How Victims Suffer

A 39-year-old nurse who is the mother of two boys is attacked by her estranged husband. He breaks into her house, beats her with a baseball bat, and then he squirts industrial strength lye on her from a plastic bottle. She is burned beyond recognition. What

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remains of her face and much of her body is a patchwork of scar tissue and skin grafts, difficult to look at and even more painful to live with. After six years, doctors locate a recently perished donor’s body and she is given a face transplant. She emerges from the operating room with what her mother describes as a puffy surreal mask, but they both are hopeful that she finally is on the road to recovery. (Goodnough, 2013)

The suffering inflicted on victims can range from merely being shaken up to gruesome disfigur- ing injuries—as the case above dramatizes—to mor- tal wounds (see Abraham, 2014).

The federal government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pictures intimate partner violence as a serious but preventable public health problem that is often intertwined with two additional crimes, stalking (see Chapter 11) plus rape and other sexual assaults (see Chapter 10). The CDC includes four types of behaviors under the heading IPV. The first is emotional abuse, which takes the form of intimidating and controlling behaviors motivated by extreme jealously, and also name- calling, belittling, humiliating insults, and other forms of bullying that undermine a person’s sense of self-worth. Denying access to money and isolation from friends and family is also considered a type of emotional abuse, as is threatening to harm a part- ner’s close relatives or possessions (including pets). (Emotional abuse is not a crime.) The second is issuing threats about impending physical or sexual violence, which includes brandishing a weapon but also using gestures and even words that communi- cate an intent to cause injury, disability, or death. Credible threats of harm could be crimes. Sexual violence, the third aspect of IPV, is a crime when- ever one partner is forced to submit to a sex act without granting consent. Physical violence, the fourth and most obvious set of lawbreaking beha- viors, includes simple assaults (pushing, shoving, pulling, dragging, shaking, ripping clothing, scratching, biting, burning, tying up, hitting with an open hand, kicking) as well as aggravated assaults evidencing an intent to inflict serious injuries (punching with a closed fist, choking, whipping,

stomping, throwing an object, and wounding with a knife or gun). The full continuum of physi- cal injuries ranges from welts, bruises, swellings, cuts, scratches, sprains, and burns to dizziness, loss of vision or hearing, fractures, broken bones, con- cussions, and internal bleeding. Using this broad definition, the CDC concludes that intimate part- ner violence can undermine physical and mental health in a number of ways and observes that the longer the victim endures the violence, the more serious its deleterious effects will be. Emotional harm can appear in the guise of flashbacks, panic attacks, sleep disorders, and other symptoms of trauma. Emotional damage can also manifest itself as lowered self-esteem, distrust of others, anger, stress, depression, eating disorders, and, in extreme cases, suicide. Physical injuries can range from minor wounds to permanent disabilities, and, in worst-case scenarios, even death. The consequences can also lead to digestive disorders, venereal dis- eases, pregnancy complications, and other acute and chronic health problems that require medical attention in emergency rooms, hospitalization, counseling, and more intensive forms of therapy. Unhealthy responses on the part of the targets to the trauma of IPV include self-destructive habits involving smoking, drinking, drug taking, and unsafe sex (Black et al., 2011; and CDC, 2011b). Battered women who suffered from PTSD but demonstrated some resiliency often benefited from social support and comforting religious beliefs (Astin et. al., 1993).

Two other expressions of intimate partner abuse are worthy of mention: forcibly tattooing a young woman against her will to symbolize that she has been claimed by some guy (see O’Donnell, 2013); and forcing a mate into getting pregnant and bearing a child by removing or sabotaging contraceptive devices (“reproductive coercion”) (Castillo, 2013).

Estimates of the Incidence, Prevalence, and Seriousness of Intimate Partner Violence

“I never reported it…. I was intimidated, ashamed. I had nowhere to go. I had five children to raise. I was

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told that if I ever left, he would find me and kill me,” said the police chief of a small rural department, who suffered broken bones, burns, and stab wounds in a series of beatings that began two weeks after she got married. (“Police Chief …,” 1993)

After “wife beating” was rediscovered in the 1970s, and the broader terms spouse abuse and woman battering entered everyday language, a num- ber of questions arose. The most basic was, “How widespread is the problem?” The myth that just a very small proportion of married women were beaten by their husbands was hard to dispel because official statistics in those days had no such break- down under the general heading of assault. When the battered women’s movement organized speak- outs, where wives disclosed their situations to sym- pathetic audiences, these true confessions indicated that violence between individuals who were sup- posed to be lovers was all too common. But anec- dotal evidence is insufficient to document the genuine dimensions of the problem. A maximalist versus minimalist debate broke out.

The maximalist perspective was that the women whose suffering was known were just the tip of the iceberg. Fierce fighting poisoned many ostensibly romantic relationships, and battering actually was so widespread as to constitute a low- profile epidemic. However, a minimalist reaction arose to challenge maximalist assumptions about just how common and serious the problem actually is. The opposing viewpoints sharply disagreed in part because of some of the complexities surround- ing efforts to estimate the true scope and intensity of not only wife beating, or spouse abuse generally, but of intimate partner violence in all its forms.

The first and most basic methodological issue concerns which victim–offender relationships should be included and which should be excluded. Several terms with similar and overlapping but not identical meanings can cause confusion and create inconsistencies from one study to another. Choos- ing one definition over another can make the scope of the problem seem much larger or much smaller. Restricting attention to wife abuse (strictly beatings of married women) will yield the lowest estimates.

Woman battering focuses on the injured parties regardless of whether they are legally married or not, so the statistical counts will be higher. Measur- ing the frequency of spouse abuse, which includes male as well as female victims who are legally mar- ried, will lead to medium-size estimates. The high- est estimates will be generated by counting all aspects of intimate partner violence. This is the broadest term because it refers to all forms of abuse of males and females in romantic relation- ships, including couples, whether heterosexual or homosexual, who are merely dating, as well as living together, in formally recognized domestic partnerships, or legally separated, as well as after a break-up or divorce.

Besides measurement problems stemming from definitions, other methodological issues can arise from the way the data is collected. Hunting for statistics about domestic disturbances in police files only will turn up cases known to authorities, but these calls for assistance could arise from conflicts between any members of the same household, including grandparents, adolescents, siblings, and relatives, not just intimates. The phrase domestic vio- lence refers to the largest grouping of all because it embraces violence in all its forms, which may or may not be reported to the police, between parents, siblings, elders, children, unmarried lovers, and other relatives living under the same roof.

Besides disagreements over which relationships should be included or excluded, additional fuel for the maximalist–minimalist debate arises from dis- agreements about which specific behaviors consti- tute abuse, violence, battering, or beatings. There are distinctions among these terms and different shades of meaning and connotations. These ambi- guities permit observers to draw very different con- clusions. First of all, it must be noted that although verbal and emotional abuse is psychologically harm- ful, this conduct is not a criminal matter. Similarly, sexual withdrawal (withholding affection, refusing sexual relations) is also destructive to a relationship and can be grounds for a break-up or divorce but cannot be the basis for an arrest. (Of course, physi- cally overpowering a partner to make her submit could constitute forcible rape; if the two are

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married, it would be marital rape, which is discussed later.) To summarize this set of complications, the question comes down to whether to count words as well as deeds. When researchers try to measure the incidence and prevalence of IPV, should “credible threats” about using force be counted, whether they are reported to the police or not?

Further complications arise from different defi- nitions about the use of force. Not all physical assaults bring about visible injuries. Partners may attack each other by pushing, shoving, arm- twisting, and hair-pulling and yet not inflict tangi- ble injuries sufficient to be labeled as wounds. If physical injury is taken to be the defining criterion, then domestic violence is overwhelmingly a male- on-female crime. But if all kinds of attacks are counted, then females act aggressively against their male partners almost as often as males assault their female lovers. Put succinctly, many men who are attacked by women are not wounded; assaults by males inflict injuries more often than assaults by females (Straus, 1991). Clearly, the precise defini- tion used by the researcher profoundly shapes a study’s findings and the interpretation of these numbers.

Social workers, family therapists, feminists, psychologists, criminologists, victimologists, police officers, and prosecutors have tried but failed to reach a consensus about where to draw the line between inclusion and exclusion of actions labeled abusive, violent, or assaultive. It seems that many people approve of, tolerate, or are resigned to some “normal” level of quarreling and fighting among partners in romantic relationships. The lack of public consensus can be called normative ambiguity (Straus, 1991), and it reflects the dis- tinction some would make between conflicts that occur within the family and fights between stran- gers. The cultural support that still exists in some communities for using force to settle family quar- rels means that the reporting rate varies from group to group. And that observation brings up a final methodological concern: Which families or couples are queried about domestic violence, and how representative is the sample used in any research endeavor?

In sum, because there is no standard definition that is widely accepted, a researcher’s working defi- nition of intimate partner violence must clearly specify how it operationalizes key variables such as the credibility of any threats, the assailant’s inten- tions, the attempts to inflict wounds, the weapons used in the attack, the actual physical injuries sus- tained, the depth of psychological trauma, and even any injuries suffered by the aggressor (see Loseke, 1989; Rhodes, 1992; and BJS, 2008a).

Maximalist Arguments Because of these meth- odological issues, maximalists can cite a number of studies yielding disturbing, even shocking, statistical findings that support their contention that intimate partner violence remains a deeply hidden but extremely widespread and serious problem:

Intimate partner violence afflicts twice as many women as another much more publicized major concern, breast cancer (Kristof, 2014a).

A consistent finding running through years of research is that women are much more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger. For most women, statistically speak- ing, the most dangerous places they frequent are their homes, and the most dangerous peo- ple they interact with are intimates, other family members, and friends (Bernstein and Kaufman, 2004; and Schwartz, 2005). Females were murdered by a male they knew (but not necessarily intimately) 13 times more often than by a male stranger in 2012 (VPC, 2014).

A substantial proportion of the adult popula- tion in the United States will experience some form of intimate partner violence at least once during their lifetimes. Nearly 25 percent of all women will be subjected to serious physical violence perpetrated by an intimate partner (such as being slammed against something or hit with a fist, or worse) within their lifetimes, For men, the corresponding prevalence rate is a surprisingly high (14 percent). Nearly 9 percent of all women will be raped, and another 16 percent will endure other kinds of sexual assaults by an intimate partner over a lifetime,

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according to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey for 2011 (Breiding et al., 2014).

Almost half of all incidents of battering were not reported to police departments in recent years, partly because of fears of reprisals but also due to previous negative experiences with officers responding to domestic disturbance calls, according to findings derived from the NCVS (Catalano, 2009). In 2013, the report- ing rate for IPV had risen slightly, but still was only 57 percent. Even the most serious violent attacks by intimates were reported only 60 percent of the time (Truman and Langton, 2014), despite all the efforts over the years to encourage victims to seek help and protection from the authorities. (Of course, many inci- dents are not disclosed to survey interviewers either, especially if the assailant is present when the injured party is answering questions.) Other pressures to keep the problem under wraps and behind closed doors inhibit victims from filing complaints, so the actual amount of violence between intimates is worse than the official statistics indicate. For example, hundreds of cities and towns have adopted “nuisance property” or “crime-free housing” ordinances that permit landlords to evict unruly tenants. Battered women might find themselves forced to choose between two dangerous courses of action: either calling attention to their dys- functional family lives by dialing 911 and thereby risking eviction or enduring the beat- ings in order to avoid expulsion from their rented homes (Eckholm, 2013).

The main reasons respondents cited for informing the authorities were to end the attack, to keep it from happening again, and to get the offender in trouble so that he would be punished. The leading reasons for not requesting help were the women’s beliefs that the incidents were private and personal matters, that the crime wasn’t important enough, that the police wouldn’t or couldn’t assist them, and that they would be subject to reprisals if they

dared to seek outside protection. NCVS data indicates that women who report being assaulted by a mate are likely to report being physically abused again when they are inter- viewed in later years. Police files confirm fears that the cycle of violence tends to escalate in frequency and severity over time (Langan and Innes, 1986).About one-third of all nonre- porting victims suffered more than one violent attack during the six months preceding their NCVS interview (Fleury et al., 1998; and Greenfeld et al., 1998).

Women sustain about 2 million injuries from intimate partner violence each year (CDC, 2008). About 1 million women each year seek medical attention for serious wounds inflicted by a male partner—a husband, ex-husband, boyfriend, or former lover. Somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of all visits by women to hospital emergency rooms are to treat injuries resulting from a partner’s assault. Domestic violence poses a greater threat of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 than automobile accidents, robberies, and cancer combined (Gibbs, 1993b). IPV may be the source of an even greater proportion of injuries, but women tend to be reluctant to disclose to doctors that they were assaulted, and physicians often shy away from raising the subject (“Screening…,” 2006).

Some violent men continue to beat their mates even when the women are pregnant. Between 6 percent and 8 percent of women queried in various studies conceded to interviewers that they were injured by their husbands or partners during their pregnancy. The prevalence rate of assaults during pregnancy is perhaps as low as 3 percent but may be as high as 25 percent, depending on the sample used in the study (see Goldstein and Martin, 2004; and Futures Without Violence, 2010). Beatings that preg- nant women endure cause more birth defects than all diseases for which children are immu- nized. The greatest risks are faced by young women who are poorly educated, not married,

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living in crowded households, and unable to get prenatal care (Hilts, 1994). Male violence is the leading cause of deaths stemming from injuries during pregnancy (Frye, 2001). Vio- lence inflicted during pregnancy is a cause of post-partum depression.

The rate of domestic violence in military families is much higher than it is among civilians. The military concedes it has a “spousal aggression issue,” as the Pentagon calls it, but points out that many soldiers are young and come from poverty-stricken families, and these two factors are correlated with high rates of reported domestic violence. However, the armed forces might actually have a more serious domestic violence problem than the figures indicate, because the Department of Defense keeps records only of substantiated attacks against a current legal spouse living on a military base. Incidents that take place off-post might not be entered in the Pentagon’s statistics, and assaults against ex-partners, live-in lovers, or dates do not count as “spousal aggression” (Schmitt, 1994; and Houppert, 2005). Civilian spouses of active duty personnel on or near military bases who have children and have been married for two years or less are assaulted the most often. The army consistently has the highest rates of spouse abuse, followed by the marines, navy, and air force. Abused women tend to be afraid to report incidents because of a lack of confidentiality, privacy, and effective services, but also because of a sense of isolation from family and friends (Futures Without Violence, 2014). Similarly, intimate partner violence may be a serious but hidden problem within the ranks of the very same police forces that victims count upon to protect them. Officers may be prone to abuse since they receive special training in hand-to-hand fight- ing, learn how to control people who challenge their authority, and enjoy the privilege of car- rying firearms wherever they go. Their intimate partners may be unusually reluctant to report abuse because they anticipate that their assailants’ close colleagues and even prosecutors (who need

the daily cooperation of officers) will not take their complaints seriously and may even go to great lengths to cover up what happened and to retaliate against the complainant. The Interna- tional Association of Chiefs of Police has pro- moted a model set of “zero tolerance” rules to purge domestic violence offenders from the ranks of law enforcement agencies, but most departments have failed to fully adopt and implement this approach. Reliable statistics still do not exist to measure how often officers abuse their domestic partners, get arrested for it, and subsequently are disciplined by the department for these assaults (Kocieniewski and Flynn, 1998; and Cohen, Ruiz, and Childress, 2013).

The total social costs of domestic violence—for health care (including mental health), social ser- vices (including aid to homeless women fleeing abusive relationships), lost productivity, and criminal justice outlays—add up to between $5 billion and $10 billion a year (Senate Com- mittee on the Judiciary, 1993; and Max et al., 2004). Individuals who are recovering from severe assaults lose nearly 8 million days of paid work each year—the equivalent of more than 32,000 full-time jobs (CDC, 2011b). Battered women are frequently harassed or even attacked when they are at their jobs, resulting in reduced productivity and inflated health care costs for their employers. Violence against women is a leading cause of female homelessness and also is the leading reason for children being homeless, according to a survey sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Mayors (Washington Crime News Service, 2003; and Futures Without Vio- lence, 2009). The overwhelming majority of women incarcerated in jails and prisons have endured severe physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes, during childhood, and/or as adults due to an intimate partner (Williams, 2013).

Males shooting their female partners to death is a much bigger problem in the United States than in other higher-income countries. The actual death toll might be even greater because

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some of the females murdered by males were their ex-girlfriends, but the FBI’s UCR only recognizes current girlfriends, wives, and ex-wives as intimate partners (VPC, 2014).

Minimalist Views The minimalist position is that violence between intimates, while serious, is not the dire threat to women’s physical and mental well-being as maximalist alarmists’ calls to action make it seem. Because there are so many unre- solved definitional and methodological issues, minimalists can point to studies that yield findings that picture the problem as not so common and not so serious, and actually in decline.

Intimate partner abuse sometimes is equated with intimate partner violence. But abuse can be defined so broadly that it goes far beyond everyday understandings of what constitutes violence, and subsequent measurements of its frequency of occurrence will be inflated. An example of a definition of intimate partner abuse that is too-inclusive is “any behavior within a current or past intimate relationship that involves actual, attempted, or threatened harm… that may impact or detract from the victim’s physical, psychological, sexual, economic, or spiritual well-being” (cited in Demarais et al., 2014).

In 2013, less than 3 out of every 1,000 persons age 12 or older suffered a simple or aggravated assault from an intimate partner, according to the NCVS (Truman, and Langton, 2014).

Most IPV attacks were only simple assaults, and most of the injuries that resulted were superfi- cial, such as scratches, bruises, and welts (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000; Rennison, 2003; and Catalano 2009). Many minor assaults that are registered on surveys don’t even lead to physical injuries and should not be lumped in with aggravated assaults that inflict severe bodily harm. Some incidents that are counted in studies were just threats or attempted assaults that failed. Also, some of the fighting is initi- ated by women or can be considered acts of retaliation, so women were not always the

passive recipients of male aggression (see Straus, 1999). Furthermore, an expanded definition of abuse that includes vicious name-calling and controlling behaviors like intimidation and social isolation, which may cause psychological damage but not physical wounds, has been used in some studies, leading to inflated esti- mates of the numbers of individuals suffering from “violence” unleashed by intimate partners.

Of all the violence (simple and aggravated assaults, rapes and other sexual assaults; and robberies) disclosed to interviewers by males and females in 2013, strangers were the per- petrators in 38 percent of all incidents; acquaintances, whether casual or well-known, accounted for 32 percent; and intimate partners were the attackers in just 15 percent (the remaining 6 percent were other family mem- bers and relatives) (Truman and Morgan, 2014). Therefore, the relative threat of intimate partners as compared to strangers and acquain- tances may have been overstated by maximalists.

Intimate partner violence negatively affects the work victims perform for organizations via absenteeism, tardiness, and distraction, but productivity losses might not be as serious as originally assumed (Reeves and O’Leary-Kelly, 2007).

As for trends, minimalists point out that domestic violence seems to be diminishing in fre- quency. In fact, the problem may have begun to subside shortly after it was rediscovered at the start of the 1970s.

Researchers found in a 1975 survey that about 4 out of every 100 couples admitted engaging in at least one serious outbreak of violence within the year. A decade later, however, researchers using the same definitions in inter- views (this time with a larger representative sample of married and cohabiting couples) uncovered evidence that the rate had dropped to about 3 couples per 100 per year. Serious

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incidents were defined as those involving kicking, hitting with a fist, biting, and beating up, or using or threatening to use a gun or knife during a dispute. The overall incidence rate, which included less serious instances of slapping, shoving, pushing, and throwing things, was estimated to be about 16 percent of married and cohabiting couples per year. The prevalence rate was only 33 percent for one or more incidents involving any degree of vio- lence during the entire marriage or cohabita- tion (Straus and Gelles, 1986).

NCVS data also indicates that intimate partner violence against women and also against men is diminishing (Rennison, 2003; and Catalano, 2009). Between 1993 and 2010, the overall IPV rate tumbled by over 60 percent for both females and males nationally. In 1993, inter- viewers learned about over 2 million incidents, which translated to a rate of nearly 10 victims for every 1,000 persons over the age of 11 that they interviewed. By 2010, the number of incidents was around 900,000 and the violent victimization rate by a current or former romantic partner was way down to about 3.5 per 1,000. The number of incidents decreased to about 810,000 in 2012, and then dropped further to less than 750,000 in 2013, according to an analysis of NCVS files. (However, most of the improvement occurred from the early 1990s up to 2003 [Catalano, 2012b; and Truman and Morgan, 2014]). As for the rate of serious violence between intimates (counting rape, other sexual assaults, aggravated assaults, and robberies but not simple assaults), it fell by more than 70 percent from 3.6 per 1,000 per- sons in 1994 down to just 1 per 1,000 in 2012 (Truman and Morgan, 2014).

As for males murdering the females they were formerly intimate with, that rate has declined about 25 percent from 1.6 per 100,000 in 1996 to 1.2 per 100,000 in 2012 (VPC, 2014). Countries and cities across the globe with mur- der rates of about 1 per 100,000 generally are considered very safe (refer back to Chapter 4).

How Victims Suffer

How Victims Suffer

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