Chapter XXV of Polish Penal Code entitled „Crimes against family, guardianship and youth" .includes art. 184 which provides a penalty for a crime of a bodily torment of a family. A number of convictions on the grounds of that provision is high, reaching 10 thousand yearly. A sample survey was taken up for those convictions in a group of 160 cases aiming at revealing the whole of social background conditions and circumstances leading to applying force in a family by some people against others. The article focuses on three questions: form and a degree of intensity of a torment, aggressiveness of perpetrators, categories of victims and their role in perpetrators' behavior. It is mostly men who are perpetrators of the violence, their vives being victims (86%). Bodily torment consists usually on battery, while moral cruelty involves using abusive language, brawls, threatening and expelling a victim from home. A degree of intensity in a half of cases is slight and •only in 7% of cases is substantial. There are three categories among victims in a family: „victims not revealing any aggression or to a lesser extent only, behaving rather passively towards a perpetrator" (32%), „vexatious victims, manifesting traits of aggression, causing tensions and leading to conflicts in families (2'9°/o)", „aggressive violions carrying out their own designs" (39°/o). It was proved in the survey that deeply rooted conflicts exist in those families, they have been building up slowly in 'the phases preceeding the application of violence. The author indicated at a necessity of undertaking preventive actions ridding family conflicts, before a violence takes place. The possibilities for activity for family courts in that scope are also pointed out. Digitalizacja i deponowanie archiwalnych zeszytów RPEiS sfinansowane przez MNiSW w ramach realizacji umowy nr 541/P-DUN/2016