Intimate violence

Preface

"People are not for hitting." We began our research on intimate violence more than fifteen years ago with this deep conviction. Our research began in the 1970s when feelings about the Vietnam War were still running high. The country had been rocked by race riots and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. We paid much too high a price for violence fifty-five thousand young men in Vietnam, dreams of a bright and prosperous future snuffed out by the deaths of political and social leaders, and the suffering of countless victims of violent crime in the streets.

While others attended to public acts of violence, we were drawn to the more private acts. We thought that it was private violence that was at the root of public violence. At first we were frustrated. So little had been written on child abuse and wife abuse that the entire literature could be read at one sitting. Worse, much of what we read was flawed, biased, and unsound. Everything we read and all the advice of colleagues and friends suggested that we were looking up a blind alley; there just wasn't much family violence out there, we were told. We persisted. That it had not appeared in print did not mean it did not exist. We would find newspaper reports on child abuse or family homicide each day. Something was out there.

Initially our involvement was purely scientific. Determining how to study child abuse and wife abuse represented a scientific puzzle to solve. Our job, we assumed, was to conduct sound scientific research so that others (clinicians and policy makers) could act to prevent and treat violence and abuse.

For a while we were able to keep our distance. We handed out surveys to college students. Later we ventured out into the community to interview people in their homes. Still, we were insulated by the scientific approach and the numbers. Always the numbers enabled us to remain detached.

But the distance could not be maintained. What started out as a short-term program of research has become life's work. Plans for other research were never realized. Family violence has taken hold of our lives just as it has the lives of most of the people who try to study, understand, and help the victims.

Slowly we came closer to the problem. Our seemingly dispassionate scholarly books and articles produced a few letters and some telephone calls from other researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and then finally, victims themselves. Friends and relatives began to take us aside and tell us about acts of family violence they had observed or committed. Speaking engagements produced more contacts, more firsthand experience, more sorrow from which we could no longer hide behind numbers. We lost some of our distance. We were forced to acknowledge our personal involvement. "How can this be?" we first asked. "What can we do?" we now ask.

To conduct research on intimate violence is to balance on a thin edge of emotion. On the one hand is the safety and security of scientific detachment. On the other hand is the agony of watching a baby, skull crushed from being thrown against a wall, wheeled into an emergency room. There is the near-total frustration of talking with a battered wife who wants help, while also knowing that there is practically no place she can go to escape the cycle of violence in which she finds herself. And there is anger-anger toward men who beat their wives, rage toward a parent who holds a child down in a scalding-hot bathtub, anger toward a political system whose budget for family violence is no more than the amount of a rounding error at the Pentagon, anger at clinicians who are too quick to take children away from parents, and equal anger at clinicians who wait too long.

Anger can become cynicism quickly. It is easy (and somewhat accurate) to conclude that family violence has always existed and that there is no evidence to suggest it will end or even diminish greatly in our lifetime. Cynicism, like scientific detachment, is a way of coping with the horror and tragedy of intimate abuse. Yet, even with some detachment and some cynicism, we are hopeful. We conduct our research, write our books and articles, and travel around the world to speak on this topic because we believe that human beings are basically nonviolent. We believe that parents and partners are not naturally mean and violent, but rather that violence arises our of social and psychological conditions that can change or be changed. We can choose to be nonviolent. We can raise a generation of nonviolent children who will never perceive violence as a legitimate means of self-expression or problem solving.

It was with these beliefs in mind that we began our research fifteen years ago; it was with these hopes in mind that we commenced the research that produced much of the information we report in this book. And it was with these ideals and aspirations that this book was written. Knowledge can make a difference. People can too.

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The sociologist Dair Gillespie points out that before the Civil War, American wives had many duties and few rights. Wives were not permitted to own property, even if they had inherited it. Husbands could collect and use their wives' wages, choose the education and religion of their children, and punish their wives if they displeased them. Husbands could even will children (born or unborn) to other guardians. If a divorce was granted, it was the husband who would decide who would have custody of the children. Husbands, according to Gillespie were their wives' companions, superiors, and masters. p.32

We mentioned thar the poor are overrepresented in official statistics on child abuse. In part, this is due to their greater likelihood of heing violent. However, it is also due to the fact that the poor run the greatest risk of heing accurately and inaccurately labeled "abusers." An injured child with poor parents is more likely to be labeled "abused" than a middle-class child with the same injuries. The sociologists Patrick Turbett and Richard O'Toole conducted an experiment with physicians and nurses. Each group was divided in half. One-half received a medical file that described a child, the child's injuries, and facts about the parents. Unbeknownst to the participants in the experiment, the files were systematically varied. For onehalf of the subjects, the child's father was described as heing a teacher, while the other half read that the father was a janitor. Even though the injury to the child was identical, the son of the janitor was more likely to be described as a victim of abuse than the son of the teacher. Turhett and O'Toole next kept the occupation and injury the same but varied the race of the child. Half of the subjects read that the child was black, while the other half had a file that described the child as white. The black children were more likely to be labeled as "abused."

Here again we see evidence that people want to see abuse as occurring in families "other than theirs." Seeing abuse as confined to poor or black families is yet another way people construct the acts of others as deviant and their own behavior as normal. p.43-4

Reviews of the different forms of drugs and their possible impact on violent behavior have found some consistent evidence. Opiates, such as heroin, are rarely associated with violence. Marijuana produces a euphoric effect. Contrary to the view of the U.S. commissioner of narcotics in 1937, Marijuana may actually reduce, not produce, violent behavior. Research on LSD also finds that the physiological effects of this drug are antithetical with violence. Amphetamine use, however, is quite another story. This is a drug that raises excitability and muscle tension. This may lead to impulsive behavior. The behavior that follows from amphetamine use is related to both the dosage and the pre-use personality of the user. High-dosage users who already have aggressive personalities are likely to become more aggressive when using this drug.

It is clearly difficult to establish a direct causal link between drug use and violence in the home. Type of drug, dosage, previous personality or character disorders, social setting, and social expectations all play a role in influencing the behavior of a substance user. Because of the ethical considerations that are involved in conducting research on drugs and violence, it is almost impossible to design a study that would disentangle all the possible factors that relate to drug use and violence.

Studies of nonhuman primates may help us understand the effect of certain drugs. The primatologists Neil Smith and Larry Byrd, of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, have studied the behavior of what they refer to as "captive groupliving monkeys." The monkeys (stump-tailed macaques) were given a protocol of d-amphetamine and then observed. Those monkeys receiving the drug did increase in their aggressive behavior. Most remarkable, in terms of our concern with family violence, was that the aggression was more likely to be directed at kin-related monkeys than non-kin-related. More importantly it was the youngest kin monkeys who were the targets of the aggression. Smith and Byrd have applied their findings from nonhuman primate research to the human condition and estimate that perhaps as much as 5 percent of instances of physical child abuse are related to amphetamine use and abuse. p.47-8

Simply stated, the more normal hitting is perceived to be, the more the people doing the hitting and being hit view the act as legitimate, normal, and useful, the less likely those persons are to define the behavior as "violent." The public shares the view that so-called normal hitting is not violent. We found that it is difficult to arouse an indifferent public to viewing acts other than the most sensational and outrageous as violent. In our own research, we have always viewed violence as a continuum, beginning with slaps, grabs, and spankings, and extending up to murder. Yet, we are frequently criticized that such a broad definition dilutes our message and the possible impact of our research and recommendations. For our part, we think s~ich criticisms are not only incorrect, but potentially harmful. Claiming that only outrageous and unusual acts represent violence serves to license the more normal slaps, spankings, and pushes. As we have said again and again, violence is possible if we fail to define it as wrong or improper. And, as we have found, permitting the socalled "normal" acts of violence sets the stage for a possible escalation to the more harmful and dangerous behaviors. p.53-4

Twenty years of discussion, debate, and action have led us to conclude that there will never be an accepted or acceptable definition of abuse, because abuse is not a scientific or clinical term. Rather, it is a political concept. Abuse is essentially any act that is considered deviant or harmful by a group large enough or with sufficient political power to enforce the definition. Abuse is a useful term for journalists who want to capture the attention of their readers or viewers. It is a useful political term because it carries such a strong pejorative connotation that it captures public attention. Unfortunately, there is no one set of objective acts that can be characterized as abusive. What is defined as abuse depends on a process of political negotiation. What is now considered child abuse and wife abuse is the product of a twenty-year effort to educate clinicians, policy makers, and the public about what acts and actions are harmful to women, children, and other family members. p.57-8

Parent Victims. One the other side of the coin of adolescent abuse are those parents of teenage children who are beaten and abused by their children. Most people assume that because mothers and fathers are typically larger than their children and command most, if not all, of the family's social and economic resources, they are immune to violence at the hands of their children. Such, however, is not the case. Clinicians have identified some severe and grievous injuries caused by children. The physician Henry Harbin and his colleague Dennis Madden report an instance in which an eleven-year-old boy became violent after being spanked by his mother. The child pushed his mother down, broke her coccyx, and then kicked her in the face while she was on the floor. The sociologist Carol Warren studied fifteen adolescents who were admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Although some of the children, as young as twelve years old, lacked physical strength, they more than compensated in speed and choice of weapons. One twelve-year-old poured gasoline in the bathroom while his mother was in there, threw down a match, and shut the door. p.61

The great dilemma in applying the term neglect to acts of omission or commission by parents is determining whether the parents neglected their children by choice, or simply did not have the financial or material resources to do better. It is certainly one thing to deliberately starve a child or fail to provide adequate clothing. However, many children suffer malnutrition because their parents simply do not have the resources to purchase food. It is not uncommon for families to fall through the cracks of the social service system and for their children to pay the price. In these cases society, not parents, is responsible for the harm done.

Again, as with emotional abuse, there are few adequate statistics that can be used to estimate how common neglect is. Our own best guess is that child neglect is about twice as frequent as are acts of physical abuse. This means that perhaps one in eleven children, or about four to five million children each year, suffers from some form of child neglect. p.69

Sometimes investigators agree on specific characteristics that are believed to be associated with violence; other times the findings are contradictory. There is one thing that researchers agree on-there are a multitude of factors associated with violence in the home. Despite public clamor for a single-factor explanation, no one factor -not mental illness, not experience with violence, not poverty, not stress, and not alcohol or drugs-explains all or most acts of intimate violence. p.84

Economic adversity and worries about money pervade the typical violent home. Alicia, the thirty-four-year-old wife of an assemblylme worker, has beaten, kicked, and punched both her children. So has her husband Fred. She spoke about the economic problems that hung over their heads:

He worries about what kind of a job he's going to get, or if he's going to get a job at all. He always worries about supporting the family. 1 think 1 worry about it more than he does. . . . It gets him angry and frustrated. He gets angry a lot. I think he gets angry at himself lor not providing what he feels we need. He has to take it out on someone, and the kids and me are the most available ones.

We witnessed a more graphic example of the impact of economic stress during one of our in-home interviews with a violent couple. When we entered the living room to begin the interview we could not help but notice the holes in the living room walls. During the course of the interview, Jane, the twenty-four-year-old mother of three children, told us that her husband had been laid off from his job at a local shipyard and had come home, taken out his shotgun, and shot up the living room. Violence had not yet been directed at the children, but as we left and considered the family, we could not help but worry about the future targets of violent outbursts. p.85

Violent parents are likely to have experienced or been exposed to violence as children. Although this does not predetermine that they will he violent (and likewise, some abusive parents grew up in nonviolent homes), there is the heightened risk that a violent past will lead to a violent future.

One of the more surprising outcomes of our first national survey of family violence was that there was no difference between blacks and whites in the rates of abusive violence toward children. This should not have been the case. First, most official reports of child abuse indicate that blacks are overrepresented in the reports. Also, blacks in the United States have higher rates of unemployment than whites and lower annual incomes-two factors that we know lead to higher risk of abuse. That blacks and whites had the same rate of abusive violence was one of the great mysteries of the survey. A careful examination of the data collected unraveled the apparent mystery. While blacks did indeed encounter economic problems and life stresses at greater rates than whites, they also were more involved in family and community activities than white families. Blacks reported more contact with their relatives and more use of their relatives for financial support and child care. It was apparent that the extensive social networks that black families develop and maintain insulate them from the severe economic stresses they also experience, and thus reduce what otherwise would have been a higher rate of parental violence. p.86

Dale, wife of a Fortune 500 executive, wrote us so that we would know that wife beating is not confined to only poor households. Her husband beats her regularly. He has hurled dishes at her, thrown her down stairs, and blackened her eyes. When her husband drinks, she often spends the night huddled in the backseat of their Lincoln Continental. Marion lives so far on the other side of the tracks, she might as well be on another planet. She and her husband live five stories up in a run-down tenement. Heat is a luxury that they often cannot afford, and when they can afford it, the heat rarely works. Marion's husband has broken her jaw and ribs, and has shot at her on two occasions. The range of homes where wife beating occurs seems to defy categorization. One can pick up a newspaper and read of wife beating in a lower-class neighborhood and then turn the page and read that the wife of a famous rock musician has filed for divorce claiming she was beaten. p.88

The latter lesson ties in well with our finding that stress also leads to an increased risk of violence in the home. One theory holds that people learn to use violence to cope with stress. If this is correct, then stress would be a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for family violence. In other words, stress alone does not cause violence unless the family members have learned that being violent is both appropriate and also will not meet with negative sanctions. Another theory is that learning to be violent and stress are two independent contributors to intimate violence and abuse. p.91

Lurking beneath the surface of all intimate violence are confrontations and controversies over power. Our statistical evidence shows that the risk of intimate violence is the greatest when all the decision making in a home is concentrated in the hands of one of the partners. Couples who report the most sharing of decisions report the lowest rates of violence. Our evidence goes beyond the statistics. Over and over again, case after case, interview after interview, we hear batterers and victims discuss how power and control were at the core of the events that led up to the use of violence. Violent husbands report that they "need to" hit their wives to show them who is in charge. Some of the victimized wives struggle against domination and precipitate further violence. Other wives tell us that they will actually provoke their husband to violence because they want him to he more dominant. This is not so much a case of the wife being a masochist as it is another example of the conflicts and struggles that occur as couples confront the traditional cultural expectation that the male should be the dominant person in the household. Some couples fight against this prescription, while others fight to preserve it. p.92

Common sense would argue that weekends are the most violent time of the week for families. Common sense would not lead one to assume that the most violent times of the year are Christmas and Easter. When we looked at which day of the week violence was most likely to occur, we found that the empirical evidence was in full support of common sense. Weekends are when families spent the most time together and when the potential for conflicts and conflicts of interest is greatest. Not surprisingly, seven out of ten violenr episodes we talked about with family members took place on either Saturday or Sunday. Weekends after a payday can be especially violent. Janice, the mother of an infant daughter, told us about the typical weekend fight:

It starts over money. He gets paid on Friday. So he comes home on Fridays and I ask him for money. I am usually at the stove cooking when he comes home. And, I have no money left. So I asks. This last Friday he said he didn't have no money. I got real mad. I mean, its payday and he has no money? He said he borrowed money and had to pay it hack. I said he just must be lyin'. He spends it on booze or gambles it. Other times we fights because he gives me only fifty dollars. I can't feed him and the baby with just fifty dollars. So I got mad and started to yell.

Thus, the days of the week that are the most violent are those that combine the most conflict and violence-producing structural components of family life-time together, privacy, and stress.

Common sense would not suggest that violence is most likely to erupt at times of the year when families celebrate holidays and the spirit of family togetherness. Yet, contrary to common sense, it is the time from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day and again at Easter that violence in the home peaks.

As we conducted our interviews with members of violent homes we heard again and again about violence that occurred around the Christmas tree. Even the Christmas tree became a weapon in some homes:

I remember one particularly violent time. When we were first married. He was out drinking and he came home stinking drunk. I suppose I must have said something. Well, he took a fit. He started putting his fist threw the walls. Finally, he just picked up the Christmas tree and threw it at me.

Another woman recalled her most violent experience:

He hit me just before New Year's Day. I don't really recall what went on. We argue a lot. This time it might have been about money, or maybe the kids. Anyway, he got fierce. He punched me again and again. 1 was bleeding real had. He had to take me to the hospital. It was the worst time of the year I ever had.

Perhaps people have a clearer memory of a violent event if it happens around a holiday. While this is a plausible explanation for our findings, it is not the complete answer. We have examined weekly reports of hospital admissions for child abuse and neglect, and found that the peak times of year for admissions were the period from Christmas to New Year's Day, and again in the spring around Easter Sunday. p.94-5

A number of factors may contribute to the likelihood of domestic violence and abuse during the Christmas season. This is a time when families can assume tremendous financial burdens. Purchasing Christmas gifts can either take a toll on a family's resources or plunge a family into debt. Stress can also come from not buying gifts and presents. If a family cannot afford gifts expected by children, loved ones, and others, this can be extremely frustrating. The holiday season offers a stark contrast between what is expected and what a family can afford.

Holidays also create nonfinancial stress. Christmas and Easter holidays project images of family harmony, love, and togetherness. Songs, advertisements, and television specials all play up the image of the caring, loving, and even affluent family. A family with deep conflict and trouble may see these images in sad and frustrating contrast wirh their own lives. We know that prison riots are more likely to occur during holiday seasons, as prisoners apparently become stressed about being separated from family and friends during times of the year when such closeness is expected. Clearly, being with family and friends, but having unmet expectations for love and warmth, can also be extremely frustrating.

Time of day and time of year analysis supports the notion that privacy and stress are important structural contributors to domestic violence. Conflict frequently erupts over a stressful event, during a stressful time of the day, or around a stressful time of year. If the eruption takes place in a private setting, and at a time and place where it is difficult to flee or back down, the conflict can escalate into violence. The more privacy, the greater the power difference, and the fewer options the victim has in terms of getting help or finding protection, the more the violence can escalate.

The saddest and most frustrating aspect of our analysis of the structural, personal, familial, temporal, and spatial dynamics of intimate violence is that our results seem to say that violence in the home is inevitable. Lessons learned as a child set the stage for using violence as an adult. The structural makeup of the modern family is like a pressure cooker containing and escalating stress and conflict. If violence breaks out late at night, on a weekend, or a holiday, victims often have no place too run, no place to hide.

Our profile of violent families is not quite as bleak as it might seem. First, no one structural factor, personal experience, or situation predetermines that all or any family will be violent. Second, families do not live in a vacuum. Family members and people outside of the home can intervene to turn down the heat under the pressure cooker. We have found that friends, relatives, and neighbors can successfully intervene and reduce the pressure that could lead to violence. We will have more to say about this in part 2 when we examine the aftermath of intimate violence and the methods that can be used to reduce or prevent violence. p.95-7

The computer spewed out the first printout of our data in the winter of 1977. We hurriedly flipped through the tables with mixed reactions. When we saw the statistics we were more than satisfied. There were enough cases of violence to allow for analysis. Indeed, the incidence was quite a bit higher than we had expected. We had not, after all, wasted a quarter of a million dollars of the taxpayers' money. Finding enough cases to conduct a proper statistical analysis was small compensation for discovering so much human pain and suffering. We were saddened to find the suffering so pervasive, and embarrassed that its existence was necessary to justify our own research. p.102

Unlike most debates among scholars, this one spilled over into the public media. United Press International headlined a wire service report on Steinmetz's article: STUDY BACKS UP SUSPICIONS HUSBAND IS MORE BATTERED SPOUSE. An Ann Landers column on husband abuse included a letter from Susan Schechter, then director of women's services at the Chicago Loop Center, YMCA. Schechter attacked the validity of the Steinmetz article. She said that Steinmetz's data on husbands as the most likely victims of abuse were being used against women's groups seeiiing funding for shelters. Steinmetz debated the meaning and interpretation of her data with journalists Roger Langley and Richard Levy on "The Today Show." Time magazine devoted a full-page story to husband abuse in March 1978. Dr. Joyce Brothers mentioned the husband abuse data in her newspaper column. With each telling of the story, the estimates of abused men were inflated. Our survey found that about two million men were victims of violence that could cause injury. When journalist Langley wrote an article for the New York Daily News, he pushed the figure up to twelve million men. Woozles, it seems, tend to multiply in direct proportion to the degree of controversy associated with a story.

There was no resolution to the public debate over battered husbands. The debate was fought over numbers-how many husbands were hit or abused-and it missed the mark. The real issues are initiation of violence, outcomes, and consequences. The same study that found fortysix men in one thousand being hit also found that the vast majority of these men were hit because they had initiated the violence and abuse. By and large, women used violence to protect themselves. Victimized women are literally between the proverbial rock and the hard place. If they leave, they stand a good chance of joining the millions of other women who have feminized poverty in America. If they stay, they are either beaten again or forced to use extreme physical violence to protect themselves. p.105

Perhaps the most unfortunate outcome of the wrangle over battered men is that since the debate in the late 1970s, there has been virtually no additional research carried out on the topic. The furor among social scientists and in the public media has contaminated the entire topic. Consequently, we have refused every request for an interview or to appear on any talk show on this topic for fear of yet again being misquoted, miscast, or misrepresented. Other social scientists who witnessed the abuse heaped on our research groupespecially on Suzanne Steinmetz-have given the topic of battered men a wide berth. p.105-6

IS FAMILY VIOLENCE INCREASING?

Ten years ago only one in ten Americans thought rhat child abuse was a serious social problem. By 1982, nine out of ten people surveyed by Louis Harris and Associates thought that child abuse was a serious problem. Has the problem increased ninefold, or have Americans just become more 3ware of the dimensions of intimate violence?

To listen to the talk shows and to read the popular magazines one would be convinced that we are in the midst of an epidemic of domestic assault. Those who believe that there has been an explosion of domestic disturbance in America have ample evidence to support their claim. They point correctly to greater stress in our society, unemployment, economic problems, and the rising numbers of single parent households. They point incorrectly to the supposed rise in the divorce rate-actually the divorce rate increased consistentiy from 1965 to 1979, but has remained stable since 1979.

Lost among the clamor about the deterioration and near collapse of the family and the daily reports of new and more chilling cases of child or wife abuse is the fact that violence between intimates is not new. Harming those you love and are related to goes back to Cain killing Abel in Genesis. The historical record is full of evidence of the killing, maiming, and beating of children by parents and wives by husbands. Lloyd DeMause examined the history of childhood and graphically noted that in 1526 the latrines of Rome were said to "resound with the cries of children who had been plunged into them." Women, Russell and Rebecca Dobash note, have traditionally been the "appropriate victims" of family violence.

The available historical and cross-cultural evidence might support the claim the violence in the home today is no worse than it has been in the past. Perhaps the chances of violencc occurring in the home today arc less than chances decades or centuries ago. Current population data could be used to argue that today's families are actually less likely to be violent than families ten or twenty years ago. Couples in the 1980s are marrying later, having fewer children, and are having fewer unwanted children. These factors are a11 related to reduced chances of violence occurring in the home. In point of fact, these data can also he used to argue that the family is not dcteriorating hut remaining a strong, viable institution, despite the preachings of conservative politicians and religious zealots. p.106-7

Quite frankly, even before we designed the Second National Family Violence Survey and applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for the more than $600,000 we needed to conduct the study, we expected to find no change in the rates of domestic violence. Our first survey found the rates of abuse to be around 4 percent. For there to be a statistically significant decrease or increase, we would have had to find a change of plus or minus nearly one or two percentage points. This would represent a change of between 20 and 50 percent. Such a massive change seemed highly unlikely.

We were surprised in 1976 when our computers and calculators told us that the rates of family abuse were as high as they were. We were shocked in 1985 to find that, contrary to our expectations, the rates of abusive violence toward children and women had declined far more than we could have ever expected (see fig. 1, 2, and 3 in Appendix C.) p.108

Reactions to our report were swift, emotional, and contradictory. Although a New York Times editorial called the findings "good news," others were a good deal more skeptical. The Christian Science Monitor reported that an unnamed Reagan administration official had "serious doubts" about the accuracy of the surveys. Dr. Frederick Green, vice president of Children's Hospital National Medical Center in DC, disputed the findings, noting that his caseload of child abuse had not declined, but had risen. The sociologist Richard Rerk summed up the skeptics when he was interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor and said, "Given all we know about the pattern of crime statistics, a 47 percent drop is so unprecedented as to be unbelievable. Never before has there been a drop of that magnitude, that rapidly."

The strongest argument against the claim that family violence has decreased is that the changes we found may have been artificialdue to what researchers refer to as rnethodological artifacts. One methodological artifact is that we used different methods to collect our data. We collected the dara in '1975 using in-person interviews. The interviews in 1985 were conducted over the telephone. Perhaps the difference in dara collection produced the changed rates of violence. Rigorous research methodologists objected to our changing data collection techniques. They pointed out that by choosing to coliect data for the second survey by telephone, we were unable to interview families who do not have phones. This amounts to about 5 percent of households. More importantly, these are likely to be low-income households who are at high risk of being violent and abusive.

A second plausible explanation for the decline in the rates of reported child and wife beating is that respondents may have been more reluctant to report severe violence in 1985 than in 1975. There has been a massive amount of public and media attention paid to child and wife abuse in the last decade. There have been numerous national media campaigns, new child abuse and neglect laws have been passed, hot lines for reporting have been instituted, and there has been almost daily media attention paid to the problems of intimate violence. The decrease in reporting may be due to what the sociologist Joseph Gusfield calls a "moral passage." As family violence becomes less acceptable, fewer parents and husbands become willing to admit participating in violence.

Richard Berk claims that a 47 percent decline in the rate of child abuse is unprecedented and nearly unbelievable. Yet, had Berk consulted the Uniform Crime Reports tabulation of homicide rates he would have found that the rate increased by 100 percent between 1963 and 1973, and then dropped by 29 percent between 1980 and 1984. If the same rate of declinc is maintained for six more years, the ten-year decline would be greater than our 47 percent change. Thus, there is precedent for our findings. The homicide statistics parallel our own findings. p.109-10

The belief that battered and abused children grow up to become abusive parents is widely shared and accepted by professionals and the general public. Yet, among students of child maltreatment there is heated controversy over the validity of the claim that abuse leads to abuse. On the one side of the debate are those who see childhood experiences with abuse as a major and direct cause of later violent behavior. Henry Kempe and Barton Schmitt claimed that "untreated abused children frequently grow up to be delinquents, murderers, a~nd barterers of the next generation of children." On the other side is the child development expert Edward Zigler of Yale University who, after a review of the major research studies on the link between abuse experienced as a child and abusive behavior as an adult, concluded that "the majority of ahused children do not become abusive parents" and ". . . the time has come for the intergenerational myth to be placed aside."

The most careful review of research on the intergenerational link finds that between 18 and 70 percent of those individuals who grew up in violence will re-create that behavior as adults. Zigler and his colleague Joan Kaufman believe that the most accurate estimate within this wide range is thar the rate of intergenerational transmission is about 30 percent. They conclude that this means that the link between being maltreated and becoming abusive is far from inevitable; thus they advocate abandoning the notion of abused children growing up to be abusive. p.121

The researchers Rosemary Hunter and Nancy Kilstrom reported that the parents who did not repeat the cycle of abuse shared a number of characteristics. These nonabusive parents had more extensive social supports and fewer ambivalent feelings about their pregnancies. Their babies were healthier. The parents also displayed more open anger about their own abusive experiences and were able to describe these traumas more freely. If they had been abused, it was by one parent, while the other parent served as a supportive life raft in a sea of trouble and pain. p.122

Among the most obvious personality traits of children from violent homes is aggressiveness. It has been our experience, and the experience of many clinicians, that children from violent homes are not only aggressive and oppositional, they are also extremely wary. A social worker who treats battered children described a first session with a battering victim.

We did not exactly start off on the proper foot. I was just finishing my lunch when 1 took the elevator up to the outpatient clinic where I was to meet the family. My cotherapist had already introduced herself to the state welfare worker and the child. I walked up to all three of them. 1 had a doughnut on a plate that was to be my dessert. The child (a ten-year-old boy) grahbed the doughnut off my plate and stuffed it into his mouth. Things went downhill from here. I did manage to get him to come with me to the office where we were to meet for therapy. Once in the office he was all over the place. He moved sporadically from one chair to the next, from one toy to another. He would glance or glare at me from rime to time, but never directly respcnded to my attempts to start a conversation. Nor was he interested in any nonverbal interaction-such as a game or playing with a toy. After about fifteen minutes of frenetic behavior, he discovered the window and the fact that we were on the tenth floor. He jumped up onto the inside windowsill and stood flush against the window-first facing me, then facing out. The window was sealed, the building is air-conditioned, but it did not give me a secure feeling to see him pressed against the window staring down. When our fifryminute session was over I was hungry, exhausted, and frustrated. I had failed to make any real contact with him at all.

Researchers and clinicians lisr several characteristics that have been found among abused children, including symptoms such as bed-wetting, poor self-concept, a tendency to withdraw and become isolated, and a pattern of hyperactivity and tantrums. E. Milling Kinard reviewed much of the literature on the psychological consequences of abuse and found other traits such as an inability to trust others, difficulties relating to both peers and adults, and a generalized unhappiness. The psychiatrist Brandt Steele notes that many abused children see themselves as ugly, stupid, inept, clumsy, or somehow defective. p.124-5

Walker's theory of learned helplessness has its roots in the research of the experimental psychologist, Martin Seligman. Seligman and his associates placed dogs in cages and administered electrical shocks at random and varied intervals. The dogs learned quickly that no matter how they responded, they could not control the shocks. At the beginning, the dogs tried to escape. When they found that they could not stop the shocks, they stopped searching for an escape and became passive and submissive. At this point the researchers altered the experiment. They first tried to teach the dogs to cross to the other side of the cage and escape. The dogs remained passive. The researchers then left the cage doors open and showed the dogs the way out. The dogs were still passive, made no attempt to get out, and made no attempt to avoid the shocks. Only by repeated attempts to physically drag the dogs out of the cage were the dogs motivated to overcome their learned helplessness and attempt to escape. Seligman's group and other experimental psychologists have repeated these experiments with cats, fish, rats, birds, primates, and even humans with the same results. p.142

... When we asked this particular woman whether she called the police, she responded quietly and politely, "Honey, in this town my husband is the police." p.149

Indifference also occurs when the observer, a physician, social worker, police officer, or judge, actually approves of the use of violence toward a victim. In one case a presiding judge refused to sentence an alleged sexual abuser to jail because he believed that the sixyear-old victim had acted provocatively and enticed the abuser into having sex with her. Those who think that sparing the rod spoils the child are often reluctant to intervene in cases of physical abuse unless grievous damage is inflicted upon the child. Feminists have argued for years that police and court oificers fail to protect victims of battering because they condone women being hit. Two judges in Massachusetts have recently volunteered to stop hearing domestic violence cases because their actions and comments on the bench persuaded the state chief justice that the judges were biased in their handling of domestic violence cases-a polite way of saying that the judges were far too approving of the violence inflicted on women. p.163

Lately, however, prosecution has become an increasingly prevalent form of intervention in cases of child abuse, and the criminal justice system has begun to play a larger role in prevention and treatment of maltreatment. Eli Newberger, a leading voice iri the field of child abuse treatment and prevention, has criticized the more aggressive role now played by the criminal justice system, and notes that prosecution itself is an increasingly prevalent form of abuse. For example:

A 12-year-old girl in California became the subject of a mandated child abuse case report when she, her mother, and her stepfather sought help from a therapist for a problem in the family. The details of the reporr have not been made public, but there apparently was concern on the part of the therapist that the child might be a victim of sexual abuse. The agency receiving the reporr made the district attorney aware of the complaint. A criminal charge was brought against the stepfather, bur at trial the child refused to divulge what may have happened between her stepfather and her. The prosecutor asked the court to find her in contempt if she continued to refuse to testify. The judge ordered her held in solitary confinement until she agreed to tell the court the facts. She was held in solitary for nine days until she was freed by a higher court.

Two brothers, 7 and 12 years old, were ordered a week ago to remain in the custody of a father accused of sexually abusing the younger child. To quote yesterday's article in the Chicago Sun-Times: "The boys wanted to be with their mother, bur the judge said she could take custody only if she came up with a cash bond she couldn't raise.. . "

Newberger, an ardent supporter of the compassionate approach to child maltreatment, notes with concern that the current punitive approach to deviance in our society has led to a reckless abandonment of social welfare approaches to giving support to families and children under stress. Prosecution of abusers, he notes, serves a number of functions-some helpful, some harmful, and some futile. Prosecution, according to Newberger, can:

1. Punish offenders-its first and most appropriate function
2. Provide public entertainment
3. Provide excellent opportunities for district attorneys to further their political ambitions
4. Provide work and income for defense lawyers
5. Justify the abandonment of social welfare approaches to human troubles
6. Serve as a smokescreen to hide the real causes of abuse (and thus continue to support the myth of abusers as aliens and victims as innocents)
7. Punish the victim p.167-9

Mediation, in one form or another, was the typical form of intervention used by police officers. The most common form of intervention used by the police when they were called by a woman was to try to calm everyone down (see fig. 14 in Appendix C). Other frequent interventions included taking time to listen to the woman's story, taking information and filing a report, issuing a warning, and breaking up the fight if it was still going on. Stronger steps were somewhat less common. Four out of ten women said that the police ordered the man out of the house. As we noted earlier, arrest (and even its threat) is the least common form of police intervention. Only four women said that the police arrested their husbands or male partners, while one woman was herself arrested. Two women said that the police did nothing. Asked whether they thought the police should have been easier or tougher, most women said that the police officers' response was about right. Overall, the women we talked to seemed satisfied with the actions taken by the police.

Police intervention when called by men is similar to intervention when the caller is female. Mediation is still the most common intervention. Police were most likely to try to calm everyone down, take time to listen to the story, take information, and file a report. Two of the men who called the police were themselves arrested, while the police never arrested the wife or female partner of the man who called. The range of actions and interventions used by the police was much narrower when they were called by men; neither the man or his partner was ordered out of the house, no threats of arrest were made, and there was no hitting or pushing of the parties involved in the marital violence. Two men said thar the police did nothing. p.170-1

There is no typical shelter with typical services. Although the goal of each shelter is to protect women from violent men, the rules, regulations, and organizational structure of shelters vary considerably. Some are in secret locations. Women who call for help are told they will be met and brought to the shelter. Many shelters prohibit men, including workmen or the police, from entering. Male children are accepted into these shelters, but older male adolescents are not allowed to stay with their battered mothers. Virtually all shelters have rules that prohibit the spanking of children. There are limits on how long women can remain, and limits as to how many times women can return to the shelter after going back to their violent partners. p.175

BABY DIES UNDER CARE OF PROTECTIVE SERVICES, the newspaper headlines read. An investigation of the Department of Social Services was initiated. The director resigned, and a new director was appointed. The standard practice for dealing with battered children changed from, "Keep the family together," to "at all costs, protect the child." This mollified the public, and it also restored calm to relations among the police, social services, and the hospital child abuse team-all of whom blamed each other for Diane's death. Eighteen months later, the protective service system experienced another tragedy that swung the pendulum back to the principle of keeping families together.

Case 2: "Protecting" the Victim

Some months after Diane's death, an investigation revealed that a one-year-old child was being neglected by his mother. The mother was a teenage, single parent, who seemed both uninterested and unable to care for the needs of her son. The Department of Social Services chose to remove the young boy from his mother and to place him in a foster home. Within six months the boy was dead, beaten to death by his foster father. Again there were newspaper headlines. Again an investigation was begun-this time it revealed rhat the overworked Department of Social Services had not carefully investigated the foster family. The foster father, it seems, had previously been reported for physical and sexual abuse. Again the agency director was replaced. Again the medical, social service, and criminal justice agencies pointed hostile fingers of blame at one another. The pendulum swung again. The standard practice of intervention became, "above all, keep the family together."

The complexity of the problem of child abuse and family violence, coupled with the strong feeling aroused by individual cases, invite a search for an orderly world and attract those involved in providing services to simple solutions like moths ro a flame. p.186

National social work guidelines recommend rhat protective service workers be assigned between twenty and twenty-five cases. The protective worker who was following Diane and Tim shared his desk with two other workers in his office. He had no telephone. His training consisted of a master of social work degree and a fourteenday training course in protective service work. His salary at the time was less than that of a kindergarten teacher, less than an assembly line worker, less than a unionized trash collector in the same city. Under these conditions, he was charged with the responsibiiity of protecting the lives and welfare of more than thirty children who were deemed to be at the highest risk of harm.

The most obvious constraint against effective intervention and prevention of family violence is insufficient funding to provide adequate services for all victims and fanlilies involved in domestic violence. The amount of money allocated to prevent and treat private violence and abuse is so small that it would be considered a rounding error in the Defense Department. Worse, over the past six years even this small amount of funding has been slashed. Within xveeks of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the federal Office of Don~estic Violence was eliminated. The h~idget of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect was cut, and most of the experienced staff in the office had their positions eliminated in a federal "reduction in force" effort. The budget for research on family violence was also severely pared. The burden of providing treatment and prevention serviccs was shifted from federal government to state governments and the private sector. p.186-7

Unfortunately, the scarcity of resources has not led to agencies and institutions banding together to lobby and demand more resources for the prevention and treatment of family violence. Instead, as is often the case when the need is great and the resources are small, there has been fierce competition for the limited resources that are available.

We have spent the better part of our professional careers watching those concerned with child abuse compete against those who wanted to provide services for spouse abuse and vice versa. An example of this kind of competition is the radical feminist argument thar there is no such thing as a battered husband. That concept flies in the face of logic and empirical data. Yet, radical feminists believe that if we acknowledge the existence of battered husbands, then the funding designated for programs to assist battered women will be cut further because monies will be directed at programs for battered men. Thus, many radical feminists have fought for years to keep battered husbands closeted so that the small amount of money that was available for wife abuse would not be jeopardized. Battered men have been kept closeted, but the funding has been cut nonetheless.

We have listened to very intelligent physicians claim that spouse abuse is not a major problem, and that the real problem is child abuse. On the other hand, those concerned with wife abuse maintain that wife abuse is the real problem and that if it could be prevented we would not need to spend money on child abuse. The rationale (such as it is) behind these arguments is that the resource pie for domestic violence is only so big, and "we need all of it that we can get." p.188

The sociologist Kai Erikson once said thar our systems of preventing deviance operate so poorly that one has to wonder if the systems are organized to encourage and maintain deviance rather than to control and prevent it. There are many government policies that not only fail to help victims of family violence, but actually exacerbate the problem. One example is government policy eliminating funding of abortion services for women receiving welfare. Child abuse researchers are convinced that if an unwanted baby is born to a household with low resources, that child is at the highest risk of being abused. I was called to testify before the U.S. Senate on the reauthorization of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1978. When asked, "What can we [the government] do to stop child abuse," my answer was, "With all due respect, what the government ought to do is stop passing laws that encourage people to abuse their children. Then we can begin to talk about what you can do to stop it." The senator who posed the question asked what I meant. I replied, "When the government cuts off abortion funds for women who are on welfare, it guarantees an increase in child abuse in this society. When the government fails to enact gun control legislation, it guarantees the maintenance of a certain level of family violence. And, when politicians say they are going to fight inflation and recession by allowing eleven pcrccnt or seven percent of the population to remain unemployed, and we know that unemployment is highly correlated with child abuse, do not ask what you can do-you are part of the problem." Government policies that endorse the use of violence to solve problems, and government action and inaction that increase family stress in certain strata of the society serve to encourage and not to prevent family violence. p.188-9

The impact of the constraints is often tragic. Fewer than one out of three abused children are reported to the proper agency. The deaths of women and children at the hands of partners and parents are preventable-nine out of ten women and children who die have already come to public attention before their deaths. We know many of the victims who need services, and yet we have not organized ourselves in such a way as to help. p.189

Public awareness campaigns ought to educate the public that family violence is a public matter requiring informal as well as formal intervention. At the informal level, the public ought to serve as an agent of social control, as is the case in Sweden. Sweden enacted legislation prohibiting parents from using corporal punishment on their children. We observed a parent swat a child at a bus stop in Stockholm. We then watched a passerby calmly and gently approach the parent and say, "Hitting your child is not permissible in Sweden." At the formal level, the public needs to learn how and to whom to report instances of abuse and neglect that require legal or criminal interventions. p.191

How do we develop internal control? We develop a cultural ethic that hitting children is inappropriate. As a country, Sweden represents a pibneer in the Western world in attempting to develop such a cultural norm. Sweden has taken a strong stand against the use of violence as a means of punishment. Capital punishment has long been banned. In 1952 the corporal punishment of children in schools was outlawed. Legislation prohibiting spanking was enacted in 1979, and has since been adopted by all other Scandinavian countries. Sweden has gone beyond simply legislating against using state, school, or parental violence in its effort to develop a nonviolent moral climate. Firearm ownership is rigorously controlled. While at least half of all American households contain guns, mostly handguns, gun ownership in Sweden is controlled, and gun ownership is limited mostly to weapons used for hunting. Television violence offers another important contrast. Violent programming in Sweden is severely restricted. Actually, Swedish television is barely on the air as many hours as the average American child watches television each week. The level of concern for media programming for children can be seen in the decision in Sweden to limit the popular American movie, ET to audiences over eleven years of age.

The difference between attitudes and national posture in the United States and that in Sweden can best be illustrated by American reactions to the Swedish antispanking law. The first reaction is typical: The Swedes are going to raise wild and spoiled kids. The second reaction is even more intriguing. When told that Sweden has a law prohibiting spanking, most Americans ask what the punishment is for breaking the law. in point of fact, Sweden changed only its criminal code. The penal code was not changed; thus, there is no punishment for spanking a child (other than disapproval from observers or bystanders). Americans take for granted that a violation requires a formal punishment. Few Americans can begin even to imagine that an antispanking law would be aimed at merely establishing a moral objection to spanking or that this law would be enforced only by informal and internal social controls. The third reaction is that the law is absurd because children should be spanked, and spankings "work." After all, parents tell us, "When I spank my children, they stop doing what it was that I wanted them to stop." p.195

Parents and partners will develop internal systems of control only if the belief that people are not for hitting is shared and supported by other social institutions. Individual internal controls will never be developed if police officers fail to respond to instances of domestic violence in the same manner that violence between strangers is dealt with. We cannot expect husbands to develop internal controls as long as judges and prosecutors see intimate violence as a private matter that does not belong on the public agenda or in the public courtrooms. Internal controls will never be applied while family members hear a member of the United States Senate quip, "If you outlaw wife beating, you take all the fun out of marriage," or a state legislator remark, "If you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?" p.199

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