Final Score: Women Often Lose on Big Game Days

Except for a few red banners someone forgot to take down, the Super Bowl is mostly just a memory here in Los Angeles. But the controversy about the connection between football and domestic violence continues.

To replay: Three days before the Super Bowl, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and representatives of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, the California Women’s Law Center and the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting held a press conference in which they announced that the biggest football day of the year is also “the biggest day of the year for violence against women.”

Though support for such a sweeping statement is mostly anecdotal, the LAPD has noted higher-than-average domestic violence arrests on Super Bowl Sunday for the last two years. In 1991 and 1992, an average of 22 people were arrested each day in domestic assault incidents. On Super Bowl Sundays for those years, the figures were 27 and 34.

One of the press conference participants cited an Old Dominion University study documenting a 40% increase in hospital emergency room admissions of northern Virginia women after Washington Redskins football wins in 1988 and 1989.

This turned out to be a misstep.

When contacted by reporters, the study authors said they had deliberately avoided stating their findings in percentages. Because the size of their sample was so small, one woman would have represented a large percentage increase.

The mistake was seized on by reporters intent on debunking a connection between the Super Bowl and battered women. There was a gleefully sexist undertone to some of the stories. In his syndicated column, lawyer Alan Dershowitz accused “zealots who are using the tragedy of battered women to promote their own agendas and personal preferences.” And headlines now refer to the “myth” of the Super Bowl and battered women.

“I felt really disappointed,” said Patricia Giggans, LACAAW executive director. “Our integrity is being impugned. This is an example of the issue itself being victimized. We are not saying football is a direct cause (of violence). We are saying it can be one of a number of triggers.”

Study co-author Janet Katz, in a brief conversation last week, seemed overwhelmed and rueful that the misinterpretation had become the issue.

“Our study suggests a relationship between the outcome of football games and assaults on women,” she said. “This is the main point.”

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Obscured by the fuss was an important women’s health issue and some potentially groundbreaking sociology.

As it turns out, the Virginia study, “The Impact of Professional Football Games Upon Violent Assaults on Women,” offers a provocative, if preliminary, look at the possibility of a relationship between football and domestic assault.

Katz and her colleagues noted an increase in the frequency of emergency room admissions for women suffering from various kinds of assault after Redskins victories in 1988 and 1989. The researchers hypothesized that the increase was due to battering.

These results, they wrote, “were surprising and not anticipated.”

Could violence-prone men, identifying strongly with “their” team, feel so full of themselves after a win that they were unable to control their physical impulses?

Maybe, say the researchers. But all conclusions, they are careful to point out, are speculative.

“In our study, some aspect of the power of the winning team may be transferred to its adherents, giving them the sense that they are able to inflict violence when they choose, particularly against a weaker target. . . . The findings suggest that assaults on women may not be the result of negative factors associated with seeing one’s team lose, but instead may be the result of a positive event (winning).”

This is consistent, they say, with the notion that sports is an area in which men are rewarded for violent behavior.

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I doubt any woman whose man has blackened her eye or broken her ribs on any day of the year cares whether the Virginia study was misinterpreted, just as I doubt she would condemn the “zealots” calling attention to her problem.

Even the main question raised by the study--whether football contributes to the phenomenon of battering by triggering violence in the home--is only a small part of a very large, very disturbing picture. Each year, estimates the government, 3 million to 4 million women are victims of domestic violence.

Last year, Los Angeles police made 8,004 domestic violence-related arrests. But officers also filed nearly 44,000 incident reports involving domestic violence. Double that number (a victim, a victimizer), and you could almost fill the 102,000-seat Rose Bowl with the Angelenos whose lives were affected by violence in the home.

To its credit, NBC broadcast a public service announcement on the topic just before the Super Bowl. From his jail cell, a man dejectedly tells the camera, “I didn’t know you could go to jail for hitting your wife.”

That simple image probably did more good than a ream of studies: LACAAW said the number of domestic violence-related phone calls to its hot line rose 16% in the week after the Super Bowl.

We could argue forever about the numbers. But that only distracts from the important question: How do we make domestic violence as unthinkable as a January without the Super Bowl?