Study in Violence: Battered Women Often Reluctant to Accept Aid

On a recent weeknight, the San Diego Police Department and the Center for Women’s Studies and Services were co-sponsoring a seminar on battered women. The doors to the “storefront” office of the Kensington police substation were open. Battered women or anyone else interested in the problem were invited to come in and “tell a story,” in the hope that the ranks of battered women might diminish by at least one.

No one showed up.

Joyce Faidley from the center was there, as was John Slough, a police officer in the Kensington substation. Faidley said indications by telephone pointed to a good turnout. She also said that for no one to show was not entirely unanticipated or unusual. It takes a lot for a battered woman to admit the problem, she said, much less air it in a public forum.

As a result, the center is reevaluating its policy on such seminars, Faidley said, reaffirming that “getting a handle on the problem of battered women is difficult at best.”

The Center for Women’s Studies and Services offers a 24-hour hot line for battered women, as well as counseling and legal aid. The latter includes helping women seek temporary restraining orders as a way of stopping the violence.

“That’s a legal order that kicks him out,” Faidley said. “He can’t come within 100 yards of the home, the children’s school, the wife’s place of employment . . . any place she feels endangered.”

The problem of battered women is getting worse, Faidley said, even as awareness continues to grow. She offered a number of statistics culled from research by the center:

- Somewhere across the country, a woman is battered every 18 seconds, and 25% of all women who report such assaults are pregnant.

- Twenty-five percent of the murders in the nation happen within the family.

- Children are battered in half of the families in which the mother is being beaten.

- Of boys ages 11 to 20 who are arrested for homicide, 63% have murdered men who were assaulting their mothers.

- Fifty percent of California women will be assaulted by their husbands, lovers or sons at some time in their lives.

- Battery is the single major cause of injury to women, exceeding rapes, muggings and auto accidents.

- Battering tends to escalate over time, leading in some instances to homicide or suicide. According to the FBI, one-third of female murder victims in California are killed by their partners.

-Eighty-five percent of batterers were either battered as children or witnessed assaults on their mothers.

Faidley said the problem is getting worse in the elderly community, where the center’s efforts are being concentrated in coming months. The center also conducts seminars in high schools, she said, hoping to influence young women against “ill-advised marriages.”

The problem also affects police. Faidley said part of the effort is targeted toward “sensitizing” police officers, most of whom loathe intervening in such cases.

A new law passed last year mandates eight hours of domestic violence training in police work. The center is involved in that.

“A lot of officers don’t like going out on those calls, because they’re dangerous,” Faidley said. “A lot of officers are killed or injured in the line of duty, and they never know what’s going to happen in a battery case. They feel they’re in a no-win situation. I sympathize with them--it isn’t easy being tossed in the middle of two people fighting.

“Battery cases offer so many ironies and bizarre contradictions. There have been cases where they’ll be handcuffing the batterer, and the wife is putting bail money in his pocket. Police officers tend to lose hope at those moments.”

After the legislative mandate of January, 1986, officer Robert Stinson put together a program for the San Diego Police Department. He simplified the law, saying it forces police to view family violence in a criminal rather than domestic context.

“If a stranger on a street corner hits someone, that person gets arrested,” Stinson said. “Now the same law applies to a husband slugging a wife in a home. I’d say the law is working very well, because a police officer now feels he can do something.”

Still, enforcement of domestic violence is difficult. An officer walks into a highly charged emotional atmosphere where two people are often hopelessly irrational. He might be making an arrest, Stinson said, and suddenly, the wife starts hitting the officer--she resents seeing a “loved one” apprehended.

Stinson said about 2% of all arrests involve domestic violence. He said the problem is getting worse in San Diego, although awareness is increasing dramatically. From January to September of 1986, after the law took effect, San Diego police responded to 3,111 calls involving domestic violence.

“What we’re encountering is an issue receiving a lot more attention,” Stinson said. “It’s becoming an issue of nationwide importance. You can look at it in a similar light as child molestation. It’s a problem that’s always been there, but now the awareness is exploding. There’s no reason to think the amount has changed, but a great deal more attention is being paid to it.”

Domestic violence is full of gray areas, contradictions, bizarre irrationality. Tammy knows. A victim of domestic violence, she sought help first from an arresting officer, then through a counselor with the Center for Women’s Studies and Services. She remains with the man who beat her; the last beating occurred two years ago.

She agreed to tell her story, provided her real name was not used. Her husband declined to be interviewed but did say he hopes her contribution “prevents another woman from being beaten.”

Tammy hopes that “if any woman identifies with my story, she will seek help immediately, after first getting out of the house.” She urges that they call the hot line: 233-3088.

Sometimes even now, two years after the last beating, she feels trapped--like a bird who can’t fly. On a recent rainy morning, she was reading a book about a housewife who takes a sabbatical from marriage. The woman leaves her family, her responsibilities, and hikes across the world with her belongings in a backpack.

“I would love to do that,” Tammy said sadly, as though the possibility could never occur. “God, how I would love to do that! I’ve just never felt free. I’ve been married almost since the day I graduated from high school.”

Beatings occurred regularly from 1978 to 1982. She considered the 1984 beating an isolated instance. The embarrassment of the ’84 beating was that neighbors called the police, and then her father found out. He came to the door and told his daughter he was taking her away, that no man in his right mind would take a fist to a wife (even though he had beaten Tammy’s mother, she said).

“Dad,” she said with blackened eyes and a bloody nose, “you don’t know the half of it.”

Yet she has stayed with the man who once gave her a series of broken ribs and a concussion, a puffed-up nose, numerous black eyes and cuts.

“I always came out looking like Rocky,” she said with a wry smile.

She says the problem is better now--her husband has promised never to abuse her. And except for the “relapse” two years ago, he’s kept his word. But he won’t agree to therapy, either for himself or as a couple, and he continues to drink--his wife thinks he’s an alcoholic. He’s remained reasonably free of whiskey, which she says “does things to him.” Part of the decoration in the home includes empty bottles of Jack Daniels and Wild Turkey.

Still, his behavior is better. She calls him a good father and says that he cares for their 8-year-old son “very deeply.”

But family violence has taken its toll on a sensitive child.

“Even if I raise my voice or my husband raises his, (the boy) panics instantly,” she said. “He thinks it’s gonna be a war zone.”

In spite of the gruesome pain, physically and emotionally, she says of her husband and their checkered nine-year marriage, “I guess you’d have to call it being madly in love with someone.”

Now 28, she met the man of her dreams more than a decade ago. He’s 10 years older. They dated for a few months, then married. At the time she met him, he was seeing another woman. Tammy said, “It came down to a fistfight between me and her, and I won.”

Violence has long played a role in Tammy’s--and her husband’s--life. Tammy’s mom used to beat her.

“I had to go to the orthodontist numerous times to have my lip unsevered from my braces,” she said. “He thought I had this problem of falling off my bike.”

Only now is Tammy finally starting to comprehend the tie between growing up in a violent home and getting stuck in one as an adult. She believes her relationship with her mother had a lot to do with who she chose for a mate, and how they’ve behaved in marriage.

She used to believe that violence begat violence, but now she thinks it doesn’t have to. Still, she can see you have to be a strong person to rise above a bloody past.

Tammy’s mother was an alcoholic who died two years ago of cancer of the liver, at which time “my subconscious exploded, and I finally started picking up the pieces. Getting myself together bit by bit.”

Her father was a 41-year career Navy officer who battered his wife. Once with her dad deployed at sea, Tammy and her siblings were ordered to move in with an aunt and uncle and their children, because her mother had left, her whereabouts unknown.

“There were 13 of us in a three-bedroom house,” she said. “We lived there a year and a half. During that time, I was sexually abused by my cousin--by him and his gay teen-age lover, both of whom were considerably older. From the time I was 18 months to 4 years old, I was abused by this cousin and his gay friend--whether I was there at the house or living with someone else. Somehow, they would find me. I was too scared to tell anybody about it.”

Her husband has his own story. His parents were alcoholics. His father was 6-foot-4, his mother 4-foot-9. His father beat his mother in brutal fights that he usually had to stop.

“That’s why I was so stunned when he started beating me,” she said. “I knew the effect those had had on him as a boy.”

Tammy concedes that drug use by her and her husband has led to many ugly moments.

“We both did coke for quite a while,” she said. “And you can believe everything they tell you about how it ruins lives. It almost ruined ours. Now we’re clean. We’re not doing any drugs.”

After the beating in ‘84, Tammy issued an ultimatum.

“It came down to, ‘You put a hand on me, and I’ll shoot your ass,’ ” she said. “He decided to try harder.”

And so far, he has. She says now when he gets upset, he goes into the basement and works for hours. At the moment, he’s unemployed. He used to be a truck driver making a lot of money, but he tired of that and will soon start his own business remodeling houses. He’s optimistic, and so is his wife.

He says he regrets having beaten her and says he’ll never again resort to such measures, because he’s fearful of losing his family. She believes him.

Tammy says she’s never felt better about herself. She works in a physical education class, as a teachers’ aide at a local elementary school. She sees a marriage and family counselor once a week--an enterprise her husband supports--and finally, she’s started to dream.

“I wanted to like myself, because I never had,” she said.

She continues to feel that the beam of her life is tenuous; hers is a hard past to overcome. But she can see how the tattered childhoods shared by her and her husband have repeated themselves in a dreary deja vu . For that reason, they’ve never raised a hand to their son, a track record she wishes had applied to them.

“Awareness is half the battle,” she said. “He and I both know that now.”

She says that if her husband ever slips and beats her again she’ll have only a promise to rely on.

“I’ll leave,” she said.

“This time, no question about it.”