New York City Challenges Current Thinking On Domestic Violence

In November and December 2002, the New York Times published two unrelated articles on domestic violence that suggest the city is grappling with exactly how to think about and address violence in intimate relationships.

In a long feature published on Sunday, November 17, reporter Deborah Sontag challenged conventional thinking about domestic violence by exploring such issues as reciprocal abuse and the advisability of mandatory arrest policies. The article, “Fierce Entanglements,” is built around the story of Michael, a self-identified abuser, and his partner Sylvia, who says their dynamic was mutually violent from the beginning: “[W]e would beat each other. We would destroy the house. It became kind of dangerous for both of us. I didn’t know who was going to kill who.”

“It was a complex situation, murkier than the black-and-white portrayal of domestic violence that currently guides public policy,” Sontag writes. She goes on to suggest that many other domestic violence situations are likewise murky. A keynote speech at a fall New York City-sponsored domestic violence conference given by Linda Mills, a legal scholar and victim of domestic violence (“at the hands of a man she described as a violence-prevention expert”), for instance, is covered. Although Mills’ abuse eventually came to include rape, Sontag reports,

[S]he wouldn’t have wanted the police to know. She would never have testified against him. “Doing so would have robbed me of the little dignity I had left.” And, she said, the “system” needs to respect women who feel that way. The system, she said, patronized victims by failing to listen to them, usurping their decision-making power and underestimating them -- underestimating their ability to negotiate their own safety and underestimating their role in the abusive relationship. Domestic violence is construed as a one-sided aggression, when often there is a warped dynamic of intimacy in which both the men and the women are players. It is dishonest, she went on, to stifle conversation about the ways in which women, too, are aggressive and violent.

Sontag also reports on those who question the effectiveness “of the mandatory arrest policies that advocates fought so long and hard for.” First she notes that many women feel disempowered and judged by a system that mandates they go through the criminal justice system to address abuse: “They don’t want to be humiliated for choosing their partners, pressured into leaving them or blamed. They don’t want to be ‘battered by the system,’ as a recent workshop given by survivors of domestic violence in New York was called.” Then she summarizes the history of how mandatory arrest policies developed, and what happened next.

An experiment in 1984 in Minneapolis played a defining role in reshaping the police approach. On the basis of 314 domestic violence cases, a study conducted by the criminologists Lawrence W. Sherman and Richard A. Berk concluded that arrests discouraged batterers from committing future acts of battery. The authors cautioned that the sample size was small and the findings preliminary, but their caution was not heeded. Citing their work, a federal task force recommended that arrest become the standard response to misdemeanor domestic violence cases. It did; most states now have mandatory arrest laws. After his Minneapolis study, however, Sherman refined his thinking on the basis of further studies that revealed a far more complicated picture. He oversaw one such study in Milwaukee, which showed that arrest makes low-income men more violent than does a simple warning by the police. The low-income men in Milwaukee, most of who happened to be black, were three times as likely to be arrested than employed white men were. Therefore, by his study’s oddly precise calculations, mandatory arrest in Milwaukee prevented 2,504 acts of violence against primarily white women at the price of 5,409 additional acts of violence against primarily black women. Although the results were expressed in racial terms, Sherman said the men’s status in society was the determining factor. Arrests generally deterred employed offenders, the studies showed, but provoked unemployed offenders to commit up to twice as many more assaults.

Another long section of the article explores the effectiveness of batterers’ programs. A judge says, “The jury is still out on whether they do any good.” A psychotherapist believes that abusers can change but notes that the programs that are based on didactic lectures on feminist theory (“domestic violence results not from individual personal or moral deficits but from an abuser’s belief that he has the right to inflict his will on his partner”) don’t work.

After discussing Michael’s history of batterers’ treatment -- paid for by his employer after Michael was arrested for punching a co-worker -- Sontag concludes, “Whether his motivation [to no longer hurt people] will be sufficiently powerful to overcome a lifelong pattern remains to be seen. For the moment, Michael and Sylvia are setting their sights on a more concrete goal: a vacation in the Poconos.”

Three weeks after “Fierce Entanglements” was published, the New York Times ran an article on 13,000 subway and bus ads and storefront posters issued by the mayor’s Office to Combat Family Violence. The ads, printed in eight languages, featured black-and-white photographs of clean-shaven, well-dressed men behind bars with headlines like “Successful Executive. Devoted Churchgoer. Abusive Husband.” And, “Employee of the Month. Soccer Coach. Wife Beater.”

Although the ads were meant to dispel the myth that “most big-city batterers are poor, uneducated and live in troubled neighborhoods,” they did not, as did the previous four years’ campaigns, lead to increases in calls to a domestic violence hotline. A psychologist who has counseled battered women for 19 years, Frederic Reichman, said the reason the ads didn’t work is that, “Domestic violence can happen in any family, but when you start putting up pictures of men in prison, you scare the women. Many of them still love their batterers and are afraid to put their men in jail. These ads reinforce that fear.”