Unspoken Acceptance of Violence : Even crimes with no apparent connection to domestic violence can turn out to be rooted in a man’s inability to handle the disintegration of a romantic relationship.

What do advocates for battered women mean when they tell us that our society has a high tolerance for domestic violence?

After all, don’t the cops come when they’re called?

And look at the 1989 incident involving O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. Didn’t the police--persuaded by Nicole’s terror and bruises--arrest O.J., even after he told them not to meddle in a “family matter”?

When the experts say we tolerate domestic violence, they aren’t usually talking about the severe battering incidents that result in crutches and stitches, police reports and jail time.

What they are talking about is a culture that does not perceive incidents of abuse as part of an escalating pattern of violence. They are talking about a culture that does not see the connection between men who isolate their wives from friends and family, men who shower their wives with emotional abuse and men who batter their wives to death when they call the relationship quits.

When talk turns to our cultural acceptance of physical violence visited upon women by men they love, I often think of the time in 1991 that Sean Connery told Barbara Walters on network TV that he could imagine smacking his wife. And how, in 1993, he told Vanity Fair that his remarks had been taken out of context: “I was really saying that to slap a woman was not the cruelest thing you can do. . . . It’s much more cruel to psychologically damage somebody. Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That’s what they’re looking for, the ultimate confrontation--they want a smack.”

And I think, too, of the Rolling Stones album “Black and Blue,” which was promoted with a huge billboard of a bound and bruised woman and was supposed to be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek image.

The mere fact that a renowned actor and one of the world’s biggest rock groups can take such casual approaches to the issue speaks volumes about our tolerance levels.

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Although we’d like to deny it, family violence is a plague on all our houses. It seeps like spilled blood out from under closed doors and stains everyone.

Even crimes with no apparent connection to domestic violence can turn out to be rooted in a man’s inability to handle the disintegration of a romantic relationship.

In the spring of 1990, you may recall, a New York man named Julio Gonzales had a fight with his ex-girlfriend. When he decided to wreak his revenge, she happened to be at work checking coats at the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx. Gonzales doused the club’s front door with a dollar’s worth of gasoline, then put a match to it. His ex-girlfriend survived, but 87 others perished in the blaze. “I knew I was going to damage,” Gonzales said, “but not of that intensity.”

His crime was characterized as the work of an arsonist, but think about it: The worst incident of mass murder in U.S. history had its origins in a man’s desire to take revenge for a soured relationship.

And how about the extraordinary turmoil unleashed in Boston in 1989 after Charles Stuart, who was white, claimed his pregnant wife, Carol, had been shot and killed by a stranger who was black? The city anguished over Stuart’s accusation, which set off a manhunt in the African American neighborhood where the shooting took place. A prime suspect was publicly identified.

In the end, it turned out the suspect was innocent. Carol Stuart had been killed by her husband, who jumped off a bridge to his death when it became clear the police were on to his hoax.

An entire city, you might say, was victimized by a man’s violence toward his wife.

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I once interviewed a cultural anthropologist who was working on a book comparing wife-beating practices in 14 rural and non-industrialized societies.

She mentioned a 1985 survey on American attitudes toward wife beating, in which most respondents said wife beating was acceptable or at least understandable under certain circumstances.

The question the anthropologist sought to answer in her book was why some societies tolerate battering while others do not. And what she discovered was that it depended on two things: how a society makes its disapproval known, and whether women have sanctuaries available.

It’s not a hard concept to grasp. After all, family violence experts often talk about what the notion of “zero tolerance” has done to the smoking and drunken-driving rates.

I often smile when I think of a story the anthropologist told me about the Wape, inhabitants of a Pacific island near New Guinea. They show no tolerance for wife beating. If the women of a village hear a man beating his wife, or even what sounds like an altercation, she said, they come and stand around the house until the wife comes out.

Wouldn’t it be great one day to see that happen here?

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.