Private Violence

(3 of 5)

The thousands of wife beaters who happen to be in prison (almost all are there for some other, less peculiar crime) regard rapists with contempt, and rapists in turn call the cellblocks' child abusers scum. But in fact the three groups have some rough affinities. The privately violent are often alcoholic or drug-dependent. All three species tend to have low opinions of themselves; they get violent, psychoanalysts say, because it gives them a cheap squirt of power. Like most criminals, they are immature and impulsive. Everything they want they want instantly. And they are uncommonly isolated people, often virtually friendless, cut off from those who lead richer, happier or just plain calmer lives.

The worst thing about family violence is its natural reproduction of itself, like a poisonous plant sending out spores. Most rapists were preyed upon sexually as children, and most violent criminals were raised in violent homes. Children of punched-out women, accustomed to seeing family business transacted with fists, are prone to become battered wives and battering husbands themselves. Worse, battered children grow up predisposed to batter their own offspring. Sexually abused boys often become pedophiles and rapists, while sexually victimized girls, perennial targets, are likelier to become battered wives. Bruce Ritter, a Roman Catholic priest, runs a shelter for teen-age runaways and castoffs in the neon squalor of Manhattan's Times Square. "The girls who walk in off the streets with babies abuse them," Father Ritter says. "If a two-week-old baby is crying, the mother will slap the baby. We try to teach her not to do that."

Yet there are important distinctions between and within the three main genres of private violence. Slapping a spouse is different from shaking a child—an adult can more easily understand, fight back or flee—and both are very unlike rape. Of the three, rape is most unequivocally a statutory crime, and probably every rapist ought to be locked up for some time. They are real criminals. Of course, a parent who willfully scalds a child's arm is a criminal. Of course, a man who stomps his pregnant wife is a criminal. These cases are, ironically, the easiest ones to think about: when the violence is so ugly and utterly inexcusable, you just throw the book at the sick bastards.

But most cases of private violence are closer calls. What to do about a man who rapes his wife? What about the fights between spouses that are not pat, villain-and-victim episodes? What about Barrel Trueblood of Terre Haute, Ind., whose son Travis was taken from him for three months in 1980 because the father had punished with the thwack of a ruler? Greg Dixon, a Baptist minister and head of Indiana's Moral Majority, says Trueblood was "just giving a normal whipping." Says he: "Reasonable people can detect whether it's assault and battery or not."

One problem is that reasonable, well-intentioned people disagree. How should outsiders decide when private violence is a matter for direct public intervention?