These graphic details of domestic abuse come to us courtesy of documentaryfilmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose camera has been mercilessly recording theoften unpleasant aspects of our social reality for three decades. In the yearssince 1967, when his first documentary, Titicut Follies, garnered artisticawards and journalistic respect -- and an injunction from the MassachusettsSuperior Court, which banned the film in the state for the next 24 years -- Wisemanhas captured everything from the crumbling walls of a housing project to thelocker-lined hallways of a high school, from a ballet company to a state prisonfor the criminally insane. Using his signature cinema verité style -- thereis no narration, music, or overt editorializing in his films -- Wiseman has becomea barometer of our values and mores, revealing our culture and progress vyobserving our social organizations, institutions and institutional practices.
It is therefore telling that Wiseman has chosen to take on the issue ofdomestic violence at precisely this moment. While the scenes from his latestfilm, Domestic Violence, are explicit, we've seen these types of imagesbefore. Hardly a news cycle goes by nowadays without a domestic-violence story.The media attention is a salutary development; not long ago, domestic violencedidn't exist as a legal or social concept.
Yet while we've come incredibly far in our struggle to recognize domesticviolence as a national, public problem, battered women now face a new set ofchallenges -- preeminent among them, the religious right's efforts to portraymarriage as the panacea for all social and moral problems. If only we could alljust pair up in happily heterosexual matrimony and stay that way, the logic goes,social ills such as violence, crime, and poverty would simply wither away.
While ample data suggest the social and personal benefits of a happy marriage,the get-married-and-stay-married-at-all-costs ethos often ignores the damage thatbad marriages can do both to adults and to children. And domestic abuse? Socialconservatives often pretend that the problem would disappear if only more peoplegot and stayed married. They make it more difficult for women to leave abusiverelationships -- not only by steeling social attitudes against divorce but bymaking it contractually harder (through such vehicles as "covenant marriages")for domestic-violence victims to escape.
Moreover, social conservatives tend to confuse marriage policy with welfarepolicy; indeed, they would like to replace the latter with the former. This isthe "get-married-and-stay-married-and-you-won't-need-welfare" argument. RobertRector, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues that marriageincentives must be built into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) -- thebasic federal welfare program, designed to provide assistance and workopportunities -- and that divorced and out-of-wedlock mothers should get diminished levels of welfare assistance for not being married. This is a typicalconservative argument that not only gets the relationship between poverty andwelfare backward -- and this is a great source of liberal-conservative argumentgenerally -- but also makes it much harder for wives to leave their abusivehusbands, for fear of being financially penalized.
Domestic Violence and the Law
It is this sort of rhetoric that threatens to roll back the heroic -- andremarkably recent -- achievements of the battered-women's movement. As late as the1960s, if you looked at American newspapers, police reports, medical records, andlegal texts, you would find little mention of domestic violence anywhere. "Inthe last few decades, there has been a great surge in attention to this issue,"says Clare Dalton, Northeastern University's Matthews Distinguished UniversityProfessor of Law, who is a leading feminist legal scholar and a pioneer in thedevelopment of legal education about domestic violence. A founder ofNortheastern's domestic-violence clinical program and the Domestic ViolenceInstitute (an interdisciplinary educational, research, and service organization), Dalton served as a consultant on Wiseman's film and leddiscussions about the issue at several showings of Domestic Violence intheBoston area.
"Right up into the 1980s, we still had states in the Union with out-of-dateimmunity laws based on common law from the 1800s, protecting men who beat theirwives," Dalton says. "It was only 10 years ago now that the Supreme Court was even ready to recognize the severity of domestic violence in our country -- onlyeight years ago that Congress addressed it on a federal level with the ViolenceAgainst Women Act [VAWA]."
That legislation, passed initially in 1994 and renewed by Congress in 2000,was a milestone: It was the first federal law ever to address the issue, and itcame at the problem with a variety of solutions, including funding for women'sshelters, a national domestic-abuse hot line, rape education-and-preventionprograms, training for federal and state judges, new remedies for batteredimmigrants, and criminal enforcement of interstate orders of protection.
As Dalton points out, VAWA would have been impossible without the work thatbegan with the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. "Our latest campaignagainst domestic violence grew directly out of the movement," she says. "For thefirst time, women were getting together and talking about their experiences anddiscovering the great prevalence of these unspoken terrors. Emerging feministtheory allowed women to connect with each other and to the ideas that feministshad been arguing for all along: that women's legally sanctioned subordinationwithin the family was denying them equality."
Taking their cue from the civil-rights and antiwar movements earlier, feministactivists began to see the law not only as an important tool for protectingvictims but as a way to define domestic violence as a legitimate social problem.Local legal groups and grass-roots advocacy organizations began to develop legalremedies based on the link between sexual discrimination and violence. Startingin the sixties, lawyers began to seek civil-protective or restraining orders tokeep batterers away from their victims. Courts began to create special rules fordomestic-violence cases and custody cases involving children from violent homes.And by the mid-1990s, Congress had passed VAWA. Today, feminist advocates forbattered women have begun to draw important interconnections among battering,poverty, welfare reform, homelessness, immigration, employment, gun control, andmany other areas of concern. They are working with all sorts of organizations tostep up education and reform.
The Psychology of Abuse
While the stories of domestic violence in Wiseman's film are horrifying,even the most compassionate viewer's sympathy can run thin when victims shunopportunities to abandon their own torture chambers. Of the three women in theopening scene who have called the police, not one is prepared to listen to adviceabout legal options or free social services. Rather, each one simply continuesrecounting her abuse, speaking as if she had never even heard the officers'recommendations.
"We have always looked at the victim and said, 'Well, why doesn't she justleave?'" says Lynn Rosenthal, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-basedNational Network to End Domestic Violence. "We've got cops and judges and lawyerswho get upset when victims don't flee, or fail to report their abusers, or don'tshow up in court to press charges." This past January, a judge in Lexington,Kentucky, sparked outrage among victims' advocates when she fined two women forcontempt of court because they returned to their alleged abusers despite having obtained protective orders against them. "But this attitude places the burden onthe victim, not the abuser," Rosenthal says. "Everyone asks why she continues tostay; no one thinks to ask, 'Why does he hit her in the first place?'"
Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry atHarvard Medical School and the training director of the Victims of ViolenceProgram at Cambridge Hospital, has been fighting to change this perception ofvictims for more than 30 years. "The tendency to blame the victim has alwaysinfluenced the direction of psychological study," Herman said in an interview inher office at Harvard. "Research had always looked at what the woman did toprovoke her batterer, or it focused on her own 'personality disorders.'" In1964, for example, researchers conducted an egregious study of battered womencalled The Wife-Beater's Wife, in which the inquiries were directed towardwomen simply because the men refused to talk. The clinicians identified the womenas "frigid" or "indecisive" and went on to treat the women so they wouldstop"provoking" their husbands.
In the mid-1980s, when the diagnostic manual of the American PsychiatricAssociation came up for revision, this misdiagnosis of victims -- and the tendencyto blame them for their partners' violence -- became the center of a heatedcontroversy. A group of male psychoanalysts proposed that "masochisticpersonality disorder" be added to the manual to describe any person "who remainsin relationships in which others exploit, abuse, or take advantage of him or her,despite opportunities to alter the situation" -- a proposal that outraged women'sgroups around the country. Herman was one of the leaders in the fight toformulate a new diagnosis that accurately described the psychological conditionsof battered women. Herman proposed "complex post-traumatic stress disorder,"whichdescribes a spectrum of conditions rather than a single disorder, and is nowlisted as a subcategory of post-traumatic stress disorder in the latest editionof the standard diagnostic manual.
Although Wiseman recounts none of this political orlegal history explicitlyin Domestic Violence, the evidence of these years of struggle pervadesevery frame he shoots. In the opening sequence, a lean, tattooed, middle-aged man wearing only his undershorts asks, "Why do you always take the woman's word?"as police officers cuff and arrest him.
"When it comes to domestic violence," they respond, "that's the way it is. Ifshe says you hit her, you hit her."
This brief exchange may not seem particularly significant -- after all, if astranger had assaulted a woman in a parking lot, we would expect the police tohaul him away. But the very fact that the Tampa, Florida, officers respondedimmediately to a call for domestic violence and then removed the batterer fromhis home without hesitation or an arrest warrant is a testament to theprogressive laws, police training, and legislative reform developed andimplemented in the past 30 years.
According to Elizabeth M. Schneider, a professor at Brooklyn Law School andthe author of Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (2000), one offirst and most important legal issues to come to the attention of the feministmovement in the 1960s was the failure of police to protect battered women fromassault. By the 1970s, class-action lawsuits were filed in New York City andOakland, California. All of a sudden, domestic violence was considered a crimeagainst the public and the state, not just the individual.
Yet even these victories and others like them initially made little headway inpolice attitudes and practices. Nineteen years ago, a woman named Tracey Thurmanwas nearly beaten to death in Torrington, Connecticut, before the police came toher aid. Though Thurman had reported her estranged husband's threats andharassment to the police repeatedly for over a year, it wasn't until she calledin utter desperation, fearing for her life, that the police responded. They sentonly one officer, however, who arrived 25 minutes after the call was placed,pulled up across the street from Thurman's house, and sat in his car whileThurman's husband chased her across the yard, slashed her with a knife, stabbedher in the neck, knocked her to the ground, and then stabbed her 12 more times.
Permanently disfigured, Tracey Thurman brought what became a landmark case tothe Supreme Court, which found that the city police had violated her 14thAmendment right to "equal protection of the laws" and awarded her $2.3 million incompensatory damages. Almost immediately, the State of Connecticut adopted a new,comprehensive domestic-violence law calling for the arrest of assaultive spouses.In the year after the measure took effect, the number of arrests for domestic assault increased 92 percent, from 12,400 to 23,830.
"We'd all like to look at our progress and be optimistic," says Clare Dalton."But if you look at the most recent statistics from the Justice Department, thenumber of women dying in domestic-violence situations hasn't changed. Theproblem is as widespread as ever.
"But there is one interesting thing here," Dalton notes. "While the number ofdeaths among women hasn't changed, fatalities among men have droppedsignificantly. This, in truth, is our first real triumph. If women feel they canget help -- if they believe the police will come when they call them, if theyunderstand they will get support and have a place to go where they will be safewith their children -- then fewer are pushed to the wall. Fewer will resort tokilling or dying at the hand of their abuser."
The Tampa Example
Such wisdom has not been lost on the City of Tampa Police Department, whoseprogressive, community-wide response to the problem Frederick Wiseman chose tofilm for Domestic Violence. Tampa's network of coordinated, cooperativeservices -- from law enforcement, to social services, to the legal system -- is amodel example of similar programs around the country.
"We now have a zero-tolerance policy toward domestic violence here in Tampa,"said Lieutenant Rod Reder, a 24-year veteran of the Hillsborough CountySheriff's Office in Tampa, when reached by phone. A former supervisor for the SexCrimes Division and onetime member of the Governor's Domestic and Sexual ViolenceTask Force, Reder is now widely considered to be an expert in the field ofdomestic and sexual violence. Under the auspices of the U.S. Department ofJustice, he runs training sessions for law-enforcement officers at conferencesnationwide. "We discovered there were so many simple things we weren't doing ...to help victims of domestic violence," Reder said. "And we found there really isonly one way to make things work. All the community players have to come to thetable; otherwise, it's the victim's safety that gets compromised."
The catalyst for Tampa's adoption of community cooperation was a woman namedMabel Bexley, who in 1981 pushed Reder to bring police practices in line with newdomestic-violence laws, and who two years later became the director of a women'sshelter called the Spring. In her 19-year tenure there, Bexley, now 65 andrecently retired, expanded the Spring -- which is the focus of much of Wiseman'sdocumentary -- from a three-bedroom house with more than a dozen women and childrenhuddled inside to a 102-bed facility with 120 employees and a $4-million budget.
Reder and Bexley teamed up again in 1995, when Tampa hit an all-time high indomestic-violence-related homicide, to work alongside members of the stateattorney's office and the 13th Judicial Circuit Court to form the zero-tolerancecampaign against domestic abuse. Reder and the Hillsborough County police thenformed a special domestic-violence unit and developed a three-day trainingseminar for all seven local law-enforcement agencies.
"We do all sorts of things now to make the system work," said Reder. "Whenpolice answer a domestic-violence call, they are required to file a report -- evenif there is no arrest -- just so the incident is documented. We had deputies whowould walk away from incidents saying, 'No harm, no foul,' and would leave withno report," he recalled. "But now officers are required to document domestics bystate law. You start dinging a few deputies and taking disciplinary action, andword gets out real quick: If you go to a domestic, write a report."
According to Reder, Tampa officers have also become very aggressive aboutarrests: "We used to think we were doing the right thing by not arresting theman -- we didn't want to get him any angrier than he already was. In the past, manyofficers looked at domestic-violence calls as a waste of time or a privatefamily matter. Now we consider them some of the most dangerous calls there are."
Hillsborough County has also addressed other gaps in the system. "We've sentadvocates to go pick up victims at their homes so they'd be sure to get tocourt," said Reder. "We used to have communal waiting rooms in the courthouse,but now we have separate ones so victims won't have to face their abusers beforetheir trial begins. To file an injunction, you used to have to fill out acomplicated 25-page form that was only available in English. This alone used toscare people away, so now we have bilingual advocates and lawyers available tohelp people fill them out."
This is where the Spring comes in. Though most victims who arrive at theshelter are running for their lives and have no desire even to consider legalaction against their abusers at that point, the facility employs an on-siteattorney to help them navigate the judicial system and pursue the available options. In addition, each one of the Spring's hot-line operators is a deputy ofthe court who can file injunctions at any hour of the day or night. This iscrucial, because the most dangerous time for abuse victims actually begins themoment they choose to leave their homes. "The Bureau of Justice statistics saythat one-third of all women murdered in the U.S. are killed by an intimate," saysJennifer Dunbar, who works at the Spring. "But of those 30 percent, 65 percentare murdered when they leave. It's our job to make sure [victims are] protectedat this point."
Nearly 40 years after the first feminist activists in the women'smovement brought domestic violence to the nation's attention, the policies havelargely been set and the laws are finally on the books. Now it's a question ofmaking sure that the systems work and helping the larger community to understand,recognize, and accommodate the needs of battered women. "Right now, we're workingon expanding efforts into other systems, like job placement, affordable housing,welfare reform, and child-protective services," says Lynn Rosenthal of theNational Network. "A number of states now have special domestic-violenceprovisions within their welfare systems and housing programs. For instance, underthe original job-placement programs in the TANF program, people who showed uptardy three times to the program would lose their benefits. A battered womanmight have tremendous problems meeting these criteria -- her husband could still besabotaging her efforts." Rosenthal adds: "It's easy to see how our ownwell-intended programs could send her right back to her batterer."
Throughout the country, states have begun to integrate their systems andhave developed new, progressive programs to deal with domestic violence. Thoughthey vary in their specific reforms, many have expanded their legal definitionof domestic violence to include nonmarried and nontraditional couples. And some,shifting their focus from punishment to rehabilitation, have begun to examine theroot causes of violence in the first place. Programs like EMERGE in Cambridge,Massachusetts, work with batterers to find nonviolent ways to express theiranger; many others educate children and teens -- ideally, before any batteringstarts. A number of states have created specialized domestic-violence courts sothat the judges hearing these cases are not only familiar with and sympathetic tothe special circumstances surrounding battering cases but can follow them fromstart to finish.
Yet for all the progress that has been made in addressing domestic violence,Wiseman's film makes clear that there is a long way yet to go. One problem is howpractically and psychologically difficult it can be for a victim to leave herbatterer. But another is the complexity of the political environment itself. Aselected officials come and go, their varying agendas affect the winds oflegislative change and shift fiscal priorities along with idealistic convictions.According to Robin Thompson, the former executive director of the FloridaGovernor's Task Force on Domestic Violence, in order for a state to stay vigilantin its fight against domestic abuse there must be "a bedrock of political commitment" -- be it a designated task force or a group of grass-roots activistsinvested in educating and uniting their community. Awareness alone is notenough.
And while states may have implemented great judicial and law-enforcementreforms, if these are not closely monitored and coordinated, they can still fallshort of their goals. For instance, if an accused batterer is arrested rightaway but then must wait six months for a trial, the victim is still largely unprotected. Or if a judge orders a defendant to participate in an interventionprogram but no one checks to see if he complies, the sentence may be useless.
Obstacles to reform certainly don't fall neatly along partisan lines. Aliberal judge might opt for a surprisingly lenient sentence for a defendent,while a conservative judge might make an equally counterintuitive ruling, viewingthe court as the woman's traditional protectorate. Yet in communities whereawareness of partner abuse remains limited -- and partisan issues such as welfare,gun ownership, and "family values" remain entwined with domesticviolence -- reform movements lag well behind their counterparts in more progressiveplaces.
So far on a national level, what little government funding there is forcommunity-based programs like the community courts or the Spring has not been cutby the Bush administration. But Rosenthal remains worried about the potential foran "unholy merger" between social conservatives and the growing movement forfathers' rights. Though she respects much of the work that fathers' rights groupshave done in calling for more paternal responsibility and accountability, shefears that some men will latch on to the claims of right-wingers who resent gainsby the battered-women's movement -- and by the feminist movement generally -- andwill seek to cripple these movements' effectiveness by demanding their defunding.
In a tableau that echoes the opening scene of Domestic Violence,Wiseman returns at the end of his documentary to police officers responding to acall. This time, it seems, the outcome will be more hopeful: The call was placednot by a battered woman but by a potential batterer seeking intervention -- alast-ditch effort to stave off the violence brewing in his household. But whenthe police arrive, the couple refuses to listen to their suggestions or take anysteps to change the situation. When neither the man nor the woman agrees to leavethe premises, the police ultimately return to their squad car shaking theirheads, leaving behind only words of advice and a volatile couple "afraid of whatthey might do." It is an ominous ending to a celebration of progress -- an eeriemirror of the problem we continue to face.