When we look again at the facts—millions of women battered every year, a woman battered every few seconds, thousands of women murdered every year by the men they live with—and when we consider what a fundamental right it is to be able to live, just to be, free of harm inside one’s own skin, then the next question should be obvious: why hasn’t this violence been stopped? Any reasonable person has to ask: What can we do to prevent it?
But as it turns out, that’s not the question reasonable people ask. We ask instead: Why doesn’t she leave?
Take Dan Rather, for example. For the CBS network show “48 Hours” he interviewed Tracey Thurman in her kitchen in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1988. Charles Thurman, who had been sentenced to twenty years for his attempt to kill Tracey, was scheduled to become eligible for parole in 1990, and Tracey Thurman explained to Rather how she felt about the possibility of his release. “I know that he’s going to come back after me, and that frightens me,” she said. “And it just scares me to think that I’m going to have to live like I lived for eight months, when I was going through the separation. I mean, a nervous wreck; my child I didn’t allow to go outside … for his own protection. And I know one day I’m going to have to go through all that again. Hopefully this time they’ll be there on time, and they’ll be able to protect me. Hopefully. But I know that he’s determined, and I know he has stated right in the courtroom, and his father got on the stand and said that he said that he will finish the job. And he has stated in several things that both of us can’t live in this world, and he’s not going to be the one to go. What frightens me most is the fear that—him ever hurting my child. That scares me. Just the thought of … If he was ever to get to me, I would rather him just—I mean, then finish the job then, because I could never deal with another beating like this. You know, I mean, I—how much more handicapped could I be?”1
Since that interview Tracey Thurman has learned to live with fear, for Buck Thurman was released in April 1991 to a Connecticut halfway house, having served seven years and ten months of his twenty year sentence. He was placed on closely supervised probation for five years.2 His parental rights were terminated. Tracey Thurman, who still lives in Torrington, has become a compelling and articulate voice for battered women in Connecticut, but she can no longer travel freely around the state as she could when Buck was behind bars. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 1990 on behalf of the proposed Violence Against Women Act, Tracey Thurman said, “Because of what I’ve experienced with him, I know he’s going to find me.”3 Now, day in, day out, with her second husband and her son, Tracey Thurman Motuzick must plan always for her safety.4
But when Dan Rather interviewed Tracey Thurman, he had a suggestion, one he perhaps guessed would occur to thousands of his viewers. “Why not move away?” he asked. “Why not get a long, long way?”5
The familiar question. Why doesn’t she just walk away?—this disfigured and terribly handicapped woman whom the television viewers have watched struggling with her physical therapy exercises and the monumental task of frying an egg? Why doesn’t she take her little boy and just leave? Again.
Tracey Thurman had an answer. She said: “Why should I? You know … I grew up here.… My family is here, my support is here.… I can go to another state, but even if I was in Hawaii and I had heard that he was getting out, my son would still be glued to me. I mean I would be scared to death. I mean, if he really wants me that bad—it’s awful morbid—but if he really wants me that bad, he’s that determined, he’s going to find me no matter where I go. And I feel as though here, the Torrington police department don’t want to mess up again. They don’t want to look like they made themselves look the first time.”6
But of course it’s the question, not the chilling and sensible answer, that sticks in the mind. It suggests that Tracey Thurman’s life is entirely in her own hands, that the violence of the man she once married, the man she left, is her problem, her responsibility. What does it mean to “leave”? How far does a woman have to go? And how many times?
Despite the immense achievements of the battered women’s movement in the past fifteen years, those who work to stop violence against women—those who staff the hotlines and the shelters and the legal service centers, those who press to make law enforcement and criminal justice act responsibly, those who lobby for legislative reform—know that the next time a woman is battered in the United States (which is to say within the next twelve seconds) few people will ask: What’s wrong with that man? What makes him think he can get away with that? Is he crazy? Did the cops arrest him? Is he in jail? When will he be prosecuted? Is he likely to get a serious sentence? Is she getting adequate police protection? Are the children provided for? Did the court evict him from her house? Does she need any other help? Medical help maybe, or legal aid? New housing? Temporary financial aid? Child support?
No, the first question, and often the only question, that leaps to mind is: Why doesn’t she leave?
This question, which we can’t seem to stop asking, is not a real question. It doesn’t call for an answer; it makes a judgment. It mystifies. It transforms an immense social problem into a personal transaction, and at the same time pins responsibility squarely on the victim. It obliterates both the terrible magnitude of violence against women and the great achievements of the movement against it. It simultaneously suggests two ideas, both of them false: that help is readily available to all worthy victims (which is to say, victims who leave), and that this victim is not one of them.
So powerful and dazzling is this question that someone always tries to answer it. And the answer given rarely is the simple truth you find in the stories of formerly battered women: She does leave. She is leaving. She left. No, so mystifying is the question that someone always tries to explain why she doesn’t leave even after she has left. This exchange takes place remarkably often on television talk shows and news programs—as it did on “48 Hours”—heavily influencing the way the public thinks about battered women. Let me give you another example.
In October 1987 the local New York City affiliate of the CBS television network included in the nightly news a segment on the case of Karen Straw, a twenty-nine-year-old woman about to stand trial for murder. Karen Straw had left her husband Clifton in 1984, after a three-year marriage, and moved with her two children to a welfare hotel. She wanted a divorce, but she couldn’t afford one. For more than two years, her husband harassed and beat her although she obtained orders of protection from the court and tried at least ten times to have him arrested and prosecuted. In December 1986 he broke into her room, beat her, raped her at knifepoint in front of the children, and threatened to kill her. She got hold of a kitchen knife and stabbed him. She was charged with second degree murder, the heaviest charge the state could bring against her since New York reserves first degree murder charges for murders of police officers and prison guards.7 The WCBS report filed by reporter Bree Walker, a woman, showed footage of Karen Straw, the Queens courthouse where she was to be tried, and short bites of three interviews prerecorded separately with Michael Dowd, a prominent attorney who had volunteered to defend Straw; Madelyn Diaz, a woman previously acquitted of all charges after killing her assaultive husband (a police officer);8 and me. Introduced by Jim Jensen, the anchorman, the segment went like this.
JIM JENSEN: This is a problem society has never really learned to deal with: women who are physically abused by their husbands. This evening we take a closer look at this problem and the way some women are finally getting some help. Bree Walker has more.
BREE WALKER (REPORTER): Jim, it’s a painful closer look at this black eye on society, how the cuts and bruises suffered by women with abusive husbands are usually overlooked, but when women finally stop suffering in silence and turn to desperate measures like murder, no one can overlook that, especially in court where once again the plea of self-defense will be tested.
Tomorrow this woman, Karen Straw, faces the trial of her life. The charge: second degree murder. The penalty: life in prison. Karen Straw allegedly killed her husband after escaping to a shabby welfare apartment where she lived with her two children. She says she turned a knife on him after he broke in and raped her at knifepoint. After two years of repeated attacks, her attorney says she had no other way out.
MICHAEL DOWD (ATTORNEY): She went to the family court. She had him arrested in the criminal court. She called the police numerous times. She moved away from him. And nothing that she did stopped him from coming back, beating her, threatening her, hospitalizing her, raping her.
ANN JONES: She’d done everything a battered woman can do to get out of that situation and to get the criminal justice system to be responsive and responsible for her safety. But it still didn’t work. They still didn’t protect her.
WALKER: … Both [Jones] and Straw’s attorney agree: the only protection our society provided Karen was a flimsy paper shield.
DOWD: She was given a piece of paper—what we call an order of protection. It’s as if we gave her a crucifix to defend herself against a vampire.
WALKER: The story of Karen Straw begins to unfold here tomorrow at her trial in Supreme Court. But it’s a story that’s hardly unique. She’s only one of many battered wives who turn to violence as a last defense. A common thread ties many of these women together. They are victims not only of abusive husbands but of weak criminal justice, of a system that again and again failed them until finally it was too late. We’ve seen it in newspapers and on television. A movie called “The Burning Bed” told the story of Francine Hughes, a Michigan housewife who poured gasoline around the bed of her husband and lit a match, leaving him to die in the flames. And two years ago a Bronx woman said her husband left her no alternative.
MADELYN DIAZ: I just remembered what he had threatened me. He said if I didn’t change my mind in the next few hours that he would kill me and the baby.
WALKER: Sympathetic juries in both cases found these women not guilty, but experts say cases like these shouldn’t have to even go that far.
JONES: Battered women are denied protection. Battering men are not arrested. They’re not locked up for any substantial length of time.
DOWD: There’s no question in my mind that Karen Straw was acting justifiably. She defended herself in her own home. Hopefully twelve honest people will give her something that the professionals couldn’t—and that’s some fairness and justice and a chance to live her life.
WALKER: The one positive note to this tragic song that plays too often is that support [systems] like victim service agencies, hospitals, and church outreach groups seem to be making a difference. The numbers show women murdering husbands and boyfriends is the only type of homicide that has in fact decreased in the last ten years. So perhaps we can say that where the courts have left off, individuals have picked up.
That ended Walker’s prerecorded report. Wrapping it up, anchorman Jensen leaned toward reporter Walker, sitting beside him in the studio, and asked the standard question, the one everybody always asks: Why didn’t she leave? Jensen phrased it this way: “Why would one murder her husband instead of just walking away?” The question was particularly remarkable, for it didn’t match Bree Walker’s report or the circumstances of Karen Straw’s life at all.
But even more remarkable was reporter Walker’s reply. As though the facts lay not in her own report but in the anchorman’s irrelevant question, Bree Walker began to explain why Karen Straw, a woman who had walked away, had not. “There are a lot of different reasons psychologists say—helplessness, dependence, a lot of different reasons. A lot of women feel …”
Jensen interrupted: “Well, if they’re dependent on them, when they kill ’em, they’ve lost their dependence, haven’t they?” He sounded angry, as if he were scolding Walker for her point of view. Walker, looking startled, responded, “Well, certainly. Yes. It’s an ugly, ugly confusing problem.” There was a moment’s awkward airspace before anchorwoman Carol Martin jumped in. “Well, from that subject we’ll move on,” she said. “Still ahead, we’ll talk about the rain.…”9
But Jensen’s question still hung in the air: “Why would one murder her husband instead of just walking away?” It enveloped the story in a fog of mystification. Clifton Straw’s violence and terrorism disappeared in that puff of rhetoric, utterly overlooked. Vanished too was the public issue reporter Walker had presented, magically replaced by the personal problem of another dumb woman. Viewers did not have to question the failure of the police and courts to protect this woman; they could think instead that Karen Straw might simply have walked away. Just when viewers were beginning to feel indignant on her behalf, they could say to themselves instead: “How stupid of her. Why didn’t she think of that?”
I told this story about the TV program to a very smart, very successful network television producer, a woman, of my acquaintance. “Don’t you think Jim Jensen’s comments were outrageous?” I asked.
“You’re too hard on men,” she said. “You can’t expect men who’ve never been that scared of another person to understand why battered women can’t leave. You have to be patient and explain to them that it was fear, not just dependence, that made her stay with him.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, taken aback. “You didn’t hear the story either. The point is that this woman didn’t stay. She was outta there. Gone. Goodbye. She left.”
My friend looked puzzled. “Then how did she get raped?”
Karen Straw was acquitted of all charges against her by jurors who heard the whole story; and she was released to gather up the tatters of her life.10 But that familiar, trivializing question—the question that obscures both the extent of violence against women and the immense individual and collective efforts of women to overcome it—doesn’t go away. It contains the whole history of woman beating in America. And our response to it shapes the future.
In 1966 Dr. William Ryan, a psychologist who’d taught at Harvard and Yale Medical Schools and Boston College, wrote an impassioned book which has rightfully become a classic. Its title—Blaming the Victim—is now a phrase tossed about in everyday conversation, but because it has been cut loose from Ryan’s careful analysis, it’s helpful to look again at what he wrote—especially because so many of the social problems he noticed have only grown worse. Ryan was concerned about America’s “oppressed,” by which he meant the underclass of black and poor people, and about the way America typically approached “solutions” to “social problems” that seemed to afflict them—problems of education, health care, housing, crime, unemployment and the like. We assume, Ryan said, “that individuals ‘have’ social problems” because of some “unusual circumstances” such as “illness, personal defect or handicap, character flaw or maladjustment” which prevent them from getting ahead as other people do.11 Because we “cannot comfortably believe that we are the cause” of social problems, we’ve developed a habit of locating the problem in the victim.12 The “dominant style in American social welfare and health” policies, he said, is “to treat what we call social problems … in terms of the … deviance of the special, unusual groups of persons” who have them.13
This convoluted habit of mind has grotesque implications for social policy. As Ryan pointed out, the process of developing social programs “happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational.” The process goes like this: “First, identify a social problem. Second, study those affected by the problem and discover in what ways they are different from the rest of us as a consequence of deprivation and injustice. Third, define the difference as the cause of the social problem itself. Finally, of course, assign a government bureaucrat to invent a humanitarian action program to correct the differences.”14
Ryan elaborates:
[Victim blamers] turn their attention to the victim in his [or her] post-victimized state. They want to bind up wounds, inject penicillin, administer morphine, and evacuate the wounded for rehabilitation. They explain what’s wrong with the victim in terms of social experiences in the past, experiences that have left wounds, defects, paralysis, and disability. And they take the cure of these wounds and the reduction of these disabilities as the first order of business. They want to make the victims less vulnerable, send them back into battle with better weapons, thicker armor, a higher level of morale.
In order to do so effectively, of course, they must analyze the victims carefully, dispassionately, objectively, scientifically, empathetically, mathematically, and hardheadedly, to see what made them so vulnerable in the first place.
What weapons, now, might they have lacked when they went into battle? Job skills? Education?
What armor was lacking that might have warded off their wounds? Better values? Habits of thrift and foresight?
And what might have ravaged their morale? Apathy? Ignorance? Deviant low class cultural patterns?
This is … Blaming the Victim. And those who buy this solution … are inevitably blinding themselves to the basic causes of the problems being addressed. They are, most crucially, rejecting the possibility of blaming not the victims, but themselves.15
Ryan was certainly not thinking of battered women. It was still possible in 1966 to write about targets of discrimination in America without thinking of women at all, and Ryan mentions wife beating only once in passing as a “crime.” Seven years were to pass before the first American shelter for battered women opened and articles about the issue, giving some startling statistics, began to appear in national magazines—seven years before “battered wives” became a “social problem”—but already the search for the victims’ “vulnerability” and “deviance” was underway. In 1964, one of the first American studies of battered women, conducted by three men and significantly entitled “The Wife-Beater’s Wife: A Study of Family Interaction,” studied women in Framingham, Massachusetts, who had charged their husbands with assault, and found the women “castrating,” “aggressive,” “masculine,” “frigid,” “indecisive,” “passive,” and “masochistic.” What’s more, the authors concluded, the husband’s assaultive behavior served “to fill a wife’s need even though she protests it.”16 As Ryan described the usual practice of victim blaming, Americans looked for the roots of a problem in the individual’s “unusual circumstances.” But the neo-Freudian psychiatric researchers who studied the wife beater’s wife found her “deviance” deep within her own distressingly “masculine” psyche, feminine only in its profound “masochism.” Thus they redefined a universal crime as a personal psychological aberration. They blamed the wife beater’s wife not simply for falling victim to battering but for causing battering, and then lying about it afterwards. Without the wife beater’s wife there would be no wife beating. The reasoning is indeed so smooth it almost sounds rational.
Today such sexist “reasoning” in the scientific literature is better concealed, but it’s often there nonetheless, lurking about the premises.17 The conclusions of the Framingham study are repeated without qualification in a recent book of pop “scholarship” on the subject, Intimate Violence, billed as “The Definitive Study of the Causes and Consequences of Abuse in the American Family.” The authors are Richard Gelles and Murray Straus, two sociologists who have turned the dispassionate, objective, scientific, mathematical inspection of victims and the superficial statistical survey into a busy, profitable academic industry. They conclude that, “There is not much evidence that battered women as a group are more masochistic than other women.”18 These authors are the most prominent of the band of academic researchers who after nearly twenty years of government supported research have still not turned their attention from the victims to the violence of men. No wonder this “reasoning” still dominates popular thinking about women who are battered. And this ingenious application of psychiatric diagnosis to social problem leads to social policy more irresponsible than Ryan could have imagined: the ultimate evasion—no policy at all. If the wife beater’s wife causes the problem, then there’s really nothing the policy makers can do, is there? President Jimmy Carter established a federal Office of Domestic Violence in 1979, but President Ronald Reagan quickly closed it down the following year.19 For this social problem no government bureaucrat is assigned, no humanitarian action program planned.
If the problem is her fault and the solution her responsibility, then neither the criminal justice system, which we might expect to come to the aid of crime victims, nor other social institutions can do anything about it. And that’s exactly what they’ve been saying all along.
The police, for example, say that wife assault is a “family matter.” They also maintain—somewhat inconsistently it would seem—a false but astonishingly durable myth that these little family matters are the most dangerous situations police officers can face, far beyond the call of duty. The myth implies that police should not be expected to go up against potentially deadly men for the sake of women who maliciously create this danger to the police in the first place.20 Evidence for this bit of police folklore comes largely from two sources. Firstly, FBI statistics on police casualties during “disturbance” calls are often taken to apply to “domestic disturbance” calls only, when in fact the category also includes far more dangerous street and barroom brawls and “man-with-a-gun” calls. Secondly, old policemen’s tales about particularly explosive domestic situations are taken to be the general rule, when in fact the bulk of “domestic disturbance” calls involve “minor assaults” which pose a danger to the victim, but little or none to police.21 Obviously it’s a peculiar logic that excuses cops from duty just when the trouble starts and leaves it up to women to deal single-handedly with men too dangerous for armed police to handle. Nevertheless, for decades the myth of police endangerment has justified to a sympathetic public the do-nothing policy of cops who consider themselves more precious than the female citizens they are paid to assist. That in itself tells you how much we value women, how much we blame women for their predicaments, and how easily we abandon them.
This is not to say that police policies haven’t changed in the course of the last twenty years. They have, and in some communities dramatically so. During the 1960s, under the influence of pop psychology, law enforcement officials took up mediation as the best way to deal with criminal assault in the home. Psychologists said that arresting batterers “exacerbated the violence, broke up families, and caused the abuser to lose his job,” so up-to-date police departments trained officers in “crisis intervention techniques,” converting cops to social workers handling not crime but “interpersonal crisis.”22 One goal of such programs was to reduce the number of arrests; and by 1977, 70 percent of the nation’s large police departments were training officers in crisis intervention.23
At the same time, however, under pressure from battered women and their advocates, law enforcement officials began to reconsider. In 1976, legal aid attorneys filed suit against the Chief of Police of Oakland, California, on behalf of “women in general and black women in particular who are victims of domestic violence” (Scott v. Hart), and police agreed to make arrests when they had probable cause to believe a felonious assault had occurred, or when a misdemeanor occurred in their presence.24 On the other coast, battered women sued the New York City police commissioner for failing to enforce laws against assault (Bruno v. Codd); the trial judge told cops that they could not automatically decline to make an arrest simply because the assailant was married to his victim.25 In the same year, 1976, the International Association of Chiefs of Police distributed two “Training Keys” on wife beating that instructed cops to treat assaulted wives as crime victims and not to protect batterers from prosecution.26 By 1980 a national organization of police chiefs, the Police Executive Research Forum, had studied the problem and concluded that police should be trained to arrest wife beaters.27 Then in 1985, as I have mentioned before, Tracey Thurman’s courtroom victory reminded police of their civil liability and prompted widespread adoption of the new pro-arrest policy. The value of the policy was underscored when a highly publicized experiment in Minneapolis demonstrated to the satisfaction of then-Police Chief Anthony Bouza the “efficacy” of arrest in deterring batterers.28
With new pro-arrest policies in place, cities such as Duluth, Minnesota, and Alexandria and Newport News, Virginia noted dramatic decreases in domestic assault and homicide.29 But policy is not practice. Follow-up studies in Minneapolis and other pro-arrest cities revealed that while police made more arrests shortly after the new pro-arrest policy was adopted, they soon backed off and resumed their traditional “discretionary” methods. Surveying “big city police agencies” from 1984 to 1989, criminologist Lawrence Sherman, one of the principal designers of the Minneapolis experiment, found the “almost universal” pro-arrest policy negated by “widespread circumvention by police officers on the street.”30 Chief Bouza points out that in police departments, the people in the lowest ranks actually hold the most power, for they determine on the spot how laws are (or are not) enforced. But who polices the police? Unless cops fear that their chief will punish them severely for disregarding departmental policy, Bouza says, “they will handle calls according to their prejudices, convenience, or personal perspective.”31 They will continue, in other words, to abet the batterer and deprive his victim of her safety, her freedom, and her constitutional rights.
Thus, despite dramatic changes in state and municipal law enforcement policies, many cops still conduct business as usual, enforcing not the law but the do-nothing policy they know best. Many police chiefs, including Chief Bouza, have had to bring disciplinary actions against their own officers to persuade them to comply with departmental policy and arrest batterers. To put teeth in the new pro-arrest policy, many state legislatures made arrest mandatory; Oregon was the first in 1977. Eight states subsequently had to amend their mandatory arrest statutes, however, to call for arrest of the “primary aggressor” only; compelled to arrest battering men, many cops arrested battered women as well, on the grounds that he and she were “assaulting” each other.32 At least fifteen states have passed laws to make arrest mandatory in cases of domestic assault, yet in much of the country, many a cop continues to be—as one judge described Detective Felix Grabowski, the cop who refused to help Deborah Evans—an “inert spectator to an unfolding tragedy.”33 A tragedy in which the victim is to blame.
Police also argue that there is little point in arresting batterers when battered women won’t follow through with prosecution. In the finest blame-the-victim tradition, police shift the burden of arrest to the battered woman who, in most cases, is in no position to press them to arrest the man who assaulted her and threatens to do so again. Yet the cops do have a point. As the Attorney General’s Task Force on Family Violence noted in 1984, “the prosecuting attorney … generally does not issue criminal charges or routinely prosecute these cases.”34 That is still the case; a recent study in Milwaukee found that 95 percent of assaultive men arrested were not prosecuted, and only 1 percent were convicted.35 Instead, prosecutors too shift the burden and the blame to the battered woman. They say battered women don’t press charges. They say this to women who are trying, like the wife beaters’ wives of Framingham, like Tracey Thurman, like Karen Straw, like Deborah Evans, to press charges. And they go on saying it, even though studies done fifteen years ago demonstrated that given the slightest help with complicated legal procedures, women follow through with remarkable tenacity. As long ago as 1977, studies in California found that with the help of Victim Assistance programs, only 10 percent of domestic assault victims in Los Angeles refused to cooperate with the prosecutor, and in Santa Barbara only 8 percent.36
Many prosecutors, however, say that there is little point in prosecuting batterers when judges simply release them, and they too have a point. A 1991 study in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, found that among assaultive men arrested, convicted, and sentenced, less than 1 percent (0.9%) served any time in jail.37 Yet judges who dispense “justice” so lightly to assaultive men have been known (as we’ve seen) to castigate women for wasting the court’s time, to order battered women to make up with their husbands, and to laugh women out of court. They have been known to set free on minimal bail men who have already attempted to kill their wives or girlfriends, and then to say when the murder is done, “There’s just no way of predicting these things.”
And judges, too, shift the burden and the blame to women. It’s a waste of time to issue temporary restraining orders against batterers, many judges say, because battered women don’t show up for the hearing to extend the order anyway; once again, women don’t “follow through.” And there the judges too have a point. A Massachusetts study found that 71 percent of women who got temporary restraining orders in the Brockton District Court in 1982 did not appear at a hearing ten days later. But this study, for once, found fault with the court, not the women; for in the Quincy District Court, where there is a separate office for restraining orders, daily briefing sessions for women seeking restraining orders, and support groups run by the prosecutor’s office, only 2.8 percent of the women failed to show up for the hearing. Again, given a little help to negotiate a complicated and hostile system beset with obstacles, women follow through.38
But why, you may ask, should battered women be afforded all this extra “help”? Why can’t they just use the system like anybody else? Think of Mary Baumruk, shot and killed in May 1992 by her estranged husband Ken Baumruk in a St. Louis courtroom during a divorce hearing. (Ken Baumruk then shot and wounded his wife’s lawyer, his own lawyer, a court bailiff, and a security officer before he was shot by police.)39 Think of Shirley Lowery, a grandmother of eleven, stabbed nineteen times by ex-boyfriend Benjamin Franklin in a Milwaukee courthouse in March 1992 when she came out of hiding to attend a hearing on a restraining order. In her application, Shirley Lowery had said that Franklin raped her and held her at gunpoint. “He follows me 24 hours every day and threatens my life,” she wrote.40 Think of Danielle Almonor, shot to death by her estranged husband, Max, in the Brooklyn Family Court in March 1992 as she waited to be called for a child custody and support hearing requested by her husband. (Max Almonor also critically wounded another woman awaiting a hearing who happened to be seated next to his wife.)41 For women trying to get free of violent men, going to court can be far more difficult, lonely, and dangerous than it is for any other class of complainants. One way courts can facilitate justice is by making their own processes easier, safer, and more accessible. Instead, police, prosecutors, and judges who believe that the “typical” battered woman gives up give up on her. And if a woman perseveres despite the obstacles they place in her way, they may pronounce her “vindictive,” a crafty manipulator of the system, using the law to get back at a man. This catch-22 is no accident. When blame for a “social problem” falls on its victims, the victims look blameworthy, no matter what they do.
Each branch of the criminal justice system, then, evades its duty by blaming another branch. Police say there’s no point in making arrests when prosecutors won’t prosecute, and prosecutors in turn say they can’t prosecute when (a) police don’t arrest, or (b) judges won’t sentence anyway. Judges say that women waste the court’s time. Blaming the victim allows everyone in the system to pass the buck; and buckpassing conveniently enables individuals within the system to acknowledge a problem without doing anything about it. They’d like to help, but, hey, what can they do? Besides, when you come right down to it, isn’t it really up to a woman to follow through? Why doesn’t she just leave?
Many women assaulted by husbands or boyfriends never do call the police, or having found them no help on one occasion, never call them again. But more than half the women assaulted are injured, and at least 25 percent of them seek medical treatment.42 (Undoubtedly this figure would be higher if more Americans had access to affordable health care.) Despite their injuries, many assaulted women have no contact with the police or courts at all. But 10 percent of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms and many others visit private physicians to have their wounds dressed, their broken bones set, their injuries treated.43 One in five women who visits an emergency room—some studies say one in three—does so because of “ongoing abuse.”44 Of women requiring emergency surgery, one in five was battered, according to one study; one in two, according to another.45 Battering accounts for half of all cases of alcoholism in women. It accounts for half of all rapes of women over age thirty.46 From 33 to 46 percent of women who suffer physical assault also report sexual assault—rape—and a “wide range” of resulting injuries, “from superficial bruises and tearing to internal injuries and scarring,” not to mention psychological consequences which, according to the American Medical Association, can be “extreme.”47 Battering is a cause of one quarter of suicide attempts by all women, and one half of suicide attempts by black women.48 And the Journal of the American Medical Association reports: “Approximately 37 percent of obstetric patients, across class, race, and educational lines, are physically abused while pregnant.” Among the results: “placental separation, antepartum hemorrhage, fetal fractures, rupture of the uterus, liver, or spleen, and preterm labor.”49 Preterm labor, of course, may mean spontaneous abortion or miscarriage.
All this adds up to almost 100,000 days of hospitalization, 30,000 emergency room visits, and almost 40,000 visits to physicians each year.50 Yet physicians manage to identify perhaps no more than one battered patient in twenty-five.51 One reason may be that fewer than half the medical schools in the United States and Canada provide any training on domestic assault, and those that do typically cover the topic in one ninety-minute session.52 Dr. Carole Warshaw, a Chicago psychiatrist and emergency physician, studied the records of fifty-two battered women treated at the emergency room of a large urban hospital in 1987 for injuries resulting from domestic assault, injuries ranging from a fractured ankle to a gunshot wound. In three out of four cases physicians did not inquire about the woman’s relationship to the assailant. Nine times out of ten physicians failed to ask about abuse at all. They referred only 8 percent of the cases to a social worker, and although every case involved at least assault and battery, nurses reported fewer than half of them to the police.53 (Medical personnel didn’t report child abuse either, until the law required it.) Instead, doctors typically patch up wounds, prescribe tranquilizers, and discharge patients, with no arrangements made for their safety, to return to the same life-threatening situation they came from. Warshaw reports that doctors fill out forms in “passive, disembodied phrases,” rendering the assailant invisible: “Hit by lead pipe.” “Blow to head by stick with nail in it.” “Hit on left wrist with jackhammer.”54
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, of the Centers for Disease Control, observes: “It’s striking that physicians almost never ask their patients about violence. The only physicians who ask about violence are psychiatrists, and they’re only interested if it occurs in a dream.”55 Faced with victims of the real violence of battering, psychiatrists often mislabel patients, mistaking the after-effects of prolonged trauma for personality disorder. Like the three men who brought us “The Wifebeater’s Wife,” psychiatrists find women inherently dependent, passive, self-defeating, or masochistic when they should be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress. Psychiatric victim-blaming reappears in quasi-psychiatric labels routinely attached to battered women by other medical personnel. Doctors observed in one study of emergency room practice, for example, routinely designated battered women “hysteric,” “neurotic female,” “hypochondriac,” or simply “crock.”56
This situation has been an open secret for as long as family physicians have treated “families.” But in 1985, then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop told health professionals that “domestic violence is a public health menace that police alone cannot cope with.”57 He suggested that hospitals and trauma centers might prevent further violence by intervening, especially since they see many of the same patients repeatedly. Mental health and counseling centers might play a similar role. But a 1987 survey of trauma centers in the San Francisco area found that more than half of them still had no protocols for dealing with domestic assault victims.58 A study of Massachusetts emergency rooms found 80 percent still without protocols in 1991.59 In 1989 Koop tried again, kicking off a campaign to alert the 27,000 members of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, often women’s primary care providers, to what Koop called “an overwhelming moral, economic, and public health burden that our society can no longer bear.”60 The success of that campaign can be judged by the fact that in October 1991 the American Medical Association announced the start of “a campaign” to combat a “public health menace”: Family Violence. At a press conference in Chicago, AMA leaders handed out an informational packet identifying family violence as “America’s Deadly Secret.” Secret? Koop’s successor as Surgeon General, Dr. Antonia C. Novello, commended the AMA for “bringing this topic of domestic violence to light.”61
Novello recommended that medical personnel be required to report domestic violence, as they are already required to report suspected child abuse; but the AMA settled for writing up “guidelines” for physicians to use in dealing with the “menace” that’s been there, right under their stethoscopes, all along. Like police “policies,” medical “guidelines” are not practice. A 1991 study of health professionals found that “Family violence is recognized as a major problem at the health care systems level,” but “little and inadequate attention is given to the prevention, identification, treatment and follow-up of cases.” The problem seems to be not ignorance but indolence. The study suggests one explanation: “Physicians have ‘an unfortunate prevalence’ of sexist, racist and ageist attitudes that helps them overlook the causes of their patients’ cuts and bruises.”62
Most studies of health care for battered women, as we’ve seen, study the victims, not the health care system; but in doing so, they’ve uncovered the fact that health care in America can be positively dangerous to an abused woman. When physicians and nurses do nothing, even when the victim/patient knows they know, they magnify the victim’s anxiety, hopelessness, fear, and shame—her sense that she alone is responsible for her safety, that she alone is perhaps, after all, to blame. One study rightly concludes: “the current pattern of medical response contributes to the battering syndrome.”63 Another confirms that “Failure to acknowledge the woman’s abusive experience is often psychologically damaging in itself.”64 And another stresses that “disconfirmation of abuse by a care giver is an important factor in the development of subsequent psychopathology.65 In other words, the way doctors and nurses and counselors treat battered women—as though nothing happened—drives them crazy. But health professionals too ask: isn’t she a grown-up? Didn’t she get herself into this? Why doesn’t she just leave?
If the problem is her fault, no one else need help either. Ministers, priests, and rabbis admonish the battered woman to try harder, to be a better wife. Marriage counselors, family therapists, and mediators counsel her to consider her husband’s point of view, practice “interpersonal communication skills,” and work diligently (often in long-term therapy) to raise her self-esteem. To illustrate “the absurd level that victim blaming reaches,” a handbook published by the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project recounts what happened to a woman named Janice:
“My husband shot at me twice but he was so drunk he missed me. I locked myself in the bathroom and crawled out the window. I ran through a field in knee-deep snow with no shoes on. The neighbors took me to the hospital. The next day I was admitted to the psych ward for anxiety. I took several tests. When the psychiatrist met with me he said I scored very high on the paranoia scale. I asked what that meant and he said, ‘It means you have an irrational fear that someone is out to get you.’ My anxiety turned to depression. I was released to go back home a week later with a prescription for Valium.”66
Privately, the representatives of social “services” and the members of the “helping professions” know. Privately, they may fear and despise the battered woman for being the victim she is. They grow impatient with her and angry that she presents herself to them, wanting something from them, wanting help. Why doesn’t she help herself? (If she were anyone else, with any other kind of problem, they would see that asking for help is a way to help oneself.) Sometimes they say to her: keep the house cleaner, don’t be so nervous, lose weight, be agreeable, don’t answer back, make the kids behave, take Valium, wear lipstick, smile, pray. Sometimes they say: Why don’t you just leave?
And if she does leave? And he comes after her? Perhaps she’ll be maimed and crippled, like Tracey Thurman. Perhaps she’ll defend herself and then be tried for murder, like Karen Straw. Perhaps she’ll be convicted and sent to prison for a long term—fifteen years, maybe, or life—as are so many battered women who kill. Or perhaps she’ll be murdered—as four women every day are murdered by their “partners.” Lisa Bianco’s mother told a television reporter: “People ask ‘Why don’t battered women leave?’ They get killed. That’s why.”67
The pattern is so commonplace that law professor Martha R. Mahoney has coined the useful term “separation assault” to describe the “varied violent and coercive moves” a batterer makes when a woman tries to leave him. Mahoney writes: “Separation assault is the attack on the woman’s body and volition in which her partner seeks to prevent her from leaving, retaliate for the separation, or force her to return. It aims at overbearing her will as to where and with whom she will live, and coercing her in order to enforce connection in a relationship. It is an attempt to gain, retain, or regain power in a relationship, or to punish the woman for ending the relationship. It often takes place over time.”68 As Mahoney points out, the battered woman whom we think of as “staying” with a batterer, or returning to him, is usually a woman held captive by the force of separation assault. And as we have seen time and time again, when a woman perseveres in her struggle to get free, the grand finale of separation assault is often her own death.
But even an abused woman’s death does not put an end to the blame we customarily heap upon her. Think of Carol Irons, who made history in 1982 at age thirty-three by becoming the first female judge in Kent County, Michigan. She was reportedly a great asset to the bench: a judge who took domestic assault seriously and conveyed that attitude to battered women and battering men as well.69 In 1984 she married Clarence (“Rat”) Ratliff, a policeman, on the lawn of the Hall of Justice in Grand Rapids. Before long, he accused her of infidelity, and for months he secretly tapped her telephone, trying to gather evidence against her. In June 1988 Carol Irons left Ratliff and started divorce proceedings. The newspapers called it “a rancorous separation.”70 On October 20, 1988, Ratliff stopped for a few drinks when he got off work in the morning, then went to the courthouse and shot Judge Irons in the chest. He fired at her again as she tried to get away, and he popped off three shots at fellow officers who came to aid the dying judge. When he was subdued, he explained: “I just couldn’t take the bitch anymore.”71
Clarence Ratliff apparently was a tough, macho guy. One of his pals in the Dilleywackers Motorcycle Club told reporters, “If there were 10,000 Clarence Ratliffs, the communists would start digging holes and burying themselves in.”72 Ratliff’s first wife, Olga Ratliff, said that he repeatedly hit her during their marriage and that after she left him he broke into her house and pistol-whipped her. Carol Irons’s divorce attorney reported that Irons had applied for a restraining order after Ratliff harassed her and threatened to kill her.73 But when Ratliff went on trial for first degree murder, the judge excluded information about his previous threats and violence lest it prejudice the jury (nine men and three women) against the man. The jurors heard instead Ratliff’s sordid suspicions about his wife and his complaint that she refused to continue paying the mortgage on his cottage after the divorce. They heard how hard it was on a man when his wife was “a judge and a whore at the same time.”74
After that, the jurors simply could not find it in their hearts to pronounce Clarence Ratliff guilty of first degree murder. Or second degree murder either. They convicted him of voluntary manslaughter. They felt that Ratliff was under too much “stress” and too full of alcohol to have intended murder. Besides, as one juror said: “Everybody felt he was provoked by his wife to do this. First of all, she went out with other men. Then he was having trouble sexually, and I imagine she rubbed that in to him. Then he went to his lawyer’s office and found out she wouldn’t agree to the settlement. All of that provoked him into doing it.”75 Judge Irons’s outraged friends called this “the-bitch-deserved-it defense.”76
Given the manslaughter conviction, Clarence Ratliff might have been out of prison within six years, as most men who kill their wives and girlfriends are, but the jurors had not taken kindly to his shooting at the cops. They found him guilty of two counts of assault with intent to commit murder, and one count of assault with a firearm, and one count of felony firearm (that is, using a firearm in the commission of a felony).77 Thousands of citizens protested the dangerous message the verdict sent to batterers: that shooting at a cop is serious, but killing your wife … well, that’s not so bad. But the prosecutor said he was “gratified” that the jury “realized how serious the attack on the police officers was.”78 In June 1989 the judge sentenced Ratliff to ten to fifteen years for killing his wife, two life terms for the assaults on two police officers, up to four years for assaulting a third officer, and two years for using a firearm in the commission of a felony. That makes Ratliff eligible for parole in 2000 and means, in practice, that he’ll be in prison about twice as long as he might have been if he’d settled for “manslaughtering” his provocative wife.79 And it left the friends of Carol Irons to rehabilitate her name. “She was a gifted and brilliant person,” said one, “a far better person than was portrayed in the trial.”80
Historian Elizabeth Pleck notes that the inevitable question, or its variant “Why does she stay?,” was first asked in the 1920s, coincidentally with the rise of modern psychology, and experts have been “answering” it ever since. “The answer given then,” Pleck says, “was that battered women were of low intelligence or mentally retarded; two decades later, [as we have seen] it was assumed these women did not leave because they were masochistic. By the 1970s, an abused woman stayed married, the experts claimed, because she was isolated from friends and neighbors, had few economic or educational resources, and had been terrorized into a state of ‘learned helplessness’ by repeated beatings.” As Pleck observes, even this “modern answer” is “far less revealing than the persistent need to pose the question.”81 What that need reveals is our refusal to do anything to stop violence against women.
Instead, “experts”—psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists mostly—fortified with government grants, busily study why women stay. Naturally they study the question, and the whole problem of male violence, by studying women, thereby managing to blame women while turning “their problem” into a tidy profit, generously provided by your tax dollars and mine. The experts have examined the personalities of battered women, their education, their family history, their previous experience with violence, their physical health, their mental health, their employment record, their use of alcohol and drugs, their sexual history and attitudes, their religious beliefs, their child-rearing practices, their veracity, their verbal skills, their problem-solving skills, their “interpersonal tactics” (which means mostly what they do when a man hits them), and—endlessly—their self-esteem.
In 1978 the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, a coalition of grass-roots women’s groups struggling on shoestring budgets to shelter and provide services for battered women, recommended that federal research grants “be limited to those helping local groups meet particular programmatic needs.”82 But those local groups were made up mostly of formerly battered women, uncredentialed and clearly on the side of women; so the substantial grants—from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Department of Justice, and other federal agencies—went instead to psychologists and sociologists, mostly men, with academic credentials and affiliations, who could be counted on to be “objective”—that is, to not take the side of women. So adept have the experts been at studying women while hiding women’s complaints, blaming women while silencing them, that two male “experts” who reviewed the heavy body of “standard literature” in the field in 1986 remarked: “The search for characteristics of women that contribute to their own victimization is futile.… It is sometimes forgotten that men’s violence is men’s behavior.… What is surprising is the enormous effort to explain male behavior by examining characteristics of women. It is hoped [presumably by the authors] that future research will show more about the factors that promote violent male behavior and that stronger theory will be developed to explain it.”83
Don’t count on it. Gender bias oozes from the very methods of the academics: quantitative, statistical, “objective,” and as distant as possible from the real experiences of real women. (Researchers who “use” battered women as experimental “subjects” commonly present them with a list of predetermined questions, designed to elicit the information the researchers want, and keyed for quick reduction to faceless numbers—a “scientific method” very different from listening to what women have to say for themselves.) When not busy finding out what’s wrong with women, researchers investigate what’s wrong with “families.”
In the 1970s, while psychologists studied women’s “helplessness” and passivity (instead of men’s violence and aggression), sociologists tried to measure the exact “magnitude” of “family” violence, spending money that might have gone to fund shelters and save lives. At the University of New Hampshire Family Violence Research Program, professors Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, assisted by Suzanne Steinmetz, devised a “Conflict Tactics Scale” to score fights in violent “families” on a convenient numerical basis, regardless of context, intention, relative size of the contenders, or real damage done. The experts then conducted a large survey, and in 1977 pronounced the battle between the sexes a statistical draw.84 This finding, that women are just as violent as men, seemed ludicrous to workers in the battered women’s movement who saw at firsthand that the damage inflicted by violent men had no parallel. But the study was among the first on “family violence.” It was big and official, backed by the weight of academia and the National Institute of Mental Health. And it conveniently deflected attention from male violence against women by recasting “family violence” as an unfortunate but egalitarian problem. For all these reasons, the study was taken seriously and widely reported in the popular press. Ever since, pro-feminist academic researchers have engaged themselves year after year in doggedly deconstructing the shoddy studies based on the “logical positivism and abstract empiricism” of the Conflict Tactics Scale.85 (To cite examples of the Scale’s failings, and of the general idiocy of trying to evaluate complex issues in simplistic statistical terms, on the Conflict Tactics Scale hitting your “partner” with a pillow counts the same as hitting him or her with a sledgehammer, and two slaps on the wrist count the same as two knife attacks.)86
Straus and Gelles met this criticism by ignoring it, and in 1986 they repeated their statistical survey, using once again the handy Conflict Tactics Scale. To no one’s surprise, they discovered anew that in using violence, the sexes are “equal.”87 This study was just as ridiculous as the first one, but it was also just as big, just as official, just as well funded, just as warmly received, just as well publicized, and just as often quoted. So the professors go on producing what they call “definitive” studies of “family violence,” and they retain their reputation as the leading academic “family violence experts” in America, enjoying the prominence reserved for those scholars whose findings best fit the misogynist temper of our times.
Their results—that women and men abuse each other in equal numbers, that the battered “spouse” is as often as not a “battered husband”—have made headlines for more than a decade. One recent example is yet another article in the New York Times on “battered husbands” seeking “equal rights.”88 Their research continues to mislead the public and policy makers alike and to mask the real nature and severity of male violence against women. (It also saddled us with verbal fakery like “family violence” and “spouse abuse” and the “violent couple.”) R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, co-directors of the Institute for the Study of Violence at the University of Wales point out that: “In Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia, Asia, Africa, South and Latin America, and the Soviet Union the problem [known in the United States as Family Violence] is believed to be and research findings show it to be violence against women.” They conclude: “One must ask if there is something peculiar about society in the USA, or about its social science.”89
More important, little or none of this peculiar research has had any application to the real experience of survivors and advocates trying to help real abused women and children. Just the reverse. Susan Schechter notes:
The shelter movement has never had the time or money to conduct its own research, documenting how battered women are active on their own behalf, how they creatively avoid and survive the violence, and the conditions under which they ultimately leave. Few researchers have documented the complex steps through which women pass as they make positive changes in their lives. Nor do we know enough about those interventions that stop assailants and those that prevent further violence. The shelter movement has found most academic researchers in the field of family violence to be indifferent, if not hostile, to its posing these questions.90
Worse, organizations that shelter and support battered women and children find it harder and harder to find funding when “experts” lead policy-makers and the general public to believe that “there are no clear cut victims or assailants, only violent couples in need of psychotherapeutic transformation,” and that when women complain of “family violence,” they have only themselves to blame.91
So thoroughly have “experts” in psychology and social science taken over the problem of woman assault that criminologists have next to nothing to say about it. Only one major theoretical study of crime in the United States even names as a crime what is now the leading cause of injury to American women. In Confronting Crime: An American Challenge, Elliott Currie writes, “Violence against women is … one of the most serious and deadly forms of criminal violence in America.”92 Until very recently, of course, there was no record of domestic crime for criminologists to think about: no arrests, no police reports, no numbers, nothing. Look through sixty years of FBI Uniform Crime Reports, crime statistics gathered unsystematically from 16,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and you’ll find that domestic violence doesn’t exist. The FBI started gathering and publishing crime statistics in 1930, but it has never collected information about the victims of aggravated assault. Attorney General William French Smith acknowledged in 1983 that the “insidious criminal problem” of domestic violence has “never received the kind of national attention it deserves,” and it still hasn’t.93 Elliott Currie says that “conservative criminologists have, with few exceptions, been oddly silent on the entire issue of domestic violence,” perhaps because they “may be more concerned with upholding ‘traditional’ norms, at whatever cost, than with reducing violence, inside or outside the family.”94 Traditional norms, of course, include the sanctity of the family and the “right” of every man privately to maintain “order”—which is to say, his own supremacy—within his own household. Indeed many of the most prominent “thinkers” in criminology uphold precisely the same patriarchal, authoritarian, and punitive values in society that the batterer literally fights for in “his” family. They would be the last to interfere with his tyrannical project—or with the psychologists and sociologists who are still trying to pin the blame on the victim.
A few criminologists concerned with police work, however, took up in the early 1980s the question of how police should respond to domestic violence calls: whether to mediate as psychologists urged, arrest as battered women and their advocates demanded, or do nothing, as police tradition dictated. As criminologists, however, their concern was not the safety of women but the deterrence of crime, which seems to mean mainly reducing the number of annoying domestic emergency calls to the police.95 The story of the police experiments is complicated, but its moral is simple: there’s more than one way to blame the victim.
The results of the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment conducted by Lawrence Sherman and Richard Berk, published in 1984, suggested that batterers arrested by police were far less likely to repeat violence within the next six months than those who were merely “advised” or sent away from the scene.96 Sherman and Berk recommended that police be empowered to make warrantless arrests in domestic assault cases, confirming the trend of law enforcement agencies, already underway, to adopt a policy of arresting batterers. But Sherman and Berk recommended against another trend: passing mandatory arrest laws to compel cops to arrest batterers. The researchers warned that police, who cherish their power of discretion—their power not to arrest—would circumvent mandatory arrest laws.97 As we’ve seen, they were right about cops circumventing the law. Mandated to arrest, many police officers refused, or they arrested battered women as well as, or instead of, batterers. Nevertheless, more and more states accepted the advice of law enforcement officials and women’s advocates, and they enacted statutes mandating arrest.
Criminologist Sherman then led a small group of researchers in spending about four million taxpayer dollars to replicate the Minneapolis experiment in five other cities, but because the researchers conducted each experiment a little differently, the results were predictably conflicting and inconclusive.98 In all six cities studied, arrest seemed to deter batterers in the short run; that is, it kept them from battering again for at least the first thirty days after arrest. (That is often all the time a woman needs to make good her escape.) In three cities, including Minneapolis, arrest seemed to deter batterers for up to six months, while in three other cities—Omaha, Charlotte, and Milwaukee—it seemed not to.99
These results led different members of the research group to different conclusions. Researchers in Omaha recommended more research.100 Researchers in Charlotte said that even if arrest didn’t have a deterrent effect, it was still “a more conscionable choice than non-arrest,” because nonarrest “legitimated” abuse and left women “on their own.”101 But Lawrence Sherman, who led the study in Milwaukee as he had in Minneapolis, made a remarkable leap. Not only does arrest not deter battering in the long term, he said, but in some groups it actually causes it.102
Sherman found that after arrest, “employed, married, high school graduate and white suspects” were less likely to repeat violence. But arrest a “marginal” man—an unemployed, unmarried, high school dropout and/or black suspect who has “nothing to lose”—and “arrest will backfire by causing increased violence.”103 This much is probably true, especially in Milwaukee where most of the arrested men were freed in a couple of hours and almost never prosecuted. (Men arrested in Minneapolis were jailed for twenty-four hours and arraigned before a judge.) But there’s a big difference between failing to stop escalating violence and causing violence to escalate, as feminist legal scholars, busy dismantling Sherman line by line, have pointed out.104
But if it’s true, as the data show, that “marginal” men are undeterred by arrest, should we bring heavier punishments to bear to make them desist? No, says Sherman, “the evidence fails to justify … greater severity.”105 What the evidence justifies to Sherman—and here he makes another dazzling leap, writing social policy for all in terms of the alleged behavior of a few—is the repeal of mandatory arrest laws. Better, says Sherman, to have police choose from a list of “options” such as offering to take the victim to a shelter or “mobilizing the victim’s social network to provide short term protection.”106 Police, exercising their famous discretion, can treat those Sherman calls “different folks” differently.107 And just in case they don’t get it right, Sherman also recommends: “Police should not be held civilly liable for failure to prevent future domestic homicide or serious injury because of failure to make arrests in … prior misdemeanor assaults.”108
You’ll recognize the notion that arrest backfires, making violent men more violent, as the longstanding excuse of cops. But now, since Sherman, it’s “science.” (Sherman likes to compare his “controlled experiments” to biochemical research.)109 It’s “unfortunate,” he says, that the battered women’s movement has paid so little attention to his “evidence that arrest positively harms black women.”110 Be it on their heads, he suggests, when black women are battered by those poor black men with nothing to lose, infuriated by arrest. But law professor Cynthia Grant Bowman questions the male perspective that draws conclusions about violence against women solely in terms of the socioeconomic circumstances of the men involved. Looked at from the woman’s perspective, it’s clear that poor inner-city women, who often have no support services and can’t afford to leave public housing, may be sitting ducks for further assaults. Such women need more law enforcement, not less.111 As for Sherman, he carries us back, by a circuitous route, to an old paternalism—though he calls it “smart” policing for the “twenty-first century.”112 He comes down squarely on the side of a universal do-nothing (but the same old “options”) “domestic violence” policy. And why? In order to protect women.113
What are we to call this kind of double whammy by which “controlled experiments” lay both the problem and the nonsolution at woman’s door? (And leave her to guard the door all by herself.) Victim blaming squared, perhaps? Complex victim blaming syndrome? Post-feminist stress disorder? (The Milwaukee Journal, in a strong editorial upholding Wisconsin’s mandatory arrest law, called it “missing the point.”)114
To feminist critics the significant thing about this research is not simply that it kept another band of academics, mostly men, happily employed for a decade in defense of the status quo ante, but that it is so relentlessly male in its design and interpretation. Here again, as in the work of “family violence” researchers, are “objective” studies that try to isolate one behavior (arrest) from a complex context and measure its effects in a broad statistical survey. (One might question the ethics of studies that answered real women’s real calls for help with cops engaged in an academic experiment.) Here again are social scientists studying a “problem” which primarily injures women without consulting injured women in designing the study. (Any battered women’s advocate could have told them that arrest alone, without other serious consequences such as prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and jail time, leaves batterers laughing at their victims and at the police, too.) The studies objectify the women studied as statistics classified by race, employment, and socioeconomic status, and deprive us of valuable information their voices could provide.115 In fact, one of the most interesting things about the police experiments is that whenever women were asked about the repetition of assaults, their reports differed from official police records; women reported, for one thing, “better results from arrest.”116 Sherman, however, focused on the official police data which he found “far more reliable” than the “expensive and troublesome” victim interviews.117 But then, he didn’t actually talk to victims. In Milwaukee, he hired female interviewers to do the job.118 One can only guess that Sherman intended to be sensitive to women victims in dispatching other women to question them. Still, he might have learned something by doing it himself.
Cynthia Grant Bowman points out: “The perspective from which neutral statistics are analysed clearly makes a difference both in the conclusions to be drawn and in the policy implications which emerge from those conclusions.”119 From Sherman’s perspective, “What prevents police from preventing repeat violence is the deep reverence for privacy in American life.”120 The underlying cause of “domestic violence,” he thinks, is not male dominance, but things like “adultery, alcoholism, or just plain argumentativeness”; and these matters, he says, drawing upon the familiar assumptions of ventilationist psychology, are related to the “intimate emotions of a sexual relationship.” “Given a choice between privacy and prevention,” he says, “Americans choose privacy.”121 We must ask, which Americans? Whose privacy? It doesn’t seem to occur to Sherman that women and “Americans” see things differently.
In the course of all this expensive, redundant, and obtuse investigation, psychologists have pinned “the problem” on various permutations of the battered woman’s psyche from her “low self-esteem” to her “self-destructive behavior.” Psychiatrists have done their utmost to get her “syndrome” officially classified as a “mental illness,” and have slipped into the official psychiatric diagnostic canon a brand new “Disorder”—“Self-Defeating Personality Disorder”—dreamed up by a committee of white male psychoanalysts.122 Pop therapist/writers have added “co-dependency” and “addictive personality,” which is/are either one new “disease” or two, depending upon which pop therapist you read. Sociologists have manufactured that monumental problem—“battered husbands”—which all at once trivializes wife beating and blames battered women not only for being victims but for victimizing men. (Every time this reactionary notion is relaunched it gets great play from male TV “personalities” who mistakenly apply “the fairness doctrine” to gender, balancing every story of battered wives with another about battered husbands.) And the victim-blaming “research” encourages the criminal justice system in its well-established do-nothing policy, so that the battered woman who tries to blame the man battering her—who tries, in fact, like Karen Straw and Tracey Thurman, to get him arrested and locked up—finds she gets no help at all.
All this can be discouraging to a woman. It can—if you will put yourself in her shoes for a moment—make her terribly upset or depressed. It can fill her with rage or despair. It can even give her a case of “low self-esteem,” creeping like mildew over her soul. Once she comes down with these “mental health problems,” the experts rush in again to blame the victim for the violence. “We cannot tell,” say Professors Gelles and Straus in their most recent “definitive” text, “whether, in fact, the violence came before the problems or whether the problems produced the violence. It is certainly plausible that health or psychological problems create stress in a home. This can lead to violence.”123
Thus we come full circle. Her mental health problems magically “produce the violence” (an abstraction, perpetrator unspecified) and once it starts coming down on her head, we know what the next question is.
The huge pile of data about battered women which the victim blamers have amassed reveals one critical fact: one battered woman is as different from the next as night from day. Taken all in all, the studies show that all battered women have only one significant characteristic in common—they all are female.
Some battered women were abused as children; others were not. Some battered women never got past grade school; others hold advanced degrees. Some battered women have never held a job; others have worked all their lives. Some battered women were married very young, others in middle age, others not at all. Many battered women are very poor; many are well-to-do. Many battered women have “too many” children, others none at all. Many battered women are passive introverts; others are active extroverts. Some battered women drink too much or use drugs; others never touch the stuff. Many battered women are black; many others are white, yellow, red, brown. Many battered women are Catholic; many others are Protestant, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, Buddhist, Mormon. In short, there is no typical battered woman. Or to put it another way, any girl or woman might be battered.
This is not a comfortable thought. And it helps to explain why even women blame women for being battered. (In the studio audience of every TV talk show there are two people who seem to be sent from central casting: the cop who says, “These women don’t really want ’em arrested,” and the woman who says, “I wouldn’t stand for that. I would never let that happen to me.”) If there is something wrong with her, then we can feel safe. And if she doesn’t leave the assailant, then we are absolved of responsibility to help her and guilt for our failure to do so. The thought that we are safe only by chance or luck, and perhaps only for the time being, temporarily ahead in some cosmic lottery over which we have no control is too disturbing to take in. And the thought that she isn’t leaving because she can’t without help, and no one will help her, and she could be me—well, what woman wants to think about that?
The psychological “experts” like to say that even battered women blame themselves for the abuse they suffer, but I haven’t found that to be true. All the survivors I meet know perfectly well who did what to whom: they blame the batterer for his abuse. They blame themselves mainly for sticking around as long as they did; and they take responsibility for specific acts which “set him off.” They say things like, “I should have known better than to go back for my clothes.” “I should have kept my opinion to myself.” “I was an idiot to think he wouldn’t follow me.” Implicit in such remarks, of course, is the desire to be in control of one’s own life, the need to believe that one can be safe by not repeating the same “mistake.” The same desire helps to explain the enormous popularity, even among battered and formerly battered women, of books like Women Who Love Too Much and Co-Dependent No More, self-blaming, “self-help” handbooks full of advice to help a woman “work on” herself, “take charge” of her life, realize her “potential,” “grow.” If I love him less, or better, or differently, if I don’t do this, if I don’t do that—then I will “change” and maybe he will “change” and our relationship will change and everything will be different and I will be safe. It will take a lot of “work,” of course, but all the advice is so very helpful, and so self-absorbing, so time-consuming, so apolitical, so doomed. This is victim blaming at its most pernicious.
Just as any woman may fall victim to any form of male violence, any man may become a batterer. A man beats up a woman not because there is something wrong with her (though he says so) or even because there is something wrong with him (though women say so) but because he can. He can because nobody stops him. On the contrary, many individuals and institutions—including pornography, popular media, police, prosecutors, judges, physicians, mental health professionals, clergy, and academic “experts”—encourage him. Even Congress abets him through its unwillingness to fund any social programs that do not foster the “Family Ideal” which is, as historian Elizabeth Pleck has noted, “the single most consistent barrier to reform against domestic violence.”124 Lest Congress neglect the “Family Ideal,” the political right wing issues reminders. When the House first passed a Domestic Violence bill in 1980 to provide some emergency services, the Washington Star urged the Senate to vote it down and keep “the long arm of Washington bureaucracy” out of “private life.” Shelters for abused women, the editorial said, would “weaken the traditional family.” Emergency counseling for abused women would “break down the emotional ties that make a family unit strong.”125 Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority mobilized against the bill and flooded Senators with mail warning them not to “meddle with family matters.”126
Even more horrifying to the Star was the prospect that “domestic violence shelters would be staffed by a good many far-fringe feminists,” a fear that roused the opposition, prompted Senate majority whip Alan Cranston to withdraw the bill, and held up legislation for years. (First introduced by Representative Barbara Mikulski in 1978 and every year thereafter, a “Family Violence Prevention and Services Act” finally slipped through in October 1984, not in its own right but as a watered down amendment to the “Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act” which was up for renewal.)127 New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey agreed with the Star, inserting his opinion in the Congressional Record: “The Federal Government should not fund missionaries who would war on the traditional family.”128 It’s those women—those far-fringe feminists and lesbians—who are to blame, the right wing says, for causing domestic violence in the first place. How? The Star explains: “Rejecting traditional female roles and attitudes, they are … rejecting a profound part of themselves. And out of their unrecognized self-hate comes a bitterness that detonates real wars of the sexes, complete with black eyes and bruises that send women out into the night looking for help.”129 The Star probably was right about that “real war of the sexes,” for the rise of feminism certainly did detonate the deepest fears of many terrified men and inspire them to more vigorous authoritarianism at home, just as it inspired a public backlash (well chronicled by Susan Faludi) of which the Star’s editorial is an example: a new wave of blaming everything on the victimized woman, and on feminist women trying to help her.
Think again of Karen Straw. The indelible paper trail she left through the records of hospitals, police, courts, and social services proves that she made every possible appeal for help to “the system.” For women’s advocates, Karen Straw became a textbook case: a woman who followed through on everything the criminal justice system told her to do, only to find the system worse than worthless. Karla DiGirolamo, Executive Director of the New York State Governor’s Commission on Domestic Violence, told the press, “It’s a crime of the system that we allow people to live this way, without public intervention, until they feel they have no alternative but to kill.” Ronnie Eldridge, former Director of the New York State Division for Women, commented, “Obviously this system doesn’t work at all.”130 But in fact, considering that the system was designed by men for men, it worked perfectly—at least until the murder trial when the jury refused to cooperate by convicting Karen Straw. Karen Straw, all by herself, had to stop the man who terrorized her. Why should men, who had no quarrel with her assailant, have done it for her? What right had she to ask?
But men don’t like to come right out and say that. Think about it—how would it sound? So they say instead, as anchorman Jim Jensen did: Why didn’t she leave? And then someone, someone like reporter Bree Walker, begins to explain—all about dependence and helplessness and low self-esteem and masochism and psychological problems and what the experts say and … Well, you see how neatly that works.
And you see what battered women, individually and collectively, have been up against all this time.