On the whole, men do indeed have a more powerful left hook. The problem is that the dynamic of domestic violence is not analogous to two differently weighted boxers in a ring. There are relational strategies and psychological issues at work in an intimate relationship that negate the fact of physical strength. At the heart of the matter lies human will. Which partner—by dint of temperament, personality, life history—has the will to harm the other? By now it should be clear that such a will is not the exclusive province of men. If it were, we wouldn’t have the news coming out of North America’s gay community that violence by women against women in personal relationships occurs with a frequency approaching violence in heterosexual relationships—with the smaller, more conventionally feminine partner often being the one who strikes.
A great source of skepticism for people confronting the concept of husband assault is the absence of visible injury. Few abused men or lesbians emerge from their relationships resembling Hedda Nussbaum, the New Yorker whose common-law husband, Joel Steinberg, was prosecuted in 1988 for the beating death of their adopted daughter, Lisa. When Hedda Nussbaum testified, her appallingly broken face, with its cauliflower ear and boxer nose, was so vividly captured by television cameras that she quickly became the icono-graphic figure of the battered woman. Every time an activist proclaimed that one in four American women were assaulted by their partners, the image of Nussbaum sprang to mind.
In reality, victims like Hedda Nussbaum dwell at the extreme end of a continuum of violence in marital and dating relationships, in which about 4 percent of women are that severely injured. The majority of couples embroiled in intimate power struggles engage in a spectrum of violent acts, which women are statistically as likely as men to initiate: the slaps across the face, the glass suddenly hurled, the bite, the fierce pinch, the waved gun, the kick to the stomach, the knee to the groin. Add the invisible wave of violence that washes over American households in an acid bath of words, the children used as pawns, the destruction of property, the enlistment of community as a means of control, and all this paints a much more complex picture of domestic violence than that summoned by one woman’s face in a heartbreaking trial.
That we have not been able to get at this complexity, in terms of the range of behavior, its causes, and its victims, has everything to do with how the issue evolved in the popular mind to begin with. Spousal assault was once a silent crime. The violence was private, like child assault. What people did behind closed doors was the business neither of their neighbors nor of the state. The first radical alteration of this paradigm came about in the early 1970s, through the work of Second Wave feminists. Because they were concentrating on the problems of women—transforming what were once considered personal issues into political concerns—they exposed the female victims of domestic assault. The subject made headlines with the publication of Battered Wives by the journalist Del Martin in 1976, one year after Susan Brownmiller opened the door on rape with her landmark book Against Our Will.
The first order of business, for many feminists like Martin, was to remove the stigma attached to battered women. Prior to Battered Wives, the few investigations that had been made into battery had been conducted by court-appointed male psychiatrists who were asked to assess male assailants for trial. Since the assailants refused to concede any problem, the psychiatrists refocused their attention on the wives who’d been assaulted and, in the grand tradition of pathologizing female behavior, came up with a host of victim-blaming labels: “masochists,” “castrators,” “flirts.” From the outset of claiming this issue for women, it was critical to clear battered women of blame. As this mission gained momentum, with more and more women testifying about their experiences to feminists and journalists, the need to shield victims from blame gained currency. To pose the question “Why did she stay?” quickly became unacceptable. It emerged that there were a number of reasons why women stayed—for the sake of their children, or because of financial dependency, or because, even if they left, their husbands would track them down. Most people accepted such reasons as credible, as evidenced most recently by the funds allotted in 1994 by the United States federal Violence Against Women Act. Male approval of spousal assault has dropped 50 percent in this period, from 20 percent of men thinking it’s acceptable to strike your wife to 10.
Soon after the first battered women found safe haven in the feminist movement, research began to reveal that violence in the home actually claimed victims of both sexes. The most significant data came from a survey published in 1980 by three highly respected family violence scholars in New Hampshire, Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Suzanne Steinmetz. Their random survey of 3,218 American homes uncovered that severe abuse was committed equally by men and women. Minor, but recurring, violence was also on a par, with 11.6 percent of women and 12 percent of men reporting that they hit, slapped, or kicked their partners.
At this point, people working on the subject of family violence had a choice. They could expand the field to include male victims—establishing that abused men were not the same men who were abusing, and vice versa for women—or they could do what they did: devote an extraordinary amount of energy to shouting male victims down. For feminists, the idea that men could be victimized was nonsensical. It didn’t square with their fundamental analysis of wife assault—that it was an extension of male political, economic, and ideological dominance over women. If women were so clearly subjugated in the public domain, through rape, sexual harassment, job discrimination, and so on, how could there be a different reality behind closed doors? Activists anticipated, moreover, that the New Hampshire data might be used to devalue female victims, in the manner of male lawyers, judges, and politicians saying, “See? She does it too”; case dismissed.
As a result, critics rushed to accuse Straus and Gelles, who were the primary authors, of shoddy research. They argued that their measurement tools were “patriarchal” and that they hadn’t explored the context of the violence: If women were equally abusive, it was only in self-defense. None could assert this as fact; nor did they criticize the lack of context for assaults against women. On the contrary, the Straus/Gelles survey method (called the conflict tactics scale) was quickly adopted as a tool for research into violence against women. But Straus and Gelles, put on the defensive, reworked their survey questions and sampled several thousand households again. Their findings, published in 1985, were virtually identical, with the additional discovery that women initiated the aggression as often as men. About a quarter of the relationships had an exclusively violent male, another quarter had an exclusively violent female, and the rest were mutually aggressive.
Once again, there was a flurry of protest and scrutiny. Scholars set out to prove that male self-esteem was less damaged by abuse, that men took their wives’ violence less seriously, and that injury had to be measured in terms of harm rather than intentions. A woman with a broken jaw could not be compared to a man like Peter Swann, who only got an ashtray to the head. In truth, both sides were guilty of using a male-centered measure of harm, in that neither was looking at the damage women could cause through indirect aggression. Moreover, Straus and Gelles, as well as subsequent scholars, have found that men often do, in fact, sustain comparable levels of injury. A 1995 study of young American military couples, arguably the most patriarchal of all, found that 47 percent of the husbands and wives had bruised, battered, and wounded each other to exactly the same degree. The argument about harm versus intention has been confounded in recent years, at any rate, by the addition of “mental” and “emotional” abuse to the lexicon of female victimization. A spate of new books on the self-help market argue that verbal abuse damages women as badly as physical blows. Picking up on this theme, California has added new provisions to its prisoner clemency policy, allowing women to apply for release for killing their mates due to “emotional” abuse. Since nobody can sensibly argue that women aren’t capable of extremely artful and wounding verbal attacks (studies find high degrees of female verbal host
ility in violent marriages), the whole question of “harm” gets turned on its head.
Nevertheless, battered women’s supporters are so invested in a gender dichotomy that some have even stooped to attacking male victim researchers on a personal level. After Suzanne Steinmetz proposed the battered husband syndrome in an article published in 1978 in Victimology, a speech she was asked by the ACLU to give was canceled because the organization received a bomb threat. Steinmetz also received so many threatening phone calls at home that she had to get an unlisted number. Thirteen years later, in 1991, the chairwoman of a Canadian panel on violence against women, Pat Marshall, when asked if she was familiar with the Straus/Gelles studies, replied that she was familiar with Murray Straus as a man and insinuated that he abused his wife. Marshall repeated these comments so frequently that Straus had to write to the Canadian minister responsible for the status of women to request a public apology. He received one. His wife, the pawn in this pretty maneuver, did not.
Accompanying the resistance to statistics on men has been a tendency to suppress data altogether. A 1978 survey conducted by the Kentucky Commission on Violence Against Women uncovered that 38 percent of the assaults in the state were committed by women, but that finding wasn’t included when the survey was released. (The information was discovered some years later by scholars.) In Detroit, a tally of emergency medical admissions due to domestic violence was widely reported by activists as evidence of injuries to women. No one told the media that 38 percent of the admissions were men. In Canada, the federal government allotted $250,000 to a research project on comparative rates of violence in dating relationships. The lead researcher, Carleton University sociologist Walter DeKeseredy, released his data on women, generating a wave of violence against women headlines and conveying the impression that Canadian college campuses were bastions of violent misogyny. DeKeseredy didn’t mention in his report that he had collected evidence of dating violence against men. If his data, which he intends to publish in 1997, reflect most other studies on dating violence, the rates will be equal. Physical aggression by young women in premarital romance is among the best documented.
“The battered husband syndrome is a backlash,” DeKeseredy said in a 1994 telephone interview. “Men are using this information to keep women out of shelters.” In fact, men are not using the information for anything, because academics with a particular political agenda are keeping it to themselves.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that those who stumble across evidence of battered men and battered lesbians do so quite by accident. A Winnipeg social scientist named Reena Sommer conducted a citywide survey on alcoholism for the University of Manitoba in 1989. Out of curiosity, she included six questions about domestic violence, interested specifically in violence against women. Some years later, she went back to her data and looked at the rates she’d collected on violence against men. To her astonishment, she found that 39.1 percent of the women in her survey had responded that they had committed acts of violence against their spouses at some point in their relationships, with 16.2 percent of those acts defined as severe. Sommer went back to her original list, found the telephone numbers, called up her respondents, and interviewed 737 of them. Ninety percent of the women who’d reported being abusive told her that they hadn’t struck in self-defense. They had been furious or jealous, or they were high, or frustrated. Rational or irrational, impulsive or controlling, they had hit, kicked, thrown, and bitten. Fourteen percent of the men went to the hospital.
In Columbus, Ohio, two young sociologists, Laura Potts and Mary Reiter, were working in a “misdemeanor intake program” in the city attorney’s office, criminal division, trying to settle minor charges through mediation, without bringing individuals to trial. Although nothing they’d read as feminists prepared them to expect it, they kept encountering men who’d been assaulted by women. One was an ailing, seventy-five-year-old man whose much younger wife had smashed him over the head with a porcelain vase. Another was a man attempting to break up with his girlfriend who got slashed in the temple with a screwdriver. In a third case, a man leaving his home to avoid an argument with his wife was chased down the street and stabbed in the back. “What we were seeing in reality,” Potts told a meeting of the American Society of Criminology in 1994, “was a far greater use of [violence by women] than what we saw in the literature.”
In Seattle, a therapist named Michael Thomas encountered the same gap between his schooling and his on-the-job experience. “My initial work was with a child abuse agency,” he says. “When you start listening to the children’s stories, you start to realize that there’s an awful lot more violence by women than any of us had been trained to expect.” Moving into private practice, Thomas began meeting “men who’d been sexually abused, often by their mothers.” Within that distressing realm he heard his first accounts of husband abuse, for it is often men who witnessed or experienced violence in childhood who permit themselves to be assaulted as adults. As one battered husband who’d been abused in his boyhood explained: “We have not had control, as men, so we’re not familiar with it and we’re quite willing to give it over.”
One mild October afternoon in Toronto, Steve Easton sat on the front porch of his small, ramshackle wooden house. A small gray cat, “rescued from an abusive home,” peered warily out the window, perched on a pile of Easton’s homemade fliers about the Easton Alliance for the Prevention of Family Violence, which runs support groups for both battered men and women. It’s hard to know what to expect from a self-proclaimed “abused man”—someone touchy-feely, fragile and bohemian, plying his visitor with herbal tea. But Steve Easton, who is twenty-nine, resembles one of the college-age guys in a Budweiser beer commercial. He is clean-cut and well built, with blow-dried hair and a Gap-style dress shirt.
Easton wasn’t remotely interested in the issue of domestic violence until he fell in love at the age of twenty-two, and fell deeper, into a traumatically volatile romance. His partner, an exotically beautiful woman from upstate New York, had seen her mother abuse her father. Ursula approached her lover the same way. She called him “cock-sucker” and “prick.” She chose what clothes he could wear to work, arguing that certain ties or shirts would attract his female colleagues. If he disregarded her choices, he came home to find his wardrobe burned to ashes. She insisted, as Dana had to Peter, that he couldn’t go out with his friends. If he did, she locked him out of the house for the night. He wasn’t permitted to read the Toronto Sun, because the tabloid carries daily photos of a woman in a bikini—the “Sunshine Girl”—and that was evidence that he lusted after other women. When she started a fight, she would follow him from room to room in their house, keeping him up all night: “I’m not finished with you!” Exhausted, he came late to work too many times and got fired. Ursula punched him, hurled bottles and books at his head, and shoved him through the glass pane of their dining room window. But it wasn’t until the day he hit her back that Easton resolved to leave her.
Against the counsel of friends and family, Easton returned to the relationship again and again before he gathered the emotional resources to end it. When he went to collect his things a final time, several friends escorted him for protection, at his request. Stigmatized, homeless, unemployed, he went in search of counseling. One organization, Education Wife Assault, handed him a pamphlet entitled “Why Husband Abuse Is a Red Herring.” Other shelters and family service organizations responded similarly, reflecting the views of prominent Toronto columnist Michele Landsberg, who wrote, “The next time a men’s advocate starts moaning about ‘husband-battering,’ question his material and suspect his motives. He sure isn’t operating from a basis of reality—and he probably knows it.”
In desperation, Easton finally called his local city hall councilman, wondering if there were organizations anywhere that counseled battered men. He was told no, but that the councilman actually got quite a few calls from men asking that. “This is my number,” Easton said. “If any more men call you,
tell them to get in touch with me.” He also placed an ad in the local community paper, to which men like Peter Swann, starved for validation, responded at once. “When I read Steve’s ad,” Peter says, “I thought we’d been with the same woman.”
Since it began, in 1993, The Easton Alliance—which is perpetually broke, and run out of the home Easton shares with his fiancée, Holly—has received between three and ten calls a day, one thousand to four thousand calls each year, from men who are enmeshed in violent relationships they cannot get out of. The reasons are as multifarious as they are for battered women: the men are afraid for their children; they are unemployed, or working class, and can’t afford new housing. Some men love their wives and don’t want to leave them, just want them to stop; others are too depressed to get out, or they’ve taken cover in booze and don’t have the wits anymore; some think they can take it and can’t. None of these reasons should be surprising, given that men can be broken-down souls, that they can care passionately about their children, that patriarchy may control the economy, but millions of individual males are flat broke. Yet as Easton discovered when he founded his group, the politics that once proclaimed family violence to be a private affair now proclaim it a woman’s affair. There is no longer room—if there ever was—for men to be victims themselves.
By the late 1980s, activists and scholars within the battered women’s movement had grown markedly more militant about the inherent distinctions between men and women. In 1984, for instance, it was still acceptable for a sociologist like Mildred Pagelow to speculate about the differences among women rather than between women and men. She suggested that a strong commitment to traditional beliefs—the husband as master, the bond as sacred—might be an important factor in why some women stayed in violent marriages. But as the female survivor culture swept onto the scene with its mantra of victimhood, scholarship that focused on interpersonal dynamics eddied into backwaters, and more simplistic dogma coursed into the mainstream. It became fashionable to compare battered women to hostages who are kidnapped and terrorized into identifying with their captors. The bottom line was that it could happen to any woman. No one was safe, no one could prevent herself from becoming Hedda Nussbaum.
When She Was Bad Page 15