nature of the crimes and chooses to focus on the most sensational and unusual of the crimes (grisly serial murders with dozens of clues left behind) that would a., most likely be solved quickly and b., are the product of such derangement as to be totally atypical and not at all characteristic of the type of violence against women that is truly a social issue: Barry and even Naipaul should be recognized for depicting an actual social problem, though it's hard to navigate Naipual's attitude toward the issue.