Wife Beating: The Silent Crime

There is nothing new about wife beating. It has always happened, everywhere. Often it is accepted as a natural if regrettable part of woman's status as her husband's property. Throughout history unlucky women have been subjected to the whims and brutality of their husbands. The colloquial phrase "rule of thumb" is supposedly derived from the ancient right of a husband to discipline his wife with a rod "no thicker than his thumb." In the U.S. the statistics reflect no unprecedented epidemic of domestic violence, but only a quite recent effort to collect figures—often inexact, but startling even when allowances are made for error—on what has always existed: ¶Nearly 6 million wives will be abused* by their husbands in any one year. ¶ Some 2,000 to 4,000 women are beaten to death annually. ¶ The nation's police spend one-third of their time responding to domestic-violence calls. ¶ Battery is the single major cause of injury to women, more significant than auto accidents, rapes or muggings. What is new is that in the U.S. wife beating is no longer widely accepted as an inevitable and private matter. The change in attitude, while far from complete, has come about in the past ten to 15 years as part of the profound transformation of ideas about the roles and rights of women in society. In cities and states scattered across the country, legal structures and social service networks, prompted by grass-roots women's organizations, have begun to redefine spouse abuse as a violation of the victim's civil rights and a criminal act of assault subject to the same punishments as other acts of violence. Marital abuse has been called "the silent crime." Bringing it out into the open by talking about it is the first step toward a solution. But for most people, including even the victim and the abuser, the almost reflex-like response to the subject is to deny that such abuse exists. In fact, however, a 1979 FBI report stated that 40% of women killed were murdered by their partners, and 10% of men by theirs. (Many of the women acted in self-defense.) When it comes to squabbling around the house, women give as good as they get. But a domestic spat is not battering, which involves a pattern of escalating abuse in a situation from which the victim feels she cannot escape. Because they are usually physically stronger than their wives, men are less likely to be battered; for reasons of pride, they are also far less likely to report it. Sociologist Murray Straus, an expert on family violence, nonetheless estimates that each year 282,000 men are beaten by their wives.

Personal testimony indicates that any female, regardless of class or race, can become a battered wife. In Stamford, Conn., a woman married to a Fortune 500 executive locked herself into their Lincoln Continental every Saturday night to escape her husband's kicks and punches. She did not leave him because she mistakenly feared he could sue for divorce on ground of desertion and she, otherwise penniless, would get no alimony.