Posted by Carolyn Ramsey (guest-blogging):
The Failure of Intimate-Violence Prevention:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_11_12-2006_11_18.shtml#1163777518
My intimate homicide data does not conclusively explain why the
criminal justice system in the late 1800s and early 1900s punished
intimate murders committed by men but failed to prevent them from
occurring. However, my University of Colorado Law Review article (see
77 Univ. Colo. L. Rev. 101 (2006)) offers several hypotheses: �First,
the decline of neighborly and family intervention against intimate
violence thrust the problem upon a police force that was too corrupt
and brutal to handle it effectively. Second, caught in a cycle of
violence and dependence, some victims impeded solutions by refusing to
seek or accept help from the police. Third, whereas Victorian social
values . . . generally condemned a man�s brutality against his
girlfriend, wife, or family, the same countercurrents that produced
intimate assaults frustrated efforts to curb them.�
Nineteenth-century police officers were widely criticized in the press
for being partisan and unprofessional and for using excessive force
against criminal suspects. Some of them beat or even killed their own
wives, as well: �In 1891, for example, on-duty patrolman William Smith
inflicted a fatal head injury on his wife with his truncheon after she
interrupted him at the [New York] saloon where he drank and caroused
with another woman. Police officers� notorious readiness to lie,
cheat, and assault may have . . . deterred victims from seeking their
assistance.�
The arrest and prosecution of batterers was hampered by the
unwillingness of victims to report abuse and by victims' tendency to
recant their allegations before or during the criminal trial. As I
note in my article:
Two [other] factors seem to have led to non-reporting and victim
recantation. First, as the Borgstrom case [see 70 N.E. 780 (N.Y.
1904)] demonstrates, a visit from the police might cause an abuser
to become even more violent. A typical New York City woman was
afraid to have her husband arrested for beating her �as he would
murder her if he ever got out [of prison].� Second many victims of
intimate abuse worried that their family�s livelihood would be
destroyed by a criminal case. Battered wives, in particular, might
face terrible hardship if the men upon whom they depended
financially were imprisoned, fired from their jobs, or shunned by
business associates for being wife beaters. The spouse of New York
City police officer William Smith who clubbed her with his
truncheon, attempted to keep the cause of her ultimately fatal
injuries a secret. As her brother testified, �she was shielding
[her husband], she was afraid he would be broken off the police if
she reported his attack on her.�
Some police officers did respond to reports of intimate violence, but
their efforts often �met other forms of resistance, besides victim
recantation. Some were shot or faced life-threatening assaults from
wife-beaters and their cronies.� In New York City in 1891, for
example, Officer Herrlich was assaulted by an allegedly abusive
husband�s friends, who pelted the officer �with stones and huge pieces
of ice� when he responded to a call for help. As I contend in my
article:
Such incidents confirm the resilience of beliefs in the
wife-beating prerogative. However, I am less convinced than other
feminist scholars that the white male establishment simply
transformed its rhetoric to hide a firm commitment to the brutal
subjugation of women. Rather, in my view, the ice-throwing incident
described above [and the intimate murder cases that I analyze in my
article] reveal a deep cultural rift over the issue of intimate
violence . . . Punishing murderers may have reinforced the status
regime ensuring that the white male establishment did not undermine
its claims to legitimacy by shedding too much intimate blood.
Nevertheless, resilient beliefs in the wife-beating prerogative
were not synonymous with a conspiracy against women. In my view, it
is more plausible that, instead of being controlled by a hegemonic
gender ideology, late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century America was divided over whether violence had a
legitimate place in family government. The press and the jury box
demonstrated little empathy for males who killed their intimates,
and policemen like Officer Herrlich even attempted to quell the
battering before it escalated to homicide. In spite of such
efforts, some American men continued to believe that �a few thumps
once in a while can do no harm.�
. . . [T]he same values that promoted protectiveness toward women
contained loose threads that often unraveled in actual intimate
relationships. Frustrated by their inability to achieve success in
the public sphere, husbands, fathers and brothers may have stuck
angrily at those who loved and lived with them. Told to be sober,
restrained, and industrious, some [Victorian] men rebelled and were
none of these things. As ideals of masculine physicality began to
supplant Victorianism around the turn of the century, certain
aspects of the new ideal seemed to resonate with the violent
conquest of women. Even though public figures like [Theodore]
Roosevelt denounced child-murder and wife-beating and placed the
American mother on a pedestal, other voices -- including those of
eminent scientists -- celebrated men�s primitive sexual instincts
as a counterweight to the �unnatural� behavior of the woman
suffragists. This competing strand of early twentieth-century
culture suggested that, if females failed to be modest, refined,
and maternal, all bets were off . . . [w]oman must then bear the
brunt of unfettered masculine violence.� In increasingly anonymous
urban environments that were not policed effectively, such tensions
and countercurrents killed.
My article ends with cases from the Progressive Era. I am now starting
a book project that would extend my research beyond 1920 to discover
how and why sympathy for women accused of murdering male intimates
waned, so that the efforts of defense attorneys to introduce battered
woman�s syndrome evidence in the late twentieth century were initially
met with hostility from the bench and the legal academy. My current
hypothesis goes something like this: When women gained the vote and
began to work side-by-side with men in the public sphere, the
paternalism that characterized public responses to the homicide cases
of the late 1800s and early 1900s diminished.
In writing this book, I plan to expand the geographical scope of my
research to include other American states, such as California,
Massachusetts, and Illinois. I also would like to include data from
other countries. For example, I am investigating the possibility of
using secondary scholarship and archival material from Australia to
assess whether another frontier society approached the problem of
lethal intimate violence in a comparable way to Colorado. Because my
research is ongoing, I would be especially gratified to receive
feedback on the material I have posted here.
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