To measure change, it helps to take the long view of history. Then one can see that in the last century and a half public opinion about battered women has undergone a fundamental shift. During the nineteenth century and a good part of this one, when a woman left her husband, the public asked: Why did she leave? The question was not merely inquisitive but judgmental, suggesting other loaded questions: What kind of woman walks out on her husband and family, the sacred duty entrusted to her by God and nature? How could she abandon her obligations, her destiny? Throw away her life? Her children’s happiness? Is she deranged? Irreligious? Unnatural?
Today, family, friends, clergy, courts, and counselors still urge a woman’s duty upon her, but when a woman complains too loudly, or some “real” trouble occurs—a homicide perhaps, or the battery of a child—the public wants to know: Why didn’t she leave? A century ago a dutiful woman’s place was with her husband, even a brutal one, though she herself was blameless. Today she is still supposed to stand by her man, but only up to a point—a point always more easily discerned in retrospect, and by others. Then, as we saw in the case of Hedda Nussbaum, if he is “really” abusive and she stays, whatever happens is said to be her own fault.
It is also clear that today in the mainstream culture of this country a woman’s duty to her child is supposed to take precedence over her duty to her husband. This judgment too represents a fundamental shift away from an older, purely patriarchal order which valued nothing so much as the privilege of the patriarch himself. Marilyn French tells an old story from India, one of those instructive moral tales designed to teach women how they are supposed to be. French writes: “The story presenting an exemplary Indian wife tells of a woman sitting with her sleeping husband’s head in her lap, watching over him and her baby playing in front of the fire. The baby wanders near the fire, but the woman does not move lest she disturb her sleeping lord. When the child actually enters the flames, she prays, begging Agni not to harm the baby. Agni rewards her wifely devotion by letting the child sit amid the flames unscathed.” As French observes, the Indian wife is “a model for Hedda Nussbaum.” But as we’ve seen, the model no longer applies—except perhaps in the minds of men like Joel Steinberg who still feel entitled to all the powers and privileges of the sleeping lord.1 Today, in this country, the exemplary wife is supposed to stand up and rescue her child from the flames, and if need be, from her “lord” himself.
Thus it happens that the big question—Why didn’t she leave?—cuts two ways. On one hand, it shifts the blame from the “nature” of men in general and the societal attitudes and institutions that abet male violence to the character of the individual victim; it blames the victim for the abuse she suffers. On the other hand, it suggests that women now have more options and should make use of them. It implies a widespread belief that women should leave abusers, that living with brutality (or, as some would say, “excessive” brutality) is no longer a good wife’s duty. Taken in the context of a century and a half of struggle, this is progress.
Yet nothing makes it easy for a woman to leave. Many factors—from low wages and inadequate child care to the unresponsive criminal justice system and a Congress unwilling adequately to fund victim services—conspire to keep the abused woman in her place within the “traditional” family. Abused women leave anyway, but often they are strictly on their own. Many flee one problem—battering—only to become part of another: “the feminization of poverty.” These days 65 percent of black children live in a family headed by a single mother, and 45 percent of all American families headed by a single mother live in poverty.2 When Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits were suspended in 1996, 60 percent of the poor women receiving them were victims of “domestic violence.”3 Dan Quayle pointed to abortion, divorce, and these single-parent families as grievous causes of “the disintegration of the American family.” But we can attribute this “disintegration” in part to violence, just as we can attribute the “feminization of poverty” in part to woman and child abuse, a cause economists and politicians never cite. Today experts name battery as a “major cause” of homelessness; large numbers of the nation’s growing band of homeless are women on their own with children—women and children who, despite the social and economic obstacles, ran from male violence at home.4 (Reflect for a moment on conventional explanations for the feminization of poverty—her youth, her lack of education, her lack of job skills, her sexual activity, her insistence upon becoming a single mother, heedless of Quayle’s righteous admonitions—and you’ll see that we blame the victim for poverty too. Men, especially men of color, are blamed for “abandoning” women and children—but not for the violence that drives women and children away.) Today most people recognize that women have a right—even a responsibility—to leave abusive men, and many individuals feel an impulse to help them, but we don’t yet recognize our responsibility as a society to rise to their aid: our duty as a society to safeguard the right of every woman to be free from bodily harm.
Our public attitude—damned if you don’t leave, damned if you do—is not simple hypocrisy. Two conflicting views come down to us from nineteenth-century debates, and we’ve never sorted them out. To radical women in the mid-nineteenth century, questions of marriage and divorce were, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it, “at the very foundation of all progress” on women’s rights.5 After all, as Stanton wrote in 1860 in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune: “We decide the whole question of slavery by settling the sacred rights of the individual. We assert that man cannot hold property in man, and reject the whole code of laws that conflicts with the self-evident truth of the assertion.”6 How then can man hold property in woman? Has woman no sacred rights as an individual?
As Stanton and her colleague Susan B. Anthony saw it, marriage was an institution devised by men, and backed by all the authority of church and state, to give husbands absolute authority over wives. Worse, no matter how “unfortunate or ill-assorted” the marriage, society and government compelled it to continue. Stanton believed, however, that marriage and divorce were private matters, not properly subject to civil or canon law, and should be transacted by simple contract. “There is one kind of marriage that has not been tried,” she said, “and that is a contract made by equal parties to lead an equal life, with equal restraints and privileges on either side.”7 Fundamental to Stanton’s “radical” view, of course, is the assumption (never shared by American law) that women and men are equal beings in the eyes of God and should enjoy equal rights and responsibilities in all things.
For women in the nineteenth century the catch was this: marriage made in heaven maintained on earth the rights and privileges of the husband, the man, as Stanton correctly said, and so did all other social institutions. Divorce might be the way out of domestic tyranny, but for most women it looked like a dead end, depriving them as it did at the time of their children, home, livelihood, reputation, and prospects. Consequently, more conservative advocates of women’s rights tried not to get women out of marriage but to protect them within it. Temperance leaders battled drunkenness, always considered a cause of brutality and violence, while moral reformers sought to curb male “animal” lust and to “improve” men with an infusion of female “purity.” More to the point, Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell campaigned in Massachusetts from 1879 to 1891 for legislation modeled on laws already passed in England in response to Frances Power Cobbe’s revelations about “wife-torture.” The new legislation provided legal separation (not divorce) and financial maintenance for wives whose husbands were convicted of assaulting them; but even that modest proposal, seen as an attack upon the family, failed.8
The same attitudes persist today, both within the family and outside it. Some battered women are as dedicated as any conservative congressman to keeping the family, their own family, together; they want only to stop the violence. Other battered women are ready to strike out for freedom and self-determination, for themselves and their kids. All these women, whether they struggle under the banner of Family Values, the flag of Woman’s Rights, or the colors of Women’s Liberation, need protection from violence, and institutional supports to help them.
In the public arena, “radical” feminists go on arguing for the rights of women, though we live in what conservatives wishfully call a “postfeminist age.” Never mind that for a pile of economic and social reasons the “traditional” family is as scarce these days as the blue whale. Never mind Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s observation that “A legislative act cannot make a unit of a divided family.”9 Policy makers and legislators backed by custom, the church, and “modern” psychology, and beholden to the far right, still try to keep “the family” alive. Consequently, our economic and social arrangements still impede a woman’s departure, especially if she has children. Some federal reimbursement programs require child welfare agencies to try to keep “families” intact; and although most such agencies now consider a woman and her children to be “a family,” some abused women may be pressured to enter counseling or mediation with their assailants, while their abused children may be left at his mercy, sometimes in his household. If a woman reports that her husband or boyfriend abuses the children, she may see them removed not only from his custody but from hers to be placed in a family of foster parents. If she and the kids set up their own household, they may get poorer, while the abusive husband (unless he is trapped in poverty himself) is likely to get relatively richer. And even the prospect of that supposedly inevitable financial decline, much trumpeted in the media, serves to intimidate the woman who considers setting out on her own.10 On the other hand, the battered woman who wants help to stop the violence while preserving her marriage and family may find the proffered alternatives—arrest, prosecution, shelter—of no use at all.
Nevertheless, today’s battered woman has options her sisters struggled in the last century and in this to win for her. She may not be formally married at all. If married, she can divorce, provided her religion and her pocketbook permit. She may get custody of her children, if she can afford the lawyers she’ll need to persuade a judge that a violent man is not fit to be a custodial parent. She can work, albeit for lower wages than a man doing the same job—that is, if she can find a job. She may even get some public assistance, though only for a short term. And she hears, as her nineteenth-century sister did not, the nagging question: “Why doesn’t she leave?”
The danger now is that we overestimate society’s changes. Implicit in the question, “Why doesn’t she leave?” is the assumption that social supports are already in place to help the woman who walks out: a shelter in every town, a cop on every beat eager to make that mandatory arrest, a judge in every courtroom passing out well-enforced restraining orders and packing batterers off to jail and effective re-education programs, legal services, social services, health care, child care, child support, affordable housing, convenient public transportation, a decent job free of sexual harassment, a living wage. The abused woman, wanting to leave, encouraged to think she will find help, yet finding only obstacles at every turn, may grow disheartened and doubt herself. If it’s supposed to be so easy, and it’s this hard, she must be doing something wrong. What seemed to be a social problem—judging by all the reports about “domestic violence” in the news—becomes a personal problem after all. For the abused woman, it’s just one more turn of the screw.
Public opinion, too, can easily turn backward—without even changing the dialogue. When we ask “Why doesn’t she leave?” do we mean to be helpful, encouraging, cognizant of her rights, and ready with our support? Or do we mean once again to blame her for her failure to avail herself of all the assistance we mistakenly think our society provides? Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell thought wife abuse would cease when women got the vote—because women would vote off the bench judges who failed to punish wife beaters.11 That didn’t work. The battered women’s movement has organized for more than twenty-five years against “domestic violence,” yet the violence continues. Could it be that individual women are to blame after all?
Or could it be rather that battered women play some indispensable part in this society that we’ve overlooked? Could it be that battered women have some function, some role or social utility we haven’t taken into account? Thus far in this book we’ve looked at the problem from the point of view of battered women—women who almost invariably ask for help. But perhaps we should look again from the point of view of “society”—if we can try for a moment to imagine that this many-headed abstraction has something like a point a view. Perhaps we should put a different question: What are battered women for?
Asking a different question puts a new light on the problem right away: battered women are for battering. The battered woman is a woman who may be beaten; she is a beatable woman. If you doubt that society views battered women as, by definition, “beatable,” then how do you explain the fact that we almost always put responsibility for woman beating on the woman? Why else would we probe her psyche to reveal the secret self within, yearning for abuse if not to set her apart as a beatable woman, unlike ourselves? In our society there are millions of these beatable women. Many of them live within “the family” which entitles only the “head” of the family to beat them. Many others live outside “the family”—in which case anyone may beat them who will. Many live and work in industries that rent or sell beatable women and children to the male “public”—prostitution, for example, and pornography. A few beatable women, like Hedda Nussbaum, become public figures whom everyone can assail.
Consider this story. In the early hours of March 25, 1990, a social club in the Bronx went up in flames and eighty-seven people died. New York City mayor David Dinkins called a press conference to discuss an important public policy issue raised by this disaster. The issue, he said, was licensing and inspection of private social clubs, like the one that incinerated its patrons. But there was another issue, an invisible issue, unmentioned by the mayor or the police or the press. It lurked between the lines of the press reports on the fire and its aftermath.
The arsonist was thirty-six-year-old Julio Gonzalez, a refugee who’d left Cuba ten years earlier for the Bronx. For most of the previous eight years he’d lived in the housing project apartment of forty-five-year-old Lidia Feliciano together with Feliciano’s three grown children and various other members of her extended family. Lidia Feliciano worked nights, keeping the cloakroom at the Happy Land Social Club. Two months before the fire, Lidia Feliciano accused Gonzalez of “making sexual advances” to her nineteen-year-old niece, Betsy Torres, who lived in the household. Feliciano threw Gonzalez out. But Gonzalez wouldn’t go away. A few days before the fire he tracked Feliciano to a beauty shop, and there he publicly swore to “love” her forever. Then he showed up at the Happy Land Social Club, still vowing his undying love. But he was drunk. Feliciano sent him away. He picked fights with patrons. It took a bouncer to hustle him out the door. He got some gasoline and returned to burn the place down.12
This is a typical story of “domestic violence”: a typical story of a typical abusive man who will not let “his” woman go. Predictably, reporters told it in the language of love. New York’s Newsday called this a “Love Story” that “Ends in Hate”—“an eight-year love story” that “erupted in jealousy, rage and death.” The “love” in question, according to all the papers, was the love of “young” Julio Gonzalez for “older woman” Lidia Feliciano. And the jealousy and rage were hers, prompted by Gonzalez’s “attentions” to her niece. Feliciano “rejected” him. She “turned him down.” She “threw him out.”13 Columnist Jimmy Breslin got the inside word from a guy named Popo, one of Julio Gonzalez’s drinking buddies, that Lidia Feliciano “dominated him” and “got him mad.” “She went out to the club and made him stay home,” Popo said. (The club, of course, was where she worked, checking coats.) Another of Breslin’s informants, a guy named Jesus, said: “She never should have told him to go away when he came to the club.” According to Breslin, Lidia Feliciano was so clearly in the wrong, so clearly asking for trouble, that “people in the Bronx” wondered why Gonzalez hadn’t just borrowed a gun and shot her.14
Lidia Feliciano compounded her sins by being one of only five people to survive Julio Gonzalez’s bonfire at the Happy Land Social Club. (Betsy Torres, the niece she had tried to protect from Julio Gonzalez, was killed.) Like the newspapers, many of Feliciano’s neighbors blamed her for the fire, blamed her for the eighty-seven lives lost, blamed her for surviving. Some told her that she shouldn’t have left the burning building. To save her from her friends and neighbors, the police had to move Lidia Feliciano and her children out of the apartment she had lived in for twenty years and place her under special protection.15
Why, when a man burns down a building, killing eighty-seven people, does a woman become the scapegoat of the neighborhood? Isn’t the answer clear? Lidia Feliciano failed miserably to do her duty: to absorb the violence of the man who claimed her, and by so doing to keep her neighbors safe. Instead she turned him out and unleashed his violence on the whole community.
Years ago Simone de Beauvoir reminded us that some women are meant to be “sewers,” safeguarding the “wholesomeness” of lovelier parts of society. “It has often been remarked,” she wrote in The Second Sex, “that the necessity exists of sacrificing one part of the female sex in order to save the other and prevent worse troubles.” She was thinking particularly of prostitutes, a caste of “shameless women” who make it possible for “honest women” to claim respect. “The prostitute is a scapegoat,” she wrote. “Man vents his turpitude upon her and rejects her.”16 In just the same way the battered woman is a scapegoat. Man vents his violence upon her and blames her for it. And so do we. How else can we explain this curious fact: that when a man commits an act of unspeakable violence, public blame falls upon the woman who failed to prevent it?
This, then, is what battered women are for. Like prostitutes (who commonly are battered women themselves), battered women serve to drain away excess male violence and assaultive sexuality. Admittedly, I employ here a peculiar theory of social relations based on the notion that male violence and sexuality well up of their own accord, like floodwaters, and must find an outlet lest they drown us all. This hydraulic theory of human behavior is perhaps a projection onto social life of the mechanics of the male orgasm. Whatever its origins, it has been a popular theory for at least a century, probably because it gives men an excuse for excess, positing an inexplicable and uncontrollable force to blame for the violence and sexuality that are, in fact, simply behaviors men choose to act out. Hydraulics provided de Beauvoir with a theory of social relations that explained the social utility of prostitutes. And the theory serves as well for battered women who, like prostitutes, must be sacrificed to preserve the “family” and “society.”
No wonder then that social institutions and policy makers are so reluctant to put a stop to either prostitution or battering. Imagine if prostitution were stopped. Where would all those men go with their kinks and aberrations and “needs”? And if battery were stopped? In this country, it is said, a man beats up a woman every twelve seconds. That’s 7,200 outbursts of violence every day, 50,400 every week, 2,620,800 every year. If battering were stopped, where would all those men go with their obsessions and jealousy and rage and despair? With all that “love”?
The potential consequences of stopping battery are terrible to think about. Perhaps that’s why we’ve gone on for so long saying we disapprove of “domestic violence,” yet blaming the victim whenever it occurs. But the consequences of battery are terrible as well: the pain and suffering, the lives lost, the time and resources and human potential squandered; the way it spills over into our streets, killing bystanders, and into the next generation, wounding the future. Four more women every day, dead. We could make it stop.
We might make a start by passing the Equal Rights Amendment, which has been stuck in congressional committee ever since it failed ratification in 1982. (It has been before Congress since 1921.) Amending the U.S. Constitution to provide equal rights for women won’t stay the hand of the batterer, but it will affirm the constitutional, philosophical, and moral underpinnings of woman’s right to be free from bodily harm. At the moment, women seem to have no such right, either in popular sentiment or under the law as it is currently enforced. In fact, as a social contract, the Constitution does not even include women as citizens. More than a century ago John Stuart Mill argued: “That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”17 The principle of perfect equality was not adopted in Mill’s time because, as he observed, “the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.”18 It has not been adopted in our own time for much the same reason. Yet Mill’s argument still holds.
As things stand now, because neither our sentiments nor our laws as they are currently enforced recognize freedom from bodily harm as a fundamental right for women, we judge instances of bodily harm to women case by case, and we assess the victim’s “rights” in the matter on the basis of her status or her character or her behavior. We condemn the “bad” victim, like Hedda Nussbaum or Lidia Feliciano, and occasionally we pity the “good” victim, but fundamental principles and human rights do not come in to our calculations. It was John Stuart Mill again who pointed out our bad habit of paying lip service to the principle of individual freedom. “If the principle is true,” he wrote, “we ought to act as if we believed it.”19
It is now long past time to admit that the right to be free from bodily harm, the right that belongs to all men under the Constitution belongs to all women as well. A fundamental human right. Not contingent upon the status, character, or behavior of the individual. That means that no woman anywhere should be subjected to bodily harm at any time for any reason. Today, given our immense burden of sexism and racism and class bias, our tendency to blame victims and to whitewash violence in the language of love, the only way to combat violence against women is to acknowledge this fundamental right of every woman—every “masochist,” every “narcissist,” every neglectful and abusive and “unfit” mother, every prostitute and junkie and drunk, every mother of an “illegitimate” child, every “bimbo,” every “slut,” every “bitch” and “fox” and “whore” and “cunt” and “piece of trash.” Women are just women, after all: no better than we should be, and often a good deal worse. But rights do not have to be earned. Human rights, by definition, are ours by virtue of our humanity.
It’s true that men often seem to have trouble recognizing that women too are human beings. Former Representative Patricia Schroeder points out that our government, so keen to defend human rights around the world, most often views oppression of women in other countries not as a violation of human rights but as “custom” or “tradition”—another quaint example of “cultural difference.”20 And individual women everywhere face that blindness every day—the blindness of men who simply can not see that women are human beings too. Sarah, for example, was held captive by a pimp when she was twelve years old and used in prostitution; her “clients” were New York City businessmen. “I was a little kid,” she says, “with black eyes and bruises all over my body, crying in pain and fear, sometimes bleeding, but it didn’t seem to diminish the pleasure of the johns one bit. Nobody ever complained or offered to help me or even seemed to notice that maybe I wasn’t totally happy to be doing what I was doing.”21 Nevertheless, despite this blindness, most men and women today would grant in principle at least that women are human beings. And as Mill said, if the principle is true, then we ought to act as if we believed it.
Institutional Change
As we’ve seen, most localities and states proved unwilling or unable to safeguard women and to provide adequate redress for crimes of violence against them. Consequently, battered women and their advocates pressed Congress to pass federal legislation. The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) was enacted as part of an omnibus Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1984. FVPSA authorized funding (4.5 million dollars in the first year) for community-based programs; and for a decade it remained the only federal funding stream supporting such work. Advocates pushed for more, and in 1994 Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). (Ironically, the legislation did not pass in its own right but as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, an act replete with right-wing law and order provisions that battered women’s advocates would oppose. Pressing for the criminal justice system to do its job, battered women had unwittingly become part of a new onslaught of law and order measures that cut back prisoners’ rights and popularized the death penalty.) Among other things, VAWA established federal penalties for interstate stalking and domestic violence. It called for states and Native American tribes to enforce restraining orders issued in other states. It offered incentives—in the form of sizable S.T.O.P. (Services, Training, Officers, and Prosecutors) grants—to states and tribes to “collaborate” with battered women’s programs to “restructure” the criminal justice response to violence against women, including “domestic violence” and sexual assault, its predominant forms. The multimillion dollar state block grants were cut in four equal pieces: law enforcement, prosecution, victim services, and discretionary funds. In 1996 Congress appropriated 130 million dollars to continue the effort, including 28 million dollars for programs to encourage arrest of batterers and 46 million for community oriented policing to combat “domestic violence.” Appropriations increased each year, tied to that crucial word: “collaboration.” To get a grant, a criminal justice agency was supposed to partner with a local shelter or domestic violence program; and when they sat down together, the criminal justice representatives knew that federal money was on the table only because these advocates, these unfunded, unappreciated, perennial outsiders and critics with whom they were now expected to cooperate, had wrung it from Congress.
Earlier, in 1992, Congress had appropriated money to establish several national resource centers to gather and disseminate information about various aspects of “domestic violence.” Consequently, when VAWA funding first began to flow to the states, the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (a project of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence) and three special-issue resource centers were already in place to guide advocates and criminal justice agencies alike in interpreting the act and devising effective collaborative projects. In addition, the staff of the Violence Against Women Office of the Department of Justice that administered and provided technical assistance for S.T.O.P. grants to states was determined to see the act serve the interests of battered women and their children, and not merely the interests of the criminal justice system that had failed them for so long. By 1998 the Stop Violence Against Women Technical Assistance Project had compiled a thick file of innovative programs—from the Philadelphia Prosecutor’s Office Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit to the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department—that could be adapted to other communities.22 Several states had already reformed their response to battering thanks to the pressure of local issues: Connecticut turned around after Tracey Thurman won her lawsuit against the Town of Torrington and its police department, Massachusetts after incisive analysis in the Boston Globe of the state’s rising tide of femicide. Now other states came around. In mandated collaboration wary strangers—police, prosecutors, and advocates—tried to find common ground.
But by far the most important aspect of VAWA is this: It asserts that “all persons within the United States shall have the right to be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender.” Thus the federal government recognized at last the civil right of women to be free from gender-motivated violence and established a federal civil rights remedy at law. A quarter-century and the work of thousands of women and many men, most of them unpaid, produced this sea change: The United States recognizes, as a matter of national public policy, that violence against women is wrong, and that states and local communities have a responsibility to end it.
Still there are problems with the act and its implementation. Since 50 percent of funding goes to the criminal justice system and only 25 percent is designated for victim services, advocates’ workload expands out of all proportion to the money available to pay for it. Still underpaid and stretched thin, they must grapple with the schizophrenic new job of collaborating with “the system” while advocating for women in conflict with it. On the other hand, the criminal justice system in many localities invents ingenious new ways to make women pay for the laws and federal funds meant to provide them safety and justice. With millions in hand to encourage arrest and prosecution, police arrest women in growing numbers; prosecutors and judges send battered women to batterers’ re-education groups and order the deportation of immigrant battered women arrested for assaulting their husbands. Here is proof once again, if any more were needed, that violence against women spews from misogyny and sex discrimination. VAWA itself, now in the last year of its five-year funding cycle, languishes in the do-nothing 106th Republican Congress; unless reauthorized, it will die in October 2000—and with it many women’s antiviolence programs all across the country. VAWA is also under attack in the courts: the civil rights provision challenged as unconstitutional. On January 11, 2000, the Supreme Court heard the case (Brzonkala v. Morrison) that could well change national policy back again and demolish the hard-won, flimsy “civil right” of women.
Two years after passing VAWA, Congress passed another major piece of legislation that threatened to snatch a lifeline from battered women and abandon them to greater danger. On August 22, 1996, President Clinton, who had spoken too loosely of “ending welfare as we know it,” signed into law The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. (The act’s title is a small masterpiece of Orwellian Newspeak.) This act eliminated open-ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program that despite its many faults had temporarily supported countless battered women in transition, and in its place created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a program of block grants to enable states to offer time-limited cash assistance. For the first time in history, government stamped an expiration date on “need.” The act also called for cuts in child care, the Food Stamp Program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for children, and benefits for legal immigrants; modification of child nutrition programs; and reduction of Social Services block grants. Supporters predicted the act would save 54½ million dollars over six years. Critics accused the government of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Under TANF the battered women formerly aided by AFDC would have about two years to get jobs and stop being “needy.”
This act differed from VAWA in several important respects. First, it was passed hurriedly, without due consideration. Secondly, it put control of grants in the hands of the states, producing fifty different versions of TANF instead of the coherent state antiviolence programs developed under the federal mandates of VAWA. Thirdly, it gave little consideration to the safety of battered women receiving public assistance. What about the battered woman so afraid for her life that she can’t cooperate with child support regulators or attend a job training program? States can elect a Family Violence Option, excusing battered women from the law’s tight time constraints; but not all states have done so, and in any case advocates for battered women rightfully resent their being singled out once again as a separate more “helpless” group, unlike other women. Worse, the act aims to achieve a conservative “moral” agenda. It aims to reduce teen pregnancy (as if teenaged girls had babies just to get on the dole) and to keep families together regardless of the violence a woman and her children might suffer.
Despite the shallow “morality” of its goals, welfare “reform” is touted as a success, judging by the number of former welfare recipients no longer on the rolls. Where these people have gone and how they are doing no one in government seems to know or care. Many news stories have reported that women move into work only to get stuck in low-wage jobs. One study found that 29 percent of women who left welfare between 1995 and 1997 earn less than $5.75 an hour while 37 percent earn less than $6.15.23 By 1997 the number of families in “extreme poverty”—that is, below one-half the designated poverty line—was up by nearly half a million with single-mother families hardest hit because of the loss of food stamps.24
Ironically, in the shadow of this ill considered law, the connections between poverty and violence are thrown into high relief. Advocates still working for the safety of battered women under the disparate rules of welfare reform draw into coalition with other advocates for children, the poor, people of color, and immigrants. They come together to talk of social problems, profound and damning, and of economic justice for all. Battered women’s advocates, long constrained to address the immediate safety needs of battered women, now of necessity lift their eyes again to the bigger picture—to sex and race discrimination and the status of women, to poverty and exploitation, to the great divide between rich and poor. They remember that from the start the battered women’s movement set two goals: safety for women and social change.
R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, directors of the Institute for the Study of Violence at the University of Wales, pointed out in another context that different cultures respond to social problems in terms of their longstanding habits of mind. Britain, for example, brings its tradition of leftist and Labour politics to bear on the social problem of battery; it emphasizes the role of the state in creating the material conditions that enable women to escape male violence and become independent. Help for battered women comes in the practical form of refuge, housing, social and health services, adequate welfare benefits, child care, and jobs. The United States, on the other hand, emphasizes the individual, the “politics of the mind,” and the politics of law and order.25
In the United States, “domestic violence” is addressed in terms of the personal psychology of individual victims and (far less often) perpetrators. “Domestic violence” is a “social” problem only in the sense that it affects an aggregate of those supposedly aberrant individuals. Hence, all that research into the pathology of victims, “mediators” in courtrooms, “conflict resolution” training for cops, support groups for victims and assailants alike, endless self-help books for women, interminable talk of “self-esteem,” and so on. When problems long neglected threaten to overwhelm us, we send in the cops, as though imprisoning aberrant individuals in sufficient numbers will achieve social justice. The 1994 Violence Against Women Act is a case in point—necessary and long overdue, yet essentially a law enforcement fix for a social problem eradicable only by profound changes in the status of women and in the material conditions of women’s lives. In effect, VAWA marks the culmination of the first phase of work begun twenty-five years ago by battered women: to provide safety for victims by establishing shelters and services and by compelling the criminal justice system to do its job. But advocates always knew that shelters and criminal justice served only a small fraction of America’s battered women, and that criminal justice was more likely to harm than help them. Advocates always thought of the other battered women, the ones they didn’t see; and for all women, they always had more in mind. They always held a vision of equality and justice—civil and criminal justice, economic justice, social justice—for us all.
If we are to make progress against battering and child abuse, we must understand that neither the problems nor the solutions lie in the individual psyche, and that the material conditions necessary for women to become free and equal and independent will not be found in our heads. Nor in the long run will they be found in our courtrooms and jails. When the material conditions of women’s lives change—when women have access to affordable housing, child care, health care, adequate welfare benefits, job training, and jobs that pay a living wage—most women can free themselves and their children from violence. But for that to happen, sex discrimination must end.
Keeping in mind that no institutional change can “save” women and children set up by economic dependence and poverty, real or threatened, to be easy marks for male violence, we must change the way our institutions operate, to combat male violence and to aid women and children still victimized. Susan Schechter points out that almost all activist/researchers in the last two decades have identified as a primary source of the “continual epidemic” of battering and child abuse “the failure of institutions to intervene properly.” She writes:
In the last fifteen years of testimony before Congress and state legislatures, in newspaper accounts, in proposals to foundations and state agencies, the same problems have been identified again and again: judges fail to hold offenders accountable or to take victim’s fears seriously, doctors patch wounds and send women back to their assailants, clergy tell women to try harder, courts issue visitation orders requiring children to see fathers who sexually assault them. The result of this institutional response is an almost guaranteed escalation of assaults. Other outcomes are equally predictable and tragic: more injuries, more deaths, more runaways, increased substance abuse, psychiatric hospitalizations and suicide attempts among women and children.26
To change things, we must see to it that those who staff our institutions are schooled in the causes and consequences of violence against women and children and trained to intervene effectively. What’s more, we must see to it that all our community institutions change, for piecemeal change may be worse than no change at all. If police arrest offenders and judges release them without punishment, for example, the result is offenders who feel licensed by the court to carry on, and to scoff at the police as well. If social workers or journalists encourage women to take the dangerous step of running from batterers and no shelter is available, the result is homeless women doubly endangered. If judges issue restraining orders but police do not enforce them, the result is often another headline femicide: “Murdered Wife Had Protection Order.”
Sometimes, with the best intentions, institutions work at cross purposes and do more harm than good. Social workers charged with child protection, for example, may place abused children in foster care, heedless of the fact that their battered mother would protect herself and them if the batterer were held to account for his violence. On the other hand, some judges, determined to keep the nuclear family intact, may pressure battered women into marital counseling, mediation, or child custody and visitation arrangements that are debilitating and profoundly dangerous to the women and their children. For their part, women who fear that they will lose their children or be bound into some continuing legal relationship with the offender may not report child abuse or even seek help themselves.
To avoid such mistakes, and to plan an effective, coordinated community program, Schechter suggests that every institution establish “policies, standards, training programs and practices” to meet one set of goals:
1. to identify and respond sensitively to every victim in the family;
2. to protect and empower abused women so that they in turn may protect their children;
3. to make it safe for women and children to seek help;
4. to stop further harm by holding offenders, rather than their victims, accountable for maltreatment;
5. to ensure that every agency in the community adheres to these standards and works cooperatively to achieve them.27
To plan a coordinated community program, members of every community agency, public and private, must sit down together. That includes not just police and prosecutors and battered women’s advocates, but agencies and institutions that may think they have no role to play in helping battered women: the housing authority, for example, the vocational school, the credit union. They must build in to their design specific ways to monitor one another’s work, collaborate on reviewing and revising programs, hold one another accountable for ineffective policies and practices, provide mutual support, and work to overcome institutionalized sexism, racism, and homophobia. Ideally, they should hire a full-time coordinator to monitor and promote their continued collaboration. Every aspect of the coordinated community program should aim to protect victims, to hold offenders accountable, and to recognize that these are only the first steps toward securing economic and social justice for women.
The Criminal Justice System
In 1980, with the leadership of feminist organizers, the city of Duluth, Minnesota, developed a Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) (218-722-2781). The DAIP coordinates the response to domestic abuse cases of battered women’s service providers, mental health agencies, and the criminal justice system, including police, sheriff, jail, prosecutors, civil and criminal court judges, and probation officers. The DAIP also provides nonviolence classes for batterers, education groups for battered women, and a center for supervised child visitation with the noncustodial parent. The project works in close cooperation with the Women’s Coalition (the local battered women’s shelter), which provides emergency housing, support groups, and court advocacy for battered women, and with the Women’s Transitional Housing Program, which provides long-term, low-rent housing and resources for child care and job training. The goal of every segment of this coordinated effort is to make women and children safe and hold offenders accountable for their crimes.
In almost twenty years of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, approximately one in twenty men living in the Duluth area (population 150,000) has been ordered by civil or criminal court to attend the twenty-six-week nonviolence program designed and conducted by profeminist women and men. The program has provided safety for thousands of women and children, although the number of men using violence has not decreased. Men who batter often turn on the charm to snare another victim and are arrested again and again for assaulting a succession of women; yet 80 percent of women who have used DAIP report five years later that they are living free of violence, most no longer living with the man who assaulted them. Duluth also maintains, year after year, a low rate of domestic homicide.28 The Duluth coordinated community response has become a model for other communities.
What can the criminal justice system do? Police departments, prosecutor’s offices, courts, and probation/parole agencies can designate staff members with special expertise to handle domestic assault cases and ensure that these employees are well trained. They can adopt a consistent policy of arresting primary offenders and handing out serious consequences. Given limited resources, police policy makers can reorder their arrest priorities, recognizing that domestic assault, the leading cause of injury to women, is far more serious, violent, dangerous, and costly to the victim and the public than the petty thefts, car thefts, burglaries, and minor drug use offenses that typically engage police attention. Police officers can be required to make warrantless arrests of primary offenders on probable cause in domestic assaults and to hold primary offenders overnight for arraignment; they can be shielded from civil liability for wrongful arrest in such cases. Police can computerize and review records of domestic calls so that they can easily identify repeat offenders.
On their own initiative, prosecutors can prosecute men arrested for domestic assault. Judges can hand down meaningful sentences. It is their job, not the battered woman’s, to prosecute and punish the criminal, although criminal justice personnel at all levels must never disregard the victim’s safety, her assessment of the offender, her wishes, and the course of action that best serves her needs. Prosecutors can hire salaried women’s advocates (and translators if necessary) to advise battered women of their rights and help them negotiate the system. Courts can make legal counsel available to battered women—without charge to poor women. Cooperating with battered women’s programs, prosecutors and courts can establish support and educational groups for victims of domestic assault.
Courts can make it easy and safe for battered women to get restraining orders, and police can enforce them by seeking out and arresting violators. They can and should confiscate the guns of all men subject to restraining orders or convicted of domestic assault. Records of restraining orders can be computerized and centralized, especially in large cities, to avoid the all too common situation in which a judge, having no knowledge that the defendant is in violation of a valid restraining order, releases him to assault again and perhaps to kill. Civil court judges can review the criminal court records of men who appear before them in cases in which battering is alleged, including proceedings for separation and divorce, child custody, and child support. Police and judges can regard violation of a restraining order as a very serious offense, punishable by imprisonment. They can regard a man who commits an assault in violation of a restraining order as dangerous; and a judge can set bail accordingly or refuse it. Knowing that between one-half and three-fourths of all murder-suicides are committed by battering men,29 courts can take at his word any man who threatens to harm or kill his present or former partner and/or himself; and prosecutors and judges can recognize that many attacks currently charged as “assault” are in fact failed murder attempts. (Charging with assault or battery a man who has slashed, stabbed, shot, clubbed, run over with a car, or doused with gasoline and set fire to a woman—as happens again and again in our courts—is an invitation to him to try again.) The court can also recognize that such a man presents a danger to himself and to the public at large.
Judges can remove batterers from their homes and order them to stay away so that women and children need not flee. In sentencing batterers, they can hand down an effective combination of sanctions and rehabilitation. Sanctions can include finding the offender guilty, ordering him to make restitution, limiting or revoking his visitation privileges, or sending him to jail. Rehabilitation can include substance abuse rehabilitation and programs, batterers’ nonviolence education (not to be confused with fruitless “anger management”), and parenting education. Judges can scrupulously avoid making some common errors, such as considering rehabilitation a substitute for sanctions, sending victims of abuse into mediation or counseling with their assailants, or letting their own biases in favor of the nuclear family blind them to the dangers women and children face.
Because so many batterers assault again and again, attacking either the same woman or a number of women in sequence, legislators and judges can hand down heavier penalties for repeat offenders. That, however, will bring sentencing judges up against the fact that nowhere in the United States is there enough jail space for perpetrators of domestic assault. The answer is not more jails and prisons in a country that already has too many, but a reordering of priorities in assigning jail time. State governors, legislators, judges, and state and local penal officials can recognize that assaultive men, particularly repeat offenders, are far more dangerous to individual victims and to the public at large than most of the nonviolent offenders who currently crowd our jails and prisons and who are good candidates for alternative sentencing.
All those involved in determining visitation arrangements can think first of the safety of mother and children. When judges are to decide child custody or visitation, they can acknowledge that their customary preference for joint custody is not in the best interests of mother or children, for forcing a woman to negotiate continually with her assailant puts her in a dangerous, inherently unequal position. And children, trapped between parents in perpetual conflict, are bound both to suffer and to learn firsthand about the efficacy of physical violence.30 In custody proceedings today, judges can establish as a matter of policy that when battering is involved, the best interest of the child is a presumption against joint custody and against custody for the battering man. When judges award custody to an abused woman they can give her some help, ranging from child support payments to parenting education. Before granting visitation rights to offending fathers, judges can encourage the establishment of a community visitation center where visits can take place under professional supervision and a mother need never encounter the battering father.
The governors of every state can review the cases of women currently imprisoned for assaulting or killing a man.31 They will find, in a great many cases, that the degree of homicide charged was greater than the facts of the homicide would support; that the homicide followed a long history of abuse about which the jury was permitted to hear nothing; that legitimate claims of self-defense were disallowed either by the court or by the woman’s own attorney; that expert testimony about battering was wrongfully excluded; or that the sentence given was so long in comparison to the sentences assigned men who committed comparable homicides as to raise at least the suspicion of gender bias, not to mention cruel and unusual punishment. Any open-minded review will find hundreds of women now in state prisons who deserve immediate clemency if not reparations.
Adopting new policies is often the easiest part of making change; getting officials to carry them out may be harder. We’ve seen that police chiefs have had to bring disciplinary action against their officers to make them arrest batterers or refrain from arresting the victimized woman as well. Similarly, some state governors have had to take action to compel criminal justice personnel to comply with state abuse prevention laws.32 But review procedures can be built in to new policies to hold accountable those who are charged with carrying them out. In addition, police, prosecutors, judges, and all other personnel in the criminal justice system who deal with domestic assault can enlist battered women’s advocates to help design and present in-service training programs on battering and child abuse. Information on battery, sexual assault, and child abuse can be made a significant part of police training, law school education, and the continuing education programs of bar associations, police, and judicial organizations. Criminal justice professionals at every level can help to inform their colleagues and reform their practices, as the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has done in establishing a Family Violence Department to disseminate information to the profession.
Today most women represent themselves in court, while their husbands, who often control the couple’s money, are likely to appear with lawyers. A violent man facing charges for battery or violation of a restraining order is assigned a lawyer at public expense if he can’t afford one, but the woman who complains against him is on her own. Yet, without lawyers, women are less likely to get orders of protection, and the orders they get are less likely to contain all the provisions they’re entitled to, putting them and their children at a disadvantage in subsequent visitation, custody, and divorce proceedings. Noting these inequities in a report to the Ford Foundation on the state of legal reform for battered women, law professor Elizabeth M. Schneider writes that despite an “explosion of legal reform activity around the country … there are virtually no lawyers available to assist battered women to navigate the … systems that have been established.”33 Although women now have remedies for battery “on the books,” Schneider concludes that “the lack of skilled legal representation effectively discriminates against battered women.”34 In the absence of lawyers, lay advocates have long provided support and advice for battered women, run interference with the criminal justice system, instigated legal reforms, and monitored compliance—all this usually without formal training or pay. Today VAWA provides some federal money for paralegal training for lay advocates, legal services for battered women, and paid lawyers and lay advocates for battered women’s shelters and programs; but much more is needed. Law schools, bar associations, and pro bono lawyers can encourage and help in this work.
For more ideas, anyone can turn to the Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody (800-527-3223) for the directory of “Emerging Programs for Battered Mothers and Their Children” prepared under the auspices of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Or contact the Battered Women’s Justice Project (800-903-0111), a national resource center that provides training, technical assistance, and other resources pertaining to criminal and civil justice. Judges in particular will want to contact the Family Violence Prevention Fund (415-252-8900); their Judicial Education Project offers judges training curricula on domestic violence cases and an interactive CD-ROM.
The Health Care System
Most battered women never call the police or go to court or flee to a women’s shelter, but battered women in great numbers visit doctors and hospitals—often repeatedly—for treatment of injuries and other stress-related illnesses, both their own and those of their children. Most doctors fail to recognize these women as victims of violence—a blindness that in itself is harmful to battered women. In 1999, seven years after the American Medical Association officially announced a “campaign” on the issue, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that fewer than one in ten primary care physicians routinely screened patients for domestic abuse.35 Since most aid to battered women is still given outside professional systems, most health care providers don’t understand the need to screen all women for abuse, can’t think of what to ask them, and wouldn’t know what to do with their answers anyway.
What can the health care system do? Recognizing that “domestic violence” is a problem of both personal and public health, it could use its frontline position to intervene and to prevent violence. The American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs recommended in 1992 that physicians routinely screen all female patients to identify victims of violence; that they “validate” the patient’s experience by discussing with her the seriousness of victimization and its possible consequences; that they accurately record the patient’s history of victimization; that they promptly refer patients to appropriate resources for victims of violence; that training on interviewing techniques, risk assessment, safety planning, and procedures for linking to resources be incorporated into undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education programs; that the AMA disseminate protocols for identifying and treating violence victims; and that the AMA launch “a campaign to alert the health care community to the widespread prevalence of violence against women.”36 At the same time JAMA devoted an issue to violence against women. The AMA’s campaign to educate its members and reform health care practices continues and can be intensified. The AMA can push for universal screening of patients for domestic violence, bearing in mind that screening is only the first step to appropriate treatment, referrals, and follow-up care. It can help to devise reporting codes specific to domestic violence, thereby assuring more accurate documentation of its incidence and costs. It can also help to devise financial and other incentives to give providers the extra push they seem to need to take an interest in battered women. It can work to ensure that domestic violence protocols become essential to accreditation through the National Commission for Quality Assurance and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals.
Similarly, the Nursing Network on Violence Against Women International and the International Association of Forensic Nurses (nurses were the first health care providers to organize on this issue) can intensify their efforts in education, training, and evidence collection. They can encourage and expand the work of SANEs (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners), trained to conduct quick, sensitive, and discreet examinations that effectively gather evidence without retraumatizing the victim. These and other organizations of health care professionals can help to change social norms by doing research and disseminating information on violence and prevention to the public and the media, and by supporting local antiviolence initiatives and efforts to reduce the number of guns in America. Health care facilities and organizations can initiate or join a coordinated response within the larger community, as the American Medical Association did when it collaborated with the American Bar Association and the National Conference of Family and Juvenile Court Judges to organize local networks of health and justice professionals to address the problem of violence. Colleges and universities that offer degrees in medicine, nursing, social work, psychology, and pastoral care can require education about male violence, battering, sexual assault, and child abuse in their standard curricula. Public health workers, visiting nurses, paramedics, ambulance drivers, substance abuse counselors, and all currently licensed health professionals—especially those in emergency care, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, internal medicine, family practice, and psychiatry—can undertake further education and training on battering and child abuse. Such training can be included in continuing education courses required for relicensing. All health care facilities—particularly community clinics and substance abuse programs—can establish family violence screening procedures for all patients, and protocols to treat domestic assault victims and refer them to other services; and supervisors can train their staffs to respond.
Although battering is a social problem and not primarily a mental health issue, therapists can play an important role in helping women survivors of violence who suffer from acute stress or chronic post-traumatic stress symptomatology. Most battered women need material assistance and emotional support, not therapy, and they can find that empowering help within the battered women’s movement in peer support groups, mutual service, and political action; but because many victims of battering and sexual assault will consult them, mental health professionals should prepare themselves to offer support, validation, safety planning, referrals to community resources, and appropriate counseling. Before counseling couples, therapists can find out whether the man is violent and, if so, refer both parties to other separate and appropriate services and help the woman make temporary safety plans.
As often as not, woman abuse and child abuse occur in the same household. Women must be able to bring their abused children to health care facilities for treatment without fear that they will lose them to the authorities. To that end, every emergency facility can provide a battered woman’s advocate on staff or on call from a battered women’s program in the community. In cases of suspected child abuse, the advocate can help evaluate what’s going on in the household and help mother and child plan for their safety. A model program is Advocacy for Women and Kids in Emergencies (AWAKE) at Children’s Hospital in Boston (617-355-4760), the first program based in a pediatric hospital to intervene and advocate for battered women. AWAKE offers a range of supportive services, including telephone and in-person counseling, help in finding emergency shelter and housing and in going to court, referrals for legal and medical care, and support groups for battered women and for children who have witnessed abuse or suffered it. AWAKE also offers consultation and training to health care professionals on many aspects of identifying and treating domestic assault victims, and it helps other organizations to establish similar programs.
Every emergency health care facility and the offices of gynecologists, obstetricians, pediatricians, family practitioners, and therapists can display and distribute information on battered women’s rights and services in the local community. (At one hospital trained doctors and nurses wear badges that read: “It’s O.K. to talk to me about domestic violence.”) Doctors and nurses can learn about community services, by visiting them if possible, and be prepared to refer their patients accordingly. Scrupulous physicians and therapists will avoid sending an abused woman to marital counseling with her assailant, or masking her real pain and fears with painkillers or tranquilizers.
Today health care professionals can get help to organize a response to domestic assault in their own practice, health care facility, or community, thanks to the Health Resource Center on Domestic Violence, a project of the Family Violence Prevention Fund. In 1992 the FVPF and the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence designed a model program to strengthen a hospital’s response to domestic violence; since then the program has been tested and refined in more than one hundred hospitals and clinics. The approach and materials, applicable to an HMO, hospital, clinic, or group practice, enable the staff of a health care facility to respond to battering in an effective, comprehensive way—with screening, documentation, intervention, safety planning, treatment, and referrals. In 1999, FVPF announced national “domestic violence” screening guidelines, developed with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Among the materials FVPF distributes is the brochure, “Best Practices: Innovative Domestic Violence Programs in Health Care Settings,” an inspiring list of model programs—some of them started by a single concerned nurse or doctor. FVPF also distributes postcards about the issue suitable for any woman to send to her own doctor. As patients, we can insist that our own health care providers screen women for abuse and support abused women with information, referrals, and follow-up care. We can tell our doctors how to get more information, or put information into their hands. Call 1-888-RX-ABUSE or see FVPF’s comprehensive web site: www.fvpf.org.
Child Protective Services
Many men who batter women batter children as well. Researchers estimate that in about half the households where women are abused, their children are abused too.37 Consequently, child welfare services and domestic violence programs often work with the same families. Having different histories and purposes, however, the two services often have worked at cross purposes. The child welfare system grew out of a movement at the turn of the last century against cruelty to children. The Social Security Act of 1930 first authorized federal child welfare services; and federal statutes passed since 1974 regulate the current child protective system, embedded in state governments. Its mission is to investigate complaints of child neglect and abuse, offer services to families, and remove children in cases of serious risk. Historically, the child welfare system interpreted its task of helping “families” as a directive to keep the nuclear family intact. Often it overlooked wife abuse and labeled the victim a “neglectful mother” or charged her with “failure to protect” her children. It removed children from mothers who would have protected and cared for them had they been given help to escape a violent man. The battered women’s movement, on the other hand, began as an independent, grass-roots movement in the 1970s devoted to providing safety for women. Although advocates provided safety for children as well, child welfare workers distrusted the movement’s focus on adult women victims. Child welfare workers also accused battered women’s advocates of being slow to deal with child abuse and neglect committed by women. Today even routine procedures often conflict, when, for example, child welfare workers are required to disclose to a battering spouse information advocates for the battered woman would keep confidential for her safety. Only recently have the two systems, child protective services and battered women’s victim services, realized that they must cooperate to aid women and children alike. And to be truly effective, they must work with other programs and agencies as part of a collaborative community effort.
One of the most effective programs, and a model for others, is the Massachusetts Department of Social Services Domestic Violence Unit. Developed during the past ten years, the program is the nation’s first systemwide effort to bring the experience of domestic violence workers to bear on the work of child protective services. The Domestic Violence Unit offers consultation and support to DSS caseworkers handling child abuse and neglect cases involving domestic abuse, and it provides safety planning and other direct services to battered mothers. (Of 22,000 DSS cases in 1994, 48 percent were found to involve domestic violence.) The program also uses interagency teams, including DSS staff, battered women’s advocates, batterers’ intervention program providers, police, court personnel, hospital staff, and visitation supervisors. It reaches out to other agencies and conducts training on the overlap between child abuse and woman abuse. The program has acknowledged weaknesses: it hasn’t integrated domestic violence workers into the court process, for one. But it has increased recognition of battering, stimulated cooperation among agencies, and reduced unnecessary placement of children in foster homes and institutions.38
Individual child protective workers can educate themselves about battering during their professional training. They can seek in-service training about battering and marital rape and urge their agency to add battered women’s advocates to the staff. They can screen all clients for domestic violence and refer battered women to local shelters and services. They can confer with battered women clients and their advocates on safety planning. They can refrain from removing children from a nonoffending mother and help her instead to find supportive services. Where collaborative programs like the Massachusetts DVU do not exist, child protection workers can take the lead in initiating them. Help is available from many sources. The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (800-537-2238) offers studies on interservice collaboration in its series of “Policy and Practice Papers.” The Family Violence Prevention Fund (415-252-8900) distributes “Domestic Violence: A National Curriculum for Child Protection Services.” The Family Violence Department of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has formulated guidelines for effective intervention in domestic violence and child maltreatment cases. The guidelines and the publication “Family Violence: Emerging Programs for Battered Mothers and Their Children,” a description of thirty-five imaginative collaborative programs throughout the country, are available from the Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody (800-527-3223).
Community-Based Domestic Violence Programs
The cornerstone of the battered women’s movement was emergency shelter. But the great majority of women seeking help from shelters neither needed nor asked for refuge. Rather, they needed court, medical, or welfare advocacy, support groups, or other community-based services. In a recent year in one small state, for example, 18 shelters provided emergency refuge to 1500 women and 2500 children, but they provided other services to more than 30,000 battered women. Today emergency shelter is still provided by approximately 1200 programs, and a small but growing number have developed longer-term transitional housing for women and their children. But the programs offering emergency shelter are part of a network of almost 2,000 community-based domestic violence programs in the United States that provide safety and a broad range of services for battered women, their children, and other domestic violence victims.39 As programs have grown, terminology has changed. Today’s advocates speak of “DV Programs” to suggest the full range of services they provide, while they use the old umbrella word “shelter” to refer only to emergency refuge. But whether they speak of DV programs or shelters, they say there’s never enough funding.
Federal money was appropriated to the states for battered women’s shelters and services under the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984. In addition, under the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, states could award a portion of the allocation for victim services to shelters. The safety and services provided for so long by volunteers had at last been recognized as a national interest and public responsibility. Nevertheless, even multimillion-dollar funding was inadequate to the task. Public information efforts that called attention to newly funded programs drew new previously unserved populations with special needs: old battered women, disabled battered women, battered women on tribal lands, rural battered women, teenaged victims of dating violence, and more. Consequently, despite enormous growth and improvement in domestic violence programs, it is still true that for every woman who uses an emergency shelter others are turned away. In all areas of the country, demand for temporary shelter, court advocacy, and peer support groups is rising, and some budgets are still being cut. Some programs have had to discontinue support programs for children, while others have had to drop court advocates. In many localities paid workers have cut their own salaries to make the money stretch farther; and many carry on as volunteers. One midwestern shelter laid off its custodian for lack of funds; later, when the shelter was criticized publicly for being dirty and unsanitary, she wrote to the local newspaper: “Until government and society commit themselves to ending violence in the home, there will always be battered women’s shelters, they will always be full and there will always be dishes to wash and bathroom floors to mop. Token laws and band-aid funding are the real problem. If we’re looking for solutions, why aren’t we putting batterers in shelters and letting the women and children stay at home?”40
Since 1994 millions of VAWA dollars have been appropriated to victim services. Until that time the battered women’s movement consisted largely of formerly battered women and deeply committed feminist volunteers; but almost overnight VAWA dollars transformed domestic violence work in some communities into a respectable career choice offering jobs and competitive salaries. Individuals and state agencies that previously had ignored domestic violence entered the competition for funds. Worse, grants administered by state officials put shelters and services in competition with one another. In some states grants were pawned to politics. In others they went to programs with professional credentialed staff able to polish grant proposals, rather than to grass roots shelters with less finesse but greater need. Many grants were appropriately targeted for “underserved populations”—women of color, rural women, lesbian women—but as a result many programs serving “mainstream” populations didn’t apply. For all these reasons, many old, established shelters and programs received no money at all.
In some localities, however, an influx of funds tested the values of the movement and local programs. Funds from federal and state agencies, foundations, and local businesses provided pleasant modern buildings to replace dilapidated rental facilities that had previously served as shelters. Mortgage payments supported by endowments replaced rental payments. In some cases money materialized to pay staff salaries. Certainly battered women deserve shelters that are well designed, comfortable, and safe, and staff deserve to be well paid; but in stepping up the economic ladder, some program boards and staff lost their footing and forgot what the work was all about. The new buildings brought new pressure to professionalize shelter staff. Rather than train existing staff in business management when budgets grew, some shelter boards replaced them with M.B.A.’s or M.S.W.’s—as if the shoes of a formerly battered woman could be filled by a college degree. In some of the new shelters rules proliferated. Tidiness was demanded of women and kids in crisis. Highly credentialed men applied for and got jobs as directors of battered women’s shelters, amply paid by federal VAWA dollars. The obvious danger of this professionalism is that it can transform a program to a self-perpetuating, self-interested bureaucracy with no goal but next year’s budget.
Shelters were never meant to become permanent establishments, but because community institutions still do not act effectively to defend women, shelters remain the single most effective way of saving lives. They should be used more efficiently by extending nationwide Minnesota’s “Day One,” a statewide computerized shelter referral system that finds somewhere in the state’s twenty-one shelters a bed for every woman in need on the first day she reaches out for help. More shelters should be established where they are needed, and all shelters and services should be staffed primarily by women who are survivors of abuse, whether or not they have professional credentials. In-service training programs should be offered to staff members who want to improve business management, writing, legal advocacy, and other skills. And because so many battered women cite the lack of affordable housing as the single greatest obstacle to getting free of an abusive man, shelters must have additional funds and the cooperation of federal, state, and municipal housing authorities to help women find transitional and long-term housing. At the same time, advocacy and support services must be adequately funded so that battered women are not forced into shelter by the lack of other options. Overburdened federal, state, and local governments will be hard pressed to find more money for shelters, housing, and services, but they must rearrange their priorities to provide it. Elizabeth Schneider reported to the Ford Foundation that money spent on shelters is well spent, for “shelter work contributes to community education, abuse prevention, and institutional change as well as the welfare of children.”41 Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, adds, “If we reduce violence in the home, we’ll reduce violence in the streets and in our schools.”42 Who can doubt anymore that our national tolerance of violence in the home promotes the violence in our civic life?
How long we must go on funding shelters depends upon the responsiveness of public attitudes and institutions. Anne Menard, former director of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, has said, “The ultimate goal of our individual and systems advocacy is to sufficiently inform and assist battered women and sufficiently challenge and support the institutions and individuals to whom they turn for assistance so that individual battered women no longer need our intervention to get the safety, services, and justice they deserve. So that wherever a battered woman turns for help—the police, the courts, the medical system, her employer, child protective services, her welfare or CSE caseworker, her friends, her church, her family—she gets the understanding, protection, and support she and her kids need.”43 When the shelter movement fulfills its original goals—to provide safety for women and to make social change—it will celebrate its irrelevancy in a just society and close the doors.
Until that time DV programs should offer emergency shelter to any abused women and children in need, regardless of their age, income, immigration status, sexual preference, occupation, or activities. Shelters are sometimes criticized for taking in prostitutes, lesbians, alcoholics, drug addicts, or fugitives; and some “professionalized” shelters, having lost sight of the movement’s goals, even turn such “problematic” women away. Women in danger deserve support and protection. For some women, shelter is still the only lifeline.
The Schools
Schools at every level from primary school to college will have among their students the children of abused women. They will have students who have been abused (or are being abused) themselves, and students who are witnesses to violence. High schools and colleges will also hold victims and perpetrators of dating violence. Yet it is the responsibility of schools to provide a secure environment conducive to learning for all their students. Like it or not, schools must stand against violence. Whether or not student victims disclose violence, schools—and particularly classroom teachers—can voice important messages about the rights of women, girls, and children, the unacceptability of abuse and violence, and sources of help for victims. Like other helping professionals, teachers should learn in college about violence against women, and they should be required to learn through continuing education or in-service training about programs and resources in their own communities. In turn teachers can offer their students information on battering, teen relationship violence, and child abuse by building in to their curricula presentations and discussions led by experienced domestic and dating violence specialists from local battered women’s programs. (Some state departments of education offer teachers curricula on battering and child abuse for classroom use, but many are inadequate. Besides, it’s unreasonable to expect already overworked teachers to become experts in yet another field when there are experts close at hand happy to volunteer.) Teachers of young children certainly should enlist the help of an experienced child advocate to present information on violence and handle student reactions. It’s important to let young children know that the abuser is wrong and the abuser’s victims blameless.
School administrators at every level can make their schools safe places for students to learn—and indeed they must, for questions of institutional liability may be raised with good reason when they fail to provide equal protection to all students. Administrators can work with teachers and local domestic violence advocates to develop a coherent all-school program of antiviolence instruction. A model program offering age-appropriate violence prevention curricula for grades K through 12 is the In-School Violence Prevention Program developed in cooperation with school officials by the Women’s Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh (412-687-8017).44 Administrators can inform parents about the importance of the school’s antiviolence curricula. They can establish domestic violence protocols and prevention policies at local and district levels so that the response to student disclosures of abuse at home or in relationships will be consistent and confidential, with the goals of making student victims safe and student perpetrators accountable. (When students disclose abuse or violence in the home, some schools make contact with the nonoffending parent to put her in touch with battered women’s resources, bringing safety to mother and children as well.) Administrators can see to it that all faculty, staff, and committee members with special responsibilities for student standards and discipline are trained in domestic and dating violence, familiar with school violence protocols, and quick to connect student victims with services. They can ensure that school personnel support students who disclose violence and advocate for them within the school when, for example, abuse at home prevents a student from doing her schoolwork. Administrators can make space available in the school for victim advocates and counselors to meet on the premises with students who otherwise would be unable to get help. They can collaborate with local mental health facilities or professional organizations to provide pro bono in-school counseling for violence-troubled youngsters.
No one knows how many students run away, drop out of school, or see their grades plummet and their hopes die as a result of dating assaults or abuse at home. Teenaged victims of abuse are particularly reticent. Yet teenagers are in step with one another, more in tune with the teen scene than any adult, and likely to tell their troubles—if at all—to another teenager. Consequently, well-informed teens can be very helpful, as friends or peer counselors, in supporting teenaged victims and holding offenders accountable. Unfortunately, most teenagers are not well informed. Misled by macho music, fashion ads, movies, TV, and romance novels of a teen culture that eroticizes and glamorizes violence, many are ill equipped to help other teens or to make wise choices themselves. That gives educators of high school and college students a twofold responsibility to educate all teenagers about the dynamics and gender politics of dating violence, sexual assault, and battering. Their goal should be not simply to teach students how to respond to violence, but to help them analyze and understand the sexism, inequality, and traditional social attitudes that foster violence. Like educators of younger children, high school teachers can devise curricula in collaboration with battered women’s advocates. Administrators in high schools and colleges can develop incentives and training for students to become peer counselors. Male teachers and coaches can be careful to model respectful, nondiscriminatory behavior. In appropriate classes or school assemblies, teachers can enlist local battered women’s advocates or other antiviolence specialists to discuss gender, power, and violence. They can encourage students to explore the connections between violent domination in the home and violence in the schools. Together administrators, teachers, and students can make their school a safe place where violence and abuse are not tolerated.
On college campuses administrators must also work to create an egalitarian environment free of violence, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. They can establish a student code of conduct that makes clear the seriousness of violence against women and the severity of punishment. They can educate students, faculty, and staff about sexual assault and dating violence—informing them about campus security, local law enforcement, reporting procedures, victim services and legal rights, and punishment of offenders. They can plan a coordinated, comprehensive campus response to violence against women, ensuring that appropriate resources are in place to serve all parts of the campus community. Administrators and faculty can speak out against battering and sexual assault and encourage student leaders to do the same. They can develop special programs and training aimed at specific student populations such as fraternities and athletes, helping them turn their group influence to good ends. They can foster student groups that deal with violence against women and encourage cooperation with agencies and resources in the local community. Concerned educators and students who want to work against violence will find helpful ideas in In Touch with Teens: A Relationship Violence Curriculum for Youth Ages 12–19 by Leah Aldridge, Cathy Friedman, and Patricia Giggans, available from the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women (213-955-9090), and Organizing College Campuses Against Dating Abuse by Marilyn Best and Debbie Nelson, distributed by the Public Education Technical Assistance Project of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (800-537-2238). For young women and their parents, two helpful books are Dating Violence: Young Women in Danger edited by Barrie Levy, and What Parents Need to Know About Dating Violence by Barrie Levy and Patricia O. Giggans, both published by Seal Press.
The Workplace
Violence in the home spills over into the workplace—where most employed Americans spend most of their waking hours. A batterer may interfere in his victim’s workplace to display his control over her. He may hope to get her fired to make her more isolated and dependent upon him. If she has left him, the workplace may be the only place he can find her. Abuse at home—sleep deprivation, physical injuries, emotional stress—affect a worker’s ability to do her job. Abuse on the job—harassing phone calls, faxes, e-mails, unannounced “show-ups” (sometimes armed), physical assaults, and homicide—interfere with work and endanger employees. Extra costs in absenteeism, impaired productivity, security, and health care impact the bottom line. With this in mind, in 1995–96 a national coalition of employer, labor, and government organizations drafted “Ten Principles for the Workplace,” guidelines for creating workplaces that are safe, fair, informed, productive, and socially responsible. The principles aim to increase safety for all workers, support workers who are victims of “domestic violence,” and hold accountable workers who commit “domestic violence.” They call for personnel, benefits, security, and employee assistance programs to respond to the needs of victims and for employers and unions to provide information to workers about helpful resources in the workplace and the community. And they call for businesses and unions to support efforts—local, state, and national—to end “domestic violence.”
How can these principles be put into practice? CEOs or management teams can strive to create a workplace intolerant of domestic abuse and helpful to its victims. They can work with managers, employee assistance programs, and unions to develop paid leave and benefit policies that meet the needs of employees who are victims of “domestic violence.” They can ensure that the company’s employee assistance personnel receive special training and include safety planning and domestic violence referrals in the services they offer. They can set up a training program for all company supervisors and managers to prepare them to respond appropriately when an employee is a victim or perpetrator of domestic assault. They can educate employees by sponsoring workshops and seminars, distributing educational materials, running articles in company newsletters, putting informational inserts in pay envelopes, displaying antiviolence posters in public places, making victim safety information available in restrooms or other private places. They can include the National Domestic Violence Hotline number (800-799-SAFE) in all information. They can make sure that security staff have been trained to deal with the special safety needs of battered women and to work cooperatively with local law enforcement. They can donate money or company products, if appropriate, to local shelters or programs. (Bell Atlantic Mobile, for example, donated thousands of cell phones programmed to call 911 to battered women under threat.) They can encourage employees to aid a local shelter or program with money, supplies, services, or special skills. Together with their employees they can make some special effort on October 1, national Work to End Domestic Violence Day. As business leaders they can urge other CEO’s to initiate similar programs or organize a group of like-minded executives and union leaders to work on collaborative community projects to end battering. Some prominent businesses are already working against domestic violence: notably Liz Claiborne, Marshalls, Bell Atlantic Mobile, Blue Shield of California, Polaroid, Wells Fargo Bank, Levi Strauss and Co., The Body Shop, The Limited, Inc., American Express, and others. Their efforts have brought them nothing but good publicity and more business from grateful customers.
The National Workplace Resource Center on Domestic Violence, a project of the Family Violence Prevention Fund (415-252-8089), makes it easy to get started. Their 200-page publication “The Workplace Responds to Domestic Violence: A Resource Guide for Employers, Unions and Advocates” is a step by step guide to creating a safe, supportive workplace. The Workplace Resource Center also distributes a “Work to End Domestic Violence” Organizer’s Kit and a “Worker to Worker Domestic Violence Action Kit” with tools and guidelines for supervisors and workers who want to spread the word at work and reach out to co-workers. There are safety cards (available in six languages) to leave in the restroom, posters, bumper stickers, pens, tee shirts, even a mug for coffee breaks that bears the motto “There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence.” Whether executives, union leaders, and workers are motivated by concern for women’s rights, worker safety, the bottom line, or the common good, there’s no excuse any more for workplaces not to work to end violence.
The Religious Community
Some abused women turn to a minister, priest, or rabbi for counsel, but many members of the clergy unfortunately still adhere to “family values” as ill-informed and obsolete as Dan Quayle. They believe in keeping the nuclear family together at all costs, and many still maintain that a wife’s duty is to love and cherish her husband, even when he beats her nearly to death. But as one survivor of battery, now a member of the clergy herself, said in explaining her own divorce: “I couldn’t believe that’s what God had in mind for my life.”45 In addition, recent criminal proceedings and civil damage suits brought against priests and clergymen for child sexual abuse and sexual harassment make clear that religious institutions may be as likely to cover up abuse in their midst as to help victims. Obviously, churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques must be safe havens for battered women and children. They must not go on being accomplices to crime, let alone sin or evil.
What can members of the religious community do? The clergy can educate themselves about battering and be alert to identify, intervene, and help battered women and abused children in their congregations. In giving pastoral care to women, clergy—like all other counselors—can ask them about the violence in their lives, validate their experience, express concern for their safety, refer them to appropriate community resources, and never suggest they enter marital counseling with the assailant. They can put the safety and well-being of the woman first, always bearing in mind that a woman and her children are a family.
Clergy can educate their congregations about violence—from the pulpit, in publications, and in pre-marital counseling—and can invite advocates to speak at educational gatherings. They can offer meeting space for support groups, supervised child visitation, and the like. They can encourage the congregation to support a local shelter through donations of money, materials, or service. They can advise seminaries and theological schools to require study of violence against women and children and training in appropriate pastoral care. They can speak out, inside and outside the congregation, and take the lead in teaching that male violence against women and children is a moral wrong. They can lead by example, offering to serve on the board of a local shelter or domestic violence program, or taking training to become a crisis counselor, a court watcher, a hospital visitor to violence victims. They can participate in planning a coordinated community response to domestic assault.
To prepare themselves, clergy can seek training or help from their local battered woman’s program. In some cases, they may find help through their own religious institution. Nationally, the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence, an interreligious educational resource, has provided education and training on sexual abuse and domestic assault for clergy, lay leaders, denominations, religious organizations, and congregations since 1977 (206-634-1903; www.cpsdv.org). When clergy fail to take the lead against domestic violence, lay leaders and religious congregants can take the initiative themselves, bringing information, example, and commitment to their religious community.
The murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in June 1994 and the indictment of O. J. Simpson prompted a flood of calls to the new National Resource Center on Domestic Violence from journalists nationwide, many of whom subsequently produced informative background stories on domestic violence. That early coverage of the Simpson case—before the trial started and the case went up in sensational smoke—surely raised public awareness of the issue. It is a good example of the role responsible journalism can play in stimulating, informing, and elevating public discourse on social issues. But too often reporters covering domestic violence assaults, femicides, and trials, pressed by deadlines, fall back on sexist cliches and readymade sexist sex-and-violence scenarios to get their copy out. It happens so easily, so “naturally”; they may not even realize that instead of investigating and accurately reporting the facts, they’ve masked rape and battering in the language of “love.” They quote police and lawyers as authoritative sources but rarely consult battered women’s advocates who could provide valuable background information, a different perspective, and an alternative scenario. Sometimes journalists seem willfully to throw fairness and balance to the winds; they sympathize with the offender, as did many journalists covering the Happy Land Social Club fire, the trial of Joel Steinberg, or the trial of O. J. Simpson. Thoughtful journalism can go a long way toward setting the tone and providing accurate information for public discussion; but as long as routine press coverage presents rape, assault, and femicide from the perspective of the offender, the press will be part of the problem women and children are up against.
For millions of Americans media provide “the truth” and shape attitudes. To change public attitudes about violence against women and help to prevent violence, media can change the way they portray violence, and the press can educate itself about “domestic violence” and sexual assault. Before editors and reporters touch this beat they should have read Battered Wives by Del Martin, Women and Male Violence by Susan Schechter, Rape in Marriage by Diana E. H. Russell, Violence Against Wives by R. Emerson and Russell P. Dobash, Battered Women Who Kill by Angela Browne, and Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus by Peggy Reeves Sanday. In addition, they should read Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes by Columbia University journalism professor Helen Benedict. Benedict gives the press low marks for its coverage of sex crimes, and much of her analysis applies equally to press coverage of domestic assault and femicide. Yet some papers—notably the Boston Globe—have covered all aspects of domestic violence for many years with exceptional thoroughness and fairness. Globe investigative stories of judicial mishandling of domestic assault cases in the ’80s helped change judicial conduct, and coverage of the epidemic of domestic assault and murder in Massachusetts in the ’90s inspired widespread public support of important state and local antiviolence initiatives.
What can the media do? Print editors and radio and TV producers can invite local battered women’s advocates to the newsroom to brief crime and court reporters and talk show hosts on the basic facts of “domestic violence” and dispel myths and stereotypes. They can ask advocates to run workshops for newsrooms—to critique recent stories and suggest ways to improve. Editors, reporters, and producers can find out how domestic abuse is handled in their local community and inform their readers and audiences. They can do stories on local shelters and services, their funding and needs—with crisis and contact numbers. They can do stories on how local police handle domestic disturbance calls, how the prosecutor’s office operates, how cases are treated in the courts and what the local conviction rate is, what happens to men convicted of domestic assault, what batterers’ groups are all about, what local schools are doing about family violence, what local programs are being developed with funds made available by the Violence Against Women Act, and how local congressional representatives voted on that legislation and why. Reporters should have local advocates in their rolodexes; and for quick and comprehensive background information and analysis, they can call the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, the best single source in the country for bringing a reporter on deadline up to speed. When big crime news breaks—a domestic murder-suicide or a mass shooting at the workplace of the gunman’s estranged wife—reporters will be better prepared to gather and make sense of the facts, and informed readers, listeners, and viewers will better understand and appreciate the journalists’ work.
Editors, reporters, and radio and television producers must also be aware of the well-funded political right and the influence it exerts on issues of women’s rights. Advocacy organizations such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, political action committees such as Gary Bauer’s anti-woman Campaign for Working Families and the antichoice National Right to Life Committee, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Janet Parshall—all push for the “traditional family” and a “return to values.” Spokeswomen promoted by the Independent Women’s Forum—Christina Hoff Sommers, Sally Satel, Cathy Young, Anita Blair, and others—have joined the Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America in spreading the antifeminist, antiwoman message. Their denigration of the battered women’s movement is echoed by columnists John Leo and George Will and by law professor and talking head Alan Dershowitz. Typically they use the media to accuse battered women’s advocates of exaggerating the incidence and seriousness of domestic violence and ignoring what they describe as widespread abuse of men by women. They dismiss theories that violence arises from gender roles and sexism and express sympathy for those rare women who are “truly” battered. Their efficient distribution of articles, op-ed pieces, and columns and frequent appearances on radio and television influence the domestic violence coverage of workaday journalists unaware of the political message masked by their “concern” for women.
As consumers, we can contact local newspapers, magazines, radio, and television to urge thoughtful and accurate coverage of violence against women. We too can write op-ed pieces, guest editorials, and letters to the editor. (Newspapers are more sensitive to reactions from readers than many readers realize. If readers are offended by coverage of the issue, editors will want to improve.) We can suggest that local radio and television stations use some of their public service time to run the antiviolence public service messages produced by the Family Violence Prevention Fund. We can suggest that they run the National Domestic Violence Hotline number (800-799-SAFE) during local news reports on domestic assault. We can see to it that they get information on local services and the names and numbers of local advocates (the real experts on the issue) available for interviews. We can notify the press of public events having to do with violence against women—a lecture, fundraiser, or educational forum—and request press coverage.
It is probably too much to expect of the entertainment media that artists and producers in the film, television, video, and music industries stop eroticizing male violence against women and depicting it with such obvious relish. But all of us as consumers can protest with our feet, our pens, and our pocketbooks; and we can organize others to boycott certain films, TV programs, recording “artists,” magazines, and the products of companies that sponsor television programs glamorizing rape and battery, or radio programs on which misogynistic records are played. And we can send our objections to production companies, networks, local affiliates, and sponsors. One complaint won’t make a difference, but thousands might.
New Legislation
When Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, battered women and abused children were encouraged to come forward for help. They came forward in record numbers, and from parts of the population previously overlooked—from high schools, for example, and tribal lands. It looked like the country was changing—recognizing at last the civil rights of women. But as I write now in December 1999, VAWA is in its last year of funding, and Congress has adjourned for the year without passing the Violence Against Women Act of 1999 (VAWA II or VAWA ’99, officially H.R. 357 and S. 51). That legislation, one of three principle VAWA reauthorization bills pending in the 106th Congress, would reauthorize major programs and grants for the next five years, including funding for model programs to educate young people about domestic violence. It would also expand VAWA by creating important new antiviolence programs: among other provisions it would give grants to school systems to address domestic violence and sexual assault, make funding available for transitional housing for battered women, and provide tax credit to businesses that combat violence against women with workplace safety programs. In addition, it would amend the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act to authorize one billion dollars to battered women’s shelters over the next five years.
This legislation will be before Congress as VAWA 2000 when it returns in late January. Congress must pass it and other important pending domestic violence bills that support screening by health care professionals, provide employment and financial safeguards for battered women, and provide services to children who witness abuse. Then perhaps Congress can turn to larger issues of economic justice for all—and such specific measures impinging directly on economic justice as raising the minimum wage, providing affordable health care for all, providing good and equitable public education, and reforming taxation to narrow the shameful chasm between rich and poor.
Concerned voters should remember the legislators who led the drive in Congress to take action for women’s civil rights: John Conyers (MI), Connie Morella (MD), Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA), Nita Lowey (NY), and Carolyn Maloney (NY) in the House of Representatives; Paul Wellstone (MN), Joseph Biden (DE), Patty Murray (WA), Barbara Boxer (CA), Edward Kennedy (MA), and Frank Lautenberg (NJ) in the Senate. The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 enjoyed bipartisan support and passed in a Republican controlled Congress—perhaps because polling repeatedly shows that violence against women is high on the list of women’s concerns, regardless of their party. With one exception, however—Representative Morella—the leaders on the issue are Democrats.
Research
During a prolific academic career, sociologist Lee H. Bowker noted that scholarly journals welcomed his traditional articles but rejected his profeminist articles on woman abuse with a nastiness that would have sunk most young professors trying to build a career. Scholarship pretends to neutral, objective standards, but Bowker concluded “that there are many gatekeepers in the world of scholarship whose professionalism is insufficient to keep their antifeminist attitudes in check.”46 Reviewing the clinical literature on battering, sociologist and batterers’ counselor James Ptacek noted that the sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists who write it accept “at face value” the victim-blaming excuses of the batterer.47 One consequence of these transparent biases is that much of the research conducted by sociologists and psychologists, scholars and clinicians, during the last twenty years (often at taxpayers’ expense) has proved irrelevant to policy makers and an impediment to the work of activists providing direct services to battered women and their children.48 Important and useful research is still to be done, particularly on the institutional and social supports for male violence, and on male violence itself. No study has ever been done, for example, of men who murder women they say they “love” although they kill at least one in three female murder victims. More important, no study has been done of the psychiatric criteria and legal standards that define as “normal” and “well adjusted” men whom ordinary uneducated women with no professional training whatsoever can plainly see are about to commit murder. (Current intensive study of batterers has found no indicators to predict a man’s impending violence as accurate as the “sixth sense” of the woman he lives with.) What is it about psychiatry and the law that makes women’s experience immaterial? What are the consequences for women, and what should we do about it?
Similarly, very little is known of the long-term effects on children who are subjected to abuse or witness it. Experts agree that helping these children will reduce youth violence ten years down the line and save many of them from full-blown mental illness as adults, yet there’s little research on when and how to intervene. Nor is there any research on the connections between violence in the home and such notorious episodes of (male) youth violence as the now commonplace high-school shootings. Given that we live in a country rapidly being consumed by violence, such studies could produce information helpful to everyone. Reports from women survivors on what helped them to escape and rebuild their lives, and what community institutions might have done to help, would be useful to service providers and policy makers. Basic incidence and cost data is needed as well. Estimates of the multi-million dollar cost of battering to health care, mental health, law enforcement, or business are only educated guesses. Policy makers don’t know the full extent or location of the damage—or where and how best to allocate money to stop it. Most public funds allocated to “domestic violence” now go to improve and assess the efficacy of the criminal justice system and to run batterers’ treatment programs, although we know for a fact that relatively few battered women ever use the criminal justice system, and that batterers’ treatment programs are notoriously ineffective. Most federal money goes to the criminal justice system, which has done next to nothing for battered women, while the life-saving battered women’s movement spends its energies writing proposals for grants from private foundations. No million-dollar study is needed to tell us that there’s something wrong with this picture.
Little or no research has documented the incidence of violence and the efficacy of programs for populations previously neglected by mainstream academics and underserved by domestic violence services—African-Americans, for example, or Asian-Americans, or Hispanics. Domestic violence workers at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota have never been contacted by any researcher, though they would welcome professional help in documenting the magnitude of the problem on tribal lands. On their own, workers at Pine Ridge have developed a new analysis relating domestic assault and alcoholism to the internalized oppression of white colonization. Indians say that they learned four things from the white man: to curse God, to drink, to gamble, and to abuse women and children. Now they act out the very behavior they despised in the white men who overran their lands. Karen Artichoker, director of Shelter Administration and the Sacred Circle at Pine Ridge, speaks of “spiritual abuse.” She says: “Our work now is to embrace our indigenous minds, our own nonviolent culture.”49 Perhaps the most helpful research of all might tell us how to break our peculiarly American habit of studying individual psyches, how to search for structural solutions to structural problems, how to find social answers to social questions, how to think about things like safety and equality and justice as if we were in fact—like Native-Americans—members of a society.
Funds for research should go to studies and projects that address the felt needs of workers in the field. Any agency, foundation, or corporation funding domestic violence research should first seek the guidance of nonacademics providing direct services to victims and offenders, particularly those who are themselves survivors of violence. They should also consult feminist theorists within the battered women’s movement and profeminist men leading programs for offenders. No matter how much conservatives and misogynists might want to wish feminism away, it is eminently clear that the feminist analysis of male violence against women and children is the most accurate and productive of change.
As we’ve seen, efforts to respond to violence against women are stubborn, widespread, and growing. But how to prevent violence? How to wipe it out? We know that most men who batter women see themselves as victims, blame women for causing abuse, regard violence as a private matter, and suffer no punishment or loss of status even when their “private” violence is made public. We also know that many officials responsible for calling batterers to account share the batterer’s attitudes. Not long ago, for example, a judge expunged a domestic violence conviction from a batterer’s record so that he could join a country club.50 To stop domestic violence then, the curtain of privacy must be cast aside. People must look at battering, see that it is wrong, and come to believe that it is so costly in so many ways to the general good that we are all obliged to take action to end it. Perhaps then abusive men will undergo a change of heart or punishment sufficient to change their behavior.
Today prevention efforts of battered women’s advocates aim to stimulate public discussion, change the collective social consciousness, and rekindle the grass-roots community activism that sparked the movement in the first place. In short, they aim to make Americans informed, outraged, and active. To this end, the Family Violence Prevention Fund launched a nationwide media and grass-roots organizing campaign in 1994. Called “There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence,” the campaign speaks to friends, neighbors, and co-workers of abuse victims who condone violence by remaining silent. In collaboration with the National Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, it carries the message to black America with the slogan: “It Is Your Business.” The Family Violence Prevention Fund distributes “Person to Person,” “Neighbor to Neighbor,” and community organizing kits with materials and tips on how to get the message out. FVPF director Esta Soler says, “We want to organize America against violence person to person, block by block. That’s how this movement first began, and it’s where our greatest hope lies.”51
Advocates focus their work each year on October, designated National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Working together, the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline collaborate on this national media outreach and community education project. They provide funds for demonstration projects in community organizing and technical assistance to hundreds of local groups across the country planning events for National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The Public Education Office of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence offers a calendar of events nationwide, lists of videos and other resources, and publications to help anyone organize an office, a college campus, or a community. Cynthia Newcomer, Public Education Director of the NRC reports that a few years ago most calls for assistance came from local battered women’s organizations. “Now,” she says, “two-thirds of our requests come from churches, schools, health care facilities, substance abuse programs, colleges, police departments, and so on. A lot of people out there want to take action.”52 The NRC encourages such groups to partner with a local battered women’s program to combine new enthusiasm with hard-won expertise in effective community alliance.
The National Battered Women’s Hotline, 800-799-SAFE or 800-787-3224 (TTY), a project of the Texas Council on Family Violence, is a multilingual round-the-clock toll-free service that links callers from the United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to resources through its nationwide database of shelters and programs. It’s a powerful tool for prevention and change as well as safety, since many callers want to know how to help someone else. The very first call to the hotline in 1996 came from a man concerned about his daughter’s safety. In its first three years of operation the hotline logged more than 300,000 calls, and in 1999 it was answering more than 11,350 calls a month.53
Some people previously neglected by battered women’s programs and services have organized prevention projects to change awareness and attitudes within their own communities. Some see themselves at special risk for violence because of their own cultural history, a lack of culturally specific services, and language barriers for many in their community. The Asian Institute on Domestic Violence (415-954-9957: Deanna Jang) organized to address abuse in Asian-American and Asian immigrant communities. The National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence (800-342-9908; www.dvalianza.com) organized to foster culturally specific research, services, training, education, and community awareness among the diverse Hispanic-American and Hispanic immigrant communities. The National Resource Center to End Violence Against Native Women (877-RED-ROAD; http://scircle@sacred-circle.com) organizes and serves American Indian and Alaska Native tribal communities. The National Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community (612-624-5357; www.dvinstitute.org), a forum for research and strategic planning, studies the interconnections of violence against women, child abuse, elder abuse, and community violence in black America.
Other groups work with individuals whose circumstances place them at high risk for violence. In Oakland, California, the Men’s Project works with boys in early adolescence, the years when manhood begins to be acted out, for good or ill. (Men involved with organizations like Big Brothers, the YMCA, or sports teams can seek training from local advocates and add violence prevention to the work they’re doing.) At Boston Medical Center a prevention project works with children at very high risk—children who have witnessed violence. Conceived to help urban kids through the stress of witnessing violence in mean streets, the Child Witness to Violence Project (617-534-4244) found that most traumatized children referred for help by police and doctors had witnessed violence at home. Their symptoms include sleep difficulties, aches and pains, aggressiveness, anger, hyperactivity, hypervigilance, worrying about loved ones, lack of concentration, loss of skills, withdrawal, emotional numbing. The program has seen children younger than two years exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.54 These, the tiniest casualties of a war for which they didn’t volunteer, stand to develop psychiatric problems as adults and perhaps become violent themselves.55 Treated with play therapy and counseling, and given the chance to develop a strong supportive relationship with an adult, they may do better than that. Think of these small faces gazing at prospects already dim and take a step to stop violence.
Individual Action
Finally we come to the question of what, if anything, individual women and men can do. Is the problem insurmountable? And if you are a nonviolent man or woman living more or less happily with a nonviolent partner, is it even your problem?
I believe that violence is everyone’s problem, that we are all touched by it in some way, if only in the cost of an extra lock for the front door. How many kids are learning right now by example in their own homes that you can get what you want by slapping somebody around? We could go over the economic costs again—the expense we all bear as taxpayers for the emergency services, police work, and court costs of undeterred male violence. We could consider how much our health insurance costs would diminish if men stopped hitting women. We could count casualties again—thousands of women dead, and almost every day more innocent bystanders injured or killed as well. No one gets off free.
It’s up to all of us, then, to recognize the principle that all women have a right to be free from bodily harm—and to act as if we believed it. That may mean overcoming a lifetime of training that tilts your opinions in the opposite direction. Whether you are a judge, a cop, a physician, a teacher, or an ordinary citizen talking over the latest murder to hit the papers, it means holding the offender to account, even if you sympathize with him. It means biting your tongue before you blame the victim. It may mean educating yourself, reading some of the books I’ve mentioned, and becoming actively involved in some way—through a group at your workplace, your religious congregation, your civic organization, or on your own. Volunteer at your local shelter, or talk with your children’s teachers about nonviolence curricula, or become a big sister or brother to an abused kid, or put a bumper sticker on your car saying “There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence.”
And if a woman you know is being abused—or you suspect that she is—it may mean talking to her, offering support, offering to help in whatever way you can whenever she feels ready to call on you. At a loss for what to say, or how to say it? Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline (800-799-SAFE) to find out about battered women’s services in your locality; then call them for advice. Or check the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s website (www.fvpf.org), or call them for a “Person to Person” or “Neighbor to Neighbor Domestic Violence Action Kit” (415-252-8900). Then, just be yourself and express what will matter most to her—your concern. Remember: listen, don’t judge. Support, don’t badger. Recognize that her life is more complicated than you can know, and that she may not respond as you would like. Many a would-be helper suggests to a battered woman that she “just leave,” then turns away in frustration, anger, and disgust when she doesn’t. (As if she hasn’t thought of it herself.) Recognize that getting free is a process; offer your continuing support and you may become part of her process of saving herself. And whether she stays or leaves, you can give her information about local services that can help her. Two books that may be helpful to her and to you are Getting Free by Ginny NiCarthy and When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can’t Do Anything Right by Ann Jones and Susan Schechter.
But before you can offer help to an abused woman, or seek it for yourself, you have to know what goes on in your own community. Is there a “domestic violence” program in your town? Who pays for its operation, and how much? Does it offer shelter? Does it have enough room, or does it often turn women in danger away? How long can a woman stay there, and will the shelter help her find a place of her own? What’s the policy of your local police department? When the cops get a domestic disturbance call, what do they actually do? What’s the record of prosecutors and judges in your town when it comes to domestic assault cases? Do they follow through with prosecution and sentencing, or do they pin their failures on battered women? Is there a batterers’ counseling program in town, and how well does it seem to be working? Where can a battered woman find a support group? Is there any special housing that might be available for her? How about job training? What kind of legal aid can she get? What does a woman have to do to get a restraining order? If she gets one, how will it be enforced? Do you have an anti-stalking law in your state? Are there any special services for battered women and their children at the local hospital? How did your senator and representative vote on the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, and how will they vote on VAWA 2000? If you can’t answer these questions, then you know what your first task is. And if the answers you find leave you dissatisfied with the services in your community, then you have more work cut out for you and your friends. The most powerful and empowering thing you can do as an individual is to become involved in a social or institutional effort for change.
It’s likely that many women reading this book will have been victims of violence. It seems to be more and more difficult to avoid it. In one survey of six thousand college students 42 percent of female students reported some kind of sexual assault; and college men who used violence on dates said they chose purposefully to do so to “intimidate,” “frighten,” or “force the other person to do something.”56 As these young men boast, violence against women does not happen by accident. And women who have been assaulted and raped are angry and afraid.
Most women, trained to stay safe at home to avoid rape and murder in the streets, are appalled to learn that home is the most dangerous place a woman can be. Experts on domestic assault dispassionately write lines like this: “The onset of systematic and severe violence against women is almost exclusively associated with entering a permanent relationship with a man.… Only in a prison or similar total institution would an individual be likely to encounter such persistent abuse, violence and terror.”57 Put that information together with the fact that no woman sets out to enter a relationship with a batterer, and you see why women are uneasy—and why the lucky ones may prefer to believe that battering is something other women bring on themselves.
Women should listen to their own uneasiness—and get more information about male violence and control. Although no test is foolproof, there are early warning signs to watch for in the behavior of any potential partner. What is his attitude toward women? How does he treat his mother and his sister? How does he work with female colleagues or a female boss? (If he doesn’t have any, that tells you something, too.) Does he make jokes about women in power? How does he treat your women friends? Does he understand that they are as important to you as he is? (Do you understand that yourself?) What is his attitude toward your autonomy? Does he respect the work you do and the way you do it? Or does he run it down, or meddle, or tell you how to do it better, or encourage you to give it up? Does he tell you he’ll take care of you? Does he want to spend the leisure time you have together on your interests, or his? How much time does he spend listening to you talk about your interests, and vice versa? (Go ahead, time it.) Does he remember what you said? Is he possessive or jealous? Does he want to spend every minute with you? Does he cross-examine you about things you do when you’re not with him? How does he feel about your male friends? What happens when things don’t go the way he wants them to? Does he blow up in a traffic jam, fume about his income tax, whine about your friends, or sulk about personal slights?
Susan Schechter and I presented many more questions and lists of control tactics in When Love Goes Wrong, a book of advice we wrote not because we believe that a woman is responsible for the violence done to her, but because it seemed to us unlikely that society would remove that responsibility from her. I want to make it clear, though, that when I offer advice to a woman, I don’t hold her or myself to blame if the advice proves ineffective. Male violence is male violence. But that said, the general principles women should keep in mind are these: stay away from a man who disrespects any women, who wants or needs you intensely and exclusively, and who has a knack for getting his own way almost all the time. Any of the above should put you on guard. And if, when you back off, he turns on the solid gold charm, keep backing. As a practical matter, I would add: prepare yourself as best you can with education, training, and job skills to lead an independent life. Support yourself.
Women who have been assaulted or raped or sexually harassed at home or at school or on the job or in the streets should report the fact to officials and talk about it to other women. Spread the assailant’s name around. If officials take no action, spread that around too. Anita Hill set us all an example. We must not keep to ourselves the shameful secrets of men. Women who have never been abused or battered and who believe that it couldn’t happen to them should volunteer to help at a battered women’s shelter. If their belief is wrong, as I think it is, they will learn something from working with battered women. If their belief is right, battered women will learn something from them.
It’s important that men take action to end male violence as well. This is simple self-interest: male violence against women casts a long shadow over women’s lives, yet 70 percent of the victims of male violence are other men.58 Clearly male violence against men is the problem of men. So too, male violence against women is the problem of men, just as racism is the problem of white people, though it’s women who suffer the one, people of color who suffer the other, and women of color who suffer both. Women can do much on our own behalf, but we can not stop violence against women by ourselves any more than people of color can stop racism by themselves. Men choose to use violence to get their way. They can just as well choose not to, as many men do who take a stand with women against violence and emotional abuse. They must increase their numbers, raise their voices, and use whatever power they have for change. All men can change their behavior. Whether they will is another matter.
But there is no good reason that change must come slowly and painfully and only after the injury and death of thousands more. In the last ten years of the twentieth century the pace of change has picked up. Most Americans now say they believe that battering is wrong. Most Americans now say they want to do something to stop it. There are new laws, new programs, new services, and above all these new attitudes to carry us into a new millennium. Things change when people stop being resigned to things as they are. Things change when people in large numbers get hold of a principle and begin to act as if they believed it.