Spouse Battering: The Crime Wave Too Often Forgotten : Simpson case puts domestic violence in the limelight

It’s unfortunate it may take the arrest of a high-profile celebrity like O. J. Simpson to focus the nation on domestic violence, a very serious problem that for too long has been cast by its sorry practitioners as a “private family affair.” It may be that the extraordinary events of last week will prove to be the beginning of the end of that neglect.

We must keep in mind, of course, that the former football star and well-liked celebrity has pleaded not guilty to charges that he murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman and that under our system of justice he is absolutely entitled to the presumption of innocence.

However, it is irrefutable that the sports commentator pleaded no contest to a 1989 misdemeanor charge of spousal battery against Nicole Simpson. According to police records released last week, Simpson beat his then-wife so badly that she required treatment at a hospital after police officers found her cowering in bushes in front of their home. The beating left her with a cut lip, a blackened left eye, a bruised cheek and a hand imprint on her neck, according to the police report. She told the responding officers she wanted Simpson arrested. The police record quotes O. J. Simpson as saying, “The police have been out here eight times before, and now you’re going to arrest me for this?”

Simpson served no jail time after his 1989 no-contest plea despite a recommendation from the prosecutor in the case that he do so. Instead, Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Ronald Schoenberg sentenced Simpson to 120 hours of community service and two years’ probation. And Simpson had to pay only $200 in fines and contribute only $500 to a shelter for battered women. The judge also allowed him to be treated by the psychiatrist of his choice--and to be treated over the telephone rather than undergo the customary face-to-face counseling program for men who batter their wives.

Simpson’s unusually light sentence is, sadly, symptomatic of how ineffective our legal system historically has been in responding to this commonplace crime of violence. The statistics are chilling: Women are four times more likely than men to be killed by their spouses or domestic partners, according to the most recent figures from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Nationally, FBI statistics show that a woman is battered every 15 seconds and that more than one-fourth of all murders of women are committed by spouses. Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti contends that a woman is killed in Los Angeles County every nine days in an episode of domestic violence. It is of course not true that domestic violence is confined to crimes by men; see the piece on today’s Commentary page by Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski.

Generally, only in the last decade have police departments across the nation begun to arrest batterers and have prosecutors begun to file charges even when a woman withdraws her complaint (often in response to her mate’s threats or pleas). In Los Angeles, Garcetti, who was elected L.A. County district attorney in 1992, has made the issue of domestic violence one of his career-long priorities.

It’s true that these are often tough cases for the authorities. Police traditionally dislike responding to domestic violence calls; such investigations are dangerous and emotionally messy. Sometimes the victim doesn’t want to believe that her mate really meant to do her harm. She may even turn on the officers. That complicates the problem enormously, and women’s shelters are full of bruised survivors trying to break the cords of their relationship.

California’s immensely helpful stalking laws are in the forefront of legislation because they let police arrest a mate who violates a judge’s order to stay away from a battered spouse. (There’s no evidence that Nicole Simpson ever sought a restraining order against her ex-husband.)

If there is any good to come of the Simpson tragedy, it could be in advancing a candid public discussion about domestic violence and perhaps initiating policy changes to address this horrendous problem with stronger deterrents and tougher punishments. Unchecked by better police work, not to mention by wiser and firmer justice from the bench, domestic violence, particularly spousal abuse, will remain perhaps America’s least-attended-to crime wave.