Private Violence

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Rape and family violence and incest are still uncomfortable subjects. And the common good is hardly better served by easy statutory fiats—one spouse slapping another is not just like any other criminal assault—than by the old silence of misplaced propriety. But the unspeakable must be spoken, in all of its repellent conjugations. Take, for example, the biggest taboo: "As long as incest has that secrecy," says Miriam Ingebritson, a Minneapolis therapist, "it has a potency and power it doesn't deserve. It has to be stripped of that power." There are now all kinds of places to turn to. Rape treatment clinics, shelters for battered wives, and centers for abused children have sprung up across the country. Legal procedures appear to have made prosecution easier. The problems are coming out of the closet in surprising places: in the small Plains city of Salina (pop. 42,600), the Domestic Violence Association of Central Kansas gets around 100 "crisis calls" a month.

There is no place so violent as home. About half of all rapes occur there. It is in the privacy of the home, both in cramped flats and in grand neocolonials, that women are pummeled by husbands and boyfriends. It was in his home in Houston a few years ago, for instance, that Second-Grader Daniel Brownell, whose stepfather's attacks had left him paralyzed and permanently senseless, was found branded with cigarette burns that spelled I CRY. One remarkable Connecticut woman named Carol,* 38, who is a volunteer counselor of imprisoned rapists, knows freakishly well that home is not necessarily a haven: it was in her childhood home in the early 1950s that she was the victim of incest, at a friend's home that a half-dozen men gang-raped her, in her very own home that her second husband beat the living daylights out of her again and again.

Out on the street, at least, one's guard is up. Muggers who demand money are, in a sense, just conducting a cutthroat business. Most of the time they do not lay claims on their victims' humanity. Home is meant to be life's one warm, safe place. Violence committed there, especially by somebody understood to be a guardian (husband, father, mother, uncle, babysitter), is a special betrayal. And once brawling becomes routine in a household, or primal taboos are cracked, there is often no stopping the spread of viciousness. Richard Gelles, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island, describes the grim ecology of a violent family: "The husband will beat the wife. The wife may then learn to beat the children. The bigger siblings learn it's O.K. to hit the little ones, and the family pet may be the ultimate recipient of violence."