Survey of Battered Wives : Women Who Call Police Cut Risk of Future Abuse

Battered wives dramatically reduce their chances of being beaten again when they call the police, according to a Justice Department report released Sunday.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ survey of the effect of reporting domestic violence found that of the married women who did not call the police after their husbands beat them, 41% suffered repeat attacks within six months.

Only 15% of the wives who called authorities after an assault, however, were beaten during the next half-year, the study showed.

“I believe this is a most provocative finding, and should be reflected upon by everyone interested in the subject of spousal abuse,” Steven R. Schlesinger, director of the bureau, a division of the Justice Department, said in a statement.

The report, based on National Crime Survey data gathered between 1978 and 1982, said that during those years, 2.1 million women--unmarried as well as married--were victims of domestic violence--assault, rape or robbery--at least once a year, and many of them were attacked repeatedly. About 128,000 women in 60,000 households were interviewed for the study.

Single Women Differ

The investigation found that unmarried women prevented recurrence of such abuse by telephoning the police, but did so less often than married women. Researchers could not explain why.

Matija Mosuic, a volunteer counselor at My Sister’s Place, a battered-women’s shelter in Washington, hailed the findings and expressed hope that they will encourage more women to report beatings. “Women do feel better if they believe the police are on the lookout for them,” Mosuic said.

At the same time, experts recognize that battered wives are in a dilemma: Although the reporting of a beating might deter recurrences, it also could incite certain men to retaliate.

Mosuic said that she has talked with many battered women who worried that if their husbands found out they had reported them to the police, they would beat them up again.

The study also found, however, that fear of reprisal was not the chief reason women did not report abuse. Almost half of the women who did not call police said they regarded the beatings as a “private or personal matter,” the report said. Only 12% cited fear of reprisal as their reason for not calling police. Another 11% said the crime was not important enough.

Deterrence Usual Motive

Among those who did call, the reason given most often--37% of the time--was “to keep it from happening again,” the report said. About 52% of the incidents were reported to police.

The report acknowledged that there is no pat answer for every woman on the question of whether to call police, but it clearly showed that women who do report being abused stand a better chance of avoiding it in the future.

Moreover, the report said, even if a man retaliated against a woman for calling the police, the acts of violence he subsequently committed “were no more serious than those against women who did not call.”

Offering one possible explanation for the effectiveness of the calls, the report said that “police represent the threat of punishment, and merely calling the police, no matter what they do, is enough to deter some men from committing new acts of violence.”