Spouse Abuse Crackdown, Surprisingly, Nets Many Women
By Carey Goldberg
The New York Times, November 23, 1999
Defenders of battered women long struggled to persuade authorities to
crack down on brutal men who reigned by the fist at home. But those
crackdowns have produced an unexpected consequence: in some places,
one-quarter or more of arrests for domestic assault are not of men
but of women.
In Concord, N.H., nearly 35 percent of domestic assault arrests this
year have been of women, up from 23 percent in 1993. In Vermont,
23 percent of domestic assault arrests this year were of women, compared
with 16 percent in 1997.
And in Boulder County, Colo., one-quarter of defendants charged in domestic
violence cases through September were women.
Those are simple statistics. But women's advocates, law enforcement officials
and academic experts say that little else seems simple about numbers
they find surprisingly high -- except that they seem to have emerged
as an unintended result of mandatory arrest laws and tougher police
rules meant to help women who were the victims of domestic violence.
Advocates for battered women and many social scientists say that most
of the women arrested in these cases were acting in self-defense
and that to punish them is unjust and even dangerous because the
victims will be unlikely to call the police again.
Other social scientists and the police say that the arrest numbers reflect
a real level of violence by women, even though women cause far fewer
injuries than men do and that the finer nets set at women's urging
to catch more domestic abuse naturally sweep up some women as well.
Nearly one million cases of "intimate partner violence" are
reported in America each year, according to the Department of Justice,
with female victims outnumbering males by more than five to one.
A different federal poll, the National Violence Against Women survey,
which uses a smaller sample and different methodology, found that
the gender gap was less pronounced. It estimated last year that 1.5
million women and 835,000 men annually were raped or assaulted by
an intimate partner, a ratio of just under two to one.
The issue of women's arrests sometimes takes on a gender-wars edge. Some
women's advocates see a backlash among predominantly male police
officers. Some men's advocates see a silent epidemic of domestic
abuse of men by women, and call the arrest numbers further proof.
But virtually no one claims to fully understand the phenomenon, which
mystifies because it so diverges from the widely accepted estimate
that 95 percent of batterers are men. Officials say efforts are under
way both to study the phenomenon and improve training for the police,
who must wade daily into 'he said, she said' battles.
"I just wish I could tell you what the cause of it is," said
Bonnie J. Campbell, director of the Violence Against Women Office, which
oversees the $1.6 billion allotted by Congress for five years under the
1994 Violence Against Women Act.
"My instincts tell me some of it is the need to fine-tune and do
a lot of training. I suspect one piece of it is backlash, but that's
just my instinct."
In addition, she noted, "We are seeing numbers that suggest that
young women are getting more aggressive."
Scholars and advocates say they are giving more attention to the arrests
of women. The high numbers have been cropping up for years in spots,
but lately, said Sue Osthoff, director of the National Clearinghouse
for the Defense of Battered Women,
"it's become a bigger problem."
She continued, "I just think it's happening to more women in more
communities."
In Concord, the police joined women's advocates and others this summer
to try to learn what was going on. But after examining 67 arrests
of women for domestic assault, there was no single easy answer, said
the city's police chief, Bill Halacy.
"We had all these hypotheses, most of which didn't turn out to be
true," Mr. Halacy said. One theory was that the arrests might be "dual
arrests" -- the arrest of both partners in a fight -- but that was
true in only 22 percent of the cases, Chief Halacy said. Then, he said, "We
started looking at: 'Is she a former victim and this is like catch-up
time?'" They found that 21 percent of the defendants had earlier
come to police attention as victims. And among the victims, 16 percent
had previously been defendants.
Among the clear points that emerged, Mr. Halacy added, only 3 of 67 assault
victims had to go to a hospital, where they were examined and released,
illustrating that violence by women causes far less injury than violence
by men. In 24 percent of cases, Mr. Halacy said, both parties in
the assault were women, including six cases of mothers assaulted
by their daughters.
Grace Mattern, executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition Against
Domestic and Sexual Violence, said that some officers said they needed "better
training on making that on-the-spot decision on who's the primary
aggressor."
It also seemed, Ms. Mattern said, that many of the women arrested were
involved in violent relationships that did not rise to the level
of battering. In classic battering, one partner seeks to control
and terrorize the other. In the cases now being examined, she said, "when
the couple gets angry, they push each other, they shove each other,
one slaps the other, but no one's a victim or a batterer."
It's more a "you hit me, I'm calling the police" situation,
she said. Throwing things, shoving and hitting, "in this day and
age, can get you arrested," she said.
In the last two or three decades, there has been a growing movement to
defend battered women that has fought for tougher laws concerning
what many had long considered "family matters." A more
recent wave of laws and policies has shifted the focus in some places
to identifying and arresting the "primary aggressor,"
but the upshot has remained the same: a great surge in domestic violence
arrests.
The trouble is that officers face a difficult task when they enter a
house where both partners are disheveled, bruised and furious. Officials
and experts emphasize that the police must have the time, training
and willingness to investigate thoroughly enough to determine whether
a woman is a victim or an abuser.
But in some cases, said Bob Moyer, executive director of the Family Violence
Council of Lancaster County, Neb., an officer is wont to say: "I
can't sort this out so I'm just going to arrest both parties."
One Vermont woman described the process that led to her arrest and conviction
for assaulting her boyfriend this year. The man had been beating
her on and off for five years, she said, including during her two
pregnancies. After she got a restraining order, and the man was warned
not to hit her, he would smash her head into a wall, or body-slam
her, often in front of their small daughter, who would lie on the
floor and cry with her.
One night as she was being beaten, she said, she grabbed a knife and
cut an artery in the man's arm. The police took her in, she said,
but the man was not arrested.
"The police didn't look at him," she said, "didn't care
about the violence he had done to me."
Vermont officials say they are trying to determine why 23 percent of
their domestic assault arrests are of women. Jeri Martinez, an educator
for the Vermont Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault,
said that a look at a few cases indicated that women were largely
being arrested for minor assaults like scratching and slapping.
"People want to look at this data and say women are beating men," she
said, "but the data doesn't tell you that." There are too many
other variables, she said, like a recent expansion of the law.
Ms. Martinez was referring to people like Bert H. Hoff. Mr. Hoff, who
runs MenWeb, a men's issues Web site that has an extensive collection
of articles on battered men, said that the arrest numbers were not
surprising, considering various studies that indicate widespread
domestic violence by women against men.
"Men are finally coming forward and are finally being believed," Mr.
Hoff said.
Murray A. Straus, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire whose
research has shown high levels of domestic assaults by women, said
that to him, the arrest numbers show that "the pendulum is starting
to swing back toward more equal treatment."
It was terrible, he said, when men were getting away with beating their
wives, but then the emphasis "swung to the other extreme" when
new laws and policies made it sound like only men could commit domestic
violence.
But some wonder whether the pendulum has swung back too far. Margaret
Martin, an associate professor at Eastern Connecticut State University
who has looked at the Connecticut arrest rates, blamed "a kind
of over-routinized enforcement of the law" for the fact that
one-third of the state's domestic assault arrests are dual arrests.
As study of the numbers proceeds, so do attempts to improve police training,
like a program recently begun in California, where the state Justice
Department reported that almost 17 percent of domestic assault arrests
in 1998 were of women.
Alana Bowman, deputy city attorney of Los Angeles and the point person
on domestic violence, said, "I think training is the key component
to allow law enforcement to see domestic violence in a context" --
a context, she said, that requires thorough investigation to look
for things like power and fear that may not be immediately obvious.
State-level training, began this month, she said, but was introduced
in Los Angeles at the start of this year and has reduced by one-third
the arrests of women compared with last year. High arrest rates of
women, she said, seem to reflect confusion among the police about
new laws.
Eve Buzawa, a domestic violence expert at the University of Massachusetts
in Lowell, said her research suggested that it would also be wise
to return more discretion to the police on whom to arrest. "When
you think about community policing,"
she said, "in every other area they're trying to teach the police
to use discretion properly."
The high rate of arrests, particularly of women, raises a basic policy
question: Has the bar been set too low on domestic violence? Should
a couple that scuffles really be vulnerable to arrest?
Chief Halacy of Concord said he had asked himself that question and concluded
that even if the violence was minor, "Our hope is that this
takes on sort of the flavor that Driving While Intoxicated did in
years past -- that it's no longer socially acceptable."