Private Violence

(4 of 5)

Some liberals sound illiberally willing to cut corners when it comes to prosecuting private-violence offenders. In some cities, a man who assaults a woman must be arrested and prosecuted, even if she changes her mind about the whole thing; in Anchorage, Alaska, a woman who declines to testify against her husband may be fined or jailed. It used to be much more difficult to convict rapists, but states are changing their laws so that simply a victim's say-so may be evidence enough. The Washington State legislature, angry over the difficulty of prosecuting a child molester, passed a law last year allowing hearsay testimony in certain criminal trials to corroborate other evidence.

The new zealousness, coming after generations of apathy, is not surprising. It is no wonder that counselors of battered women are inclined to advise a black-and-blue wife to file for divorce and prosecute the brute instead of going back to him for the third time. When a nuclear family is undergoing a meltdown, about to blow, it is a good idea to evacuate the place. But sometimes the professionals seem eager to denigrate their clients' commitment to marriage. "Women have an incredible amount of hope," says Mary Marecek, a counselor at the oldest women's shelter in Massachusetts. "We want them to get over the hope that the ideal marriage may still come out of it." Yet a hopeful woman, trying to make a go of a not-so-good marriage, is not always a fooL There are those in the field who—like the Ellen Jamesians, the self-mutilating feminists of The World According to Garp—seem too quick to find in wife abuse a confirmation and dramatization of sexism, a bloody cartoon of male oppression.

There are more specialized kinds of private violence, of course, only just beginning to be classified as "social problems." Most prominent is "granny bashing," the flip British nickname for the physical mistreatment of old people, usually the victimizers' parents or grandparents. About 5% of dependent elderly Americans may be abused, according to Murray Straus, a University of New Hampshire sociologist. Is a surge of parent bashing possible? It would not be a real surprise: futuristic cabin fever could break out if, on the verge of the 21 st century, millions of Americans really are working and living in their hermetic "electronic cottages." Last year in state-of-the-art and otherwise pacific Japan, there were 1,099 reported cases of children assaulting their parents.

In most of the rest of the world, private violence is not considered a high-priority social problem. Not that punch-ups at home are any less prevalent. Rather, as a Thai social worker says, "it's so common that no one thinks it's a problem." If anything, victims abroad are more explicitly shamed into silence, with the legal and medical systems often oblivious. In most countries a man's home is practically his personal free-fire zone, off limits to busybodies. And the U.S. has far and away more shelters and programs where victims can find solace and help. But the vast array of American services is to meet a vast terror: a woman's chances of being raped in the U.S., for instance, are five or ten times as great as in Western Europe.