Private Violence

The unspeakable crimes are being yanked out of the shadows What might be called public violence is as American as assassinations, mob wars and mass murders, the stuff of screaming headlines and periodic national soul searching. What might be called private violence, what people who know each other, even profess to love each other, do to each other, is a nightmarish realm only beginning to be forthrightly explored. Its particular horror stems from its viola tions of the trust upon which all intimate human relations depend: it is cruelty exercised on those nearest, most vulnerable, least able or inclined to defend themselves from their attackers. For those who commit private violence, who abuse children, beat wives and rape, the usual reasons behind public violence—greed, dementia, vengeance, feral antisocial anger—do not generally apply. How to explain acts of brutality so personal and thus so specially disturbing?

Public violence, at least, can be neatly tallied. The FBI is aware of exactly 22,516 murders committed in the U.S. in 1981, a fifth of them killings of loved ones, and that is very close to the true total. Even the Government accounting of motor-vehicle thefts, 1,073,998 for 1981, is almost right, since victims cannot get their insurance money unless they file a police report. But when statisticians turn to private violence, the numbers become iffy, approximate in the extreme. Are there 650,000 cases of child abuse annually, or a million? Or 6 million? Bona fide experts, extrapolating and just guessing, variously cite all those figures and others. It is said that every year 2 million women are beaten by their husbands, and it is also said that nearly 6 million are. Pick your figure. A Justice Department survey counted 178,000 rapes during 1981, but for every woman who reported a rape to the police, perhaps nine or maybe 25 did not. It is beyond dispute, however, that extraordinary numbers of women and children are being brutalized by those closest to them.

The uncertainty about the scope of private violence is a function of shame, of hushing up. Such crimes, unlike slashings or shootings on sidewalks and in taverns, often leave a victim more hurt and humiliated than outraged. Historically, beatings by one's husband, like rapes, were bad enough to suffer but more shameful still to reveal publicly. Child-rearing, no matter how harshly executed, was an entirely private matter.

Today, the dirty secrets are no longer being kept. Victims of private violence are talking—to police, prosecutors, counselors, friends, one another—and U.S. society is trying to help. Private violence is becoming less private. Thus, while reports of child abuse in Florida, for example, rose from 35,301 in 1981 to 45,704 last year, such apparent increases may be due mostly to authorities' finding out about more of the violence. Betty Friedan, the feminist author, believes that attacks on women are not necessarily on the rise, just coming out of the shameful murk: "Women don't tolerate it any more because they know it's all right to speak up."