When Battered Women Kill

Angela Browne

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781439118658
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A compassionate look at 42 battered women who felt "locked in with danger and so desperate that they killed a man they loved"; scholarly and compelling.

CHAPTER 1 Setting the Stage

A woman calls the police emergency number begging for help. She says she just shot her husband. Officers arriving at the scene note that she is bruised and there is evidence of an altercation. While ambulance attendants work on the dying man, police locate the weapon and test the woman’s hands for traces of gunpowder. Then they wrap her hands in plastic and lead her to a squad car, wending their way past neighbors gathered on the sidewalk. The woman is taken to jail, where she is interrogated. She attempts to reply to the officers’ questions, although her responses are disoriented and confused and she will later remember little of what she said. At some point she is informed that her husband is dead. She is asked to strip to the waist, so pictures can be taken of her injuries, and is booked on suspicion of murder. Later, testimony reveals that she had been beaten and sexually assaulted by her mate on numerous occasions, and that he threatened to kill her shortly before the shooting took place. The woman has no prior criminal record; she has a family, and has held a steady job.

Neighbors are shocked by the killing; such things don’t happen in their part of town. Relatives are grieved and defensive. They struggle with what to say when questioned; what to say in court, when the private lives of their family become front-page news. The man’s family, who knew the most about his abusiveness, are in the worst position: Will they aid in this woman’s defense, when she has just killed their son and brother? Could they have prevented it? Was his drinking to blame? Or was it her fault, for staying with him? They knew he sometimes hit her, but no one ever dreamed she would kill him.

What leads a woman who has occupied the role of victim, and who usually has no history of violent or illegal behavior, to use deadly force against her mate? What factors—in her perceptions, in the relationship, and in our society—precipitate the woman’s committing a homicide? Why would a woman remain with a man who assaults her or threatens to take her life? And why are men the primary perpetrators of severe violence against their partners? What evokes this response in some men?

THE INCIDENCE OF VIOLENCE IN FAMILIES

Early studies on criminal victimization focused primarily on violent incidents occurring outside the home. Most of these studies were conducted with incarcerated offenders—individuals labeled as comfortably “different” from the “rest” of us. Their problems were seen as stemming from unusual family backgrounds that were “unique” in being violent or disordered; or as attributable to a medical or psychological condition that provided a pathological explanation for their behavior.

Newspapers and other media emphasized the more sensational crimes and criminals. Assaults were depicted as occurring on city streets or in barroom brawls; rapes and murders were committed on the unsuspecting by deranged strangers; bad things happened to good people only when they were where they weren’t supposed to be: out late at night, in a dangerous part of town, in a place of questionable reputation. An impression was formed that the risk of personal injury lay primarily in individuals outside one’s circle of intimates. Violence in the family—if recognized at all—was rarely considered criminal unless a death occurred. The average family, it was assumed, afforded its members nurturance and protection. Individuals who left their homes and families were sometimes stigmatized, forcibly returned, or punished.

Yet current evidence identifies a reservoir of victimization that has existed almost unnoticed and, indeed, has been given permission to thrive within our culture. Research in the 1960s first began to document an unsuspected level of assaults within the nation as a whole. In 1968, in a nationally representative sample of 1,176 adults, one out of every 12 reported that they had been threatened or cut with a knife; one out of every 17 said they had been threatened or shot at with a gun; and one in 17 admitted having used a gun or a knife on another person in self-defense. (These incidents included only assaults that occurred as an adult, and excluded military action.) In addition, one-fifth approved of slapping a spouse on “appropriate” occasions; the percentage increased with higher levels of income and education, rising to 25 percent among the college educated. Contrary to popular impressions, experiences with violence were not confined to the poor or the working class. Violence was equally common among all income groups and education levels. The researchers concluded that “the privacy of the middle-class life-style preserves an illusion of greater domestic tranquility…,” but that, apparently, this was “only an illusion.”¹

The study of family violence, with an emphasis on child abuse, also began in the 1960s.² At that time, there were almost no reports of abused wives, and those that existed attributed the assaults to personality disorders in both the women and the men. Violence in families was thought to be infrequent and to result from psychopathology in the individuals involved, rather than being seen as a society-wide problem of much greater proportions.³ It wasn’t until the early 70s that sociologists started to study these assaults on a wider scale, and shocked the nation with their findings on the percentage of American families in which such attacks occurred.⁴

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of inquiry into violence between intimates. Some researchers explain violence in families from the perspectives of stress theory, resource deprivation, conflict and aggression theory, structural inequality, and theories that attribute the occurrence of violence to the patriarchy and general discrimination against women in our society.⁵ Violence between romantic partners cannot be adequately understood, however, without consideration of the specific context in which it occurs: that of intimate relationships between men and women. Combining the more specialized topic of family violence with theories on relationships compels us to note the ways in which abuse by male partners and responses by female victims are extensions of our cultural expectations of romance and relating, and enables us to examine the similarities—as well as the differences—between relationships that include physical abuse and those limited to more “normal” interactions between couples.

In this country, a woman’s chances of being assaulted at home by her partner are greater than that of a police officer being assaulted on the job. Books that document such abuse and describe the nature of the attacks have been written about the so-called “battered woman.” Little is known, however, about the progression of such violence, or about those cases in which an abusive relationship culminates in death. Yet these issues surely deserve our attention.

Many spousal homicides are preceded by a history of abuse, and women jailed for the slaying of their mates frequently were beaten by them.⁶ Many of these women sought help from the police or others prior to the lethal incident but either the urgency of their situation was not understood, or the alternatives offered were inadequate to allow them to escape. A more adequate understanding of the dynamics of relationships marked by violence could enable us to avert at least some of the homicides that now occur in desperation, and identify and intervene with those couples at risk for severe and continued assaults.

VIOLENCE BETWEEN PARTNERS

How often does violence between partners occur? In a national survey of over 2,000 homes conducted in 1975 and published in 1980, Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Suzanne Steinmetz questioned married couples and found that more than one quarter (28 percent) reported at least one instance of physical assault in their relationships; 16 percent reported violent incidents in the year just prior to the study. Of these incidents, over one-third were serious assaults involving acts such as punching, kicking, hitting with an object, and assaults with a knife or gun. A follow-up survey conducted in 1985 found the exact same percentage reporting violent incidents in the twelve months prior to the study. These estimates are supported by the results of a Harris poll using similar questions, which found that 21 percent of women respondents had been physically attacked by a male partner at least once. This figure was much higher for those who had been recently separated or divorced; of these women, two-thirds reported violence in their former relationships.⁷

Other studies conducted in U.S. cities confirm these percentages. In a random sample in San Francisco, 21 percent of women who had been or were currently married reported at least one occasion of physical abuse by their mates.⁸ Similarly, researchers attempting to find a group of nonbattered women to compare with a sample of physically abused wives in Pittsburgh found that 34 percent of their control group also reported being attacked by a partner.⁹ Though the “majority” of respondents in these studies did not report violence, these figures mean that over a million-and-a-half women in the United States are physically assaulted by a partner each year.¹⁰ Of course, many people just don’t tell researchers about violence in their families, so these figures are underestimates of the true incidence of violence between partners. The true incidence of abuse between partners may be nearly double what people report in surveys.

HOW SERIOUS IS FAMILY VIOLENCE?

Because we think of families as safe and even companionable, the phrase “family violence” seems almost a contradiction in terms. When the words are linked together, the emphasis shifts to the family, and the meaning of “violence” is modified by our particular images of home. “Domestic violence” has a tame sound—like a household pet, no longer wild. A “domestic problem” sounds minor and uninteresting; perhaps trouble with bill-paying or disagreements over the division of household chores. Somehow, we devalue incidents that occur in the home. News accounts still report serious assaults and even murders between partners as “the result of a domestic argument,” masking the extremity of the acts and the history of threat and brutalization that frequently preceded such events.

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that, although we now know more physical attacks are perpetrated by intimates than by strangers, attacks by family members are probably not as serious as those by outsiders. In comparing assaults involving intimates with assaults involving strangers, the 1980 National Crime Survey found that when the attacker was a stranger, just over one-half (54 percent) of the victims sustained injuries. However, when the attacker was related, three-fourths of the victims were injured. In addition, three-fifths of the attacks by relatives occurred at night, when most of the victims were “home safe.” We lock our doors at night to keep the danger out. However, many people are actually locked in with the danger: Their place of greatest risk is their home.

“MUTUAL COMBAT”

How mutual is the violence between romantic and/or married partners? When violent assaults occur in relationships, are men or women more likely to be the perpetrators? Are there differences between men and women when one looks at relatively minor physical assaults, versus more serious actions and injuries?

In the Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz study of American families, nearly half (49 percent) of the couples who reported violence said that both partners had used some kind of force; in 27 percent of the cases, only the husband had been assaultive; and in 24 percent, only the wife had been assaultive. However, Straus and his colleagues noted that, because of men’s greater average size and physical strength and their tendency toward greater aggressivity, the same acts frequently have quite a different effect in terms of pain, injury, and threat when performed by a woman and a man.¹¹ Men are also better able to avoid physical victimization than are women. As Mildred Pagelow (1984) observed:

Men are, on the average, larger and muscularly stronger than women, so if they choose to strike back they can do greater physical harm than is done to them, they can nonviolently protect themselves from physical harm, or they can leave the premises without being forcibly restrained, (p. 274)

In the Straus study, assaultive actions were divided into categories of relatively “minor” (threw something at the other; pushed, grabbed or shoved; slapped) and “severe” (kicked, bit, punched, hit with an object, beat up, threatened with a knife or gun, used a knife or gun). Despite the seemingly equal appearance of assaultive behavior when looked at separately, when analyzing the results this way, Straus and his colleagues found that men had a higher rate of using the most dangerous and injurious forms of violence—such as physically beating up their partners or using a knife or a gun—and that when violent acts were committed by a husband, they were repeated more often than they were by wives. In addition, a large number of violent attacks against wives occurred when the women were pregnant, thus increasing the risk of injury and of miscarriage or stillbirth.

Although the Straus study has been cited often as evidence for the mutuality of violence, several other factors should be taken into account. First, the Straus sample was restricted to couples who were living together currently; recently separated or divorced couples were not included in the inquiry. Second, information on violent acts was gathered from only one member of a couple, without corroboration from the other partner or other sources, and without a means for ascertaining possible differences in the reports of the victims and the perpetrators of violence. Also, the study was not designed to ask about injuries sustained from the violence, nor about what proportion of the acts were in response to violence initiated by the other or in self-defense. Finally, questions about violence were set in a context of settling disputes in a conflict situation and, therefore, may not have elicited information about attacks that seemed to come “out of the blue.” These are crucial factors for assessing the mutuality of combat, and some of them have been investigated in more depth by other researchers.

As noted earlier, separated and divorced couples appear to have extremely high rates of violence, especially violence perpetrated by husbands. Thus, a greater impression of “mutuality” may result when one studies intact couples than when divorced or separated couples are included. In the 1982 National Crime Survey, for instance, 91 percent of all violent crimes between spouses were victimizations of women by husbands or ex-husbands, while only 5 percent were victimizations of husbands by wives or ex-wives.

The identity of the person doing the reporting also seems to be important in assessing what weight to give responses. Studies of crime victims show a surprising tendency to forget even fairly serious attacks. Experience with women victims of a partner’s violence confirms this. Battered women, especially those who have been victimized over a long period, tend to underestimate both the frequency and the severity of the violence they experience when their reports are compared to the reports of witnesses or to hospital and other records. Similarly, experts working with abusive men note that the men greatly underreport their violent actions; they minimize or deny assaultive behavior against their wives, and claim more involvement by the victim in justification of their violence than witness or police reports would support.¹² Thus, in a study combining estimations of violence by male perpetrators on female victims, one is faced with the possibility that the perpetrators will sound less violent and more victimized, while the victims will appear to have been less severely assaulted and more likely to victimize their partners, than is actually the case.

When one looks at the results of studies overall, men seem much more likely to assault their female partners, especially seriously, than women are to assault male partners.¹³ For instance, in analyzing the records on almost 900 cases of family violence, R. Emerson Dobas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage
• Chapter 2: Childhood Roots of Violence
• Chapter 3: Courtship and Early Marriage: From Affection to Assault
• Chapter 4: Typical Violence
• Chapter 5: The Psychology of Intimate Relating: Differences in Women and Men
• Chapter 6: The Outer Limits of Violence
• Chapter 7: Fear and the Perception of Alternatives
• Chapter 8: Even Unto Death
• Chapter 9: The Legal System and Battered Women
• Chapter 10: Summing Up
• Epilogue: Disposition of Cases Discussed in the Text
• Appendix: The Interview Schedule
• About the Author
• Source Notes
• References
• Case Study Index
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright