A New Side to Domestic Violence

Tears streamed down her face as the woman described years of abuse at the hands of her husband. He beat her and held her a virtual prisoner in their Encino apartment. In the 10 years the couple--both Middle Eastern immigrants--had been in America, the wife had not had a credit card or access to a car.

Finally, she had had enough. On the day her husband refused to let her drive the family’s new car, they struggled over the keys and she bit him on the arm.

The police, summoned by neighbors, looked at the bite mark--and arrested the wife.

This tale of justice turned on its head represents a bitter twist in the war on spousal abuse. Hard-hitting laws requiring police to make arrests in abuse cases have put more men behind bars. But around the country, arrests of women also are rising, sometimes at even faster rates.

Last year in Los Angeles, a record 14.3% of domestic abuse arrests were of women, more than double the rate five years earlier.

“Every state that has instituted mandatory arrest has seen a backlash against women, with more women being arrested,” said Joan Zorza, the author of a 1994 study of the problem by the National Center on Women and Family Law.

Many of these cases are eventually dismissed--only 5% of the criminal domestic violence cases prosecuted by the Los Angeles city attorney’s office involve male victims. But the controversy over mandatory arrest laws and the subsequent rise in arrests of women show how attempts to correct past injustices can have unforeseen consequences--and how complex the world of domestic abuse can be.

Some women’s advocates blame poor police training and negative social attitudes toward women.

Other experts say that men, many of them onetime abusers, are learning to punish their wives and girlfriends with the law rather than with their fists.

Some men’s organizations say the new laws are exposing a fact that many are unwilling to face: women also can be abusers.

Mandatory arrest laws gained favor in the late 1980s, when the nation awakened to the mortal danger spousal abuse posed to women. After discovering that police were often driving away from domestic violence calls without intervening--sometimes with fatal results--communities began to adopt statutes requiring officers to make arrests in certain situations.

Twenty-seven states have such laws. The language varies, but the way it often works on the street is that the investigating officer looks for a visible injury, no matter how minor. “We teach, if you see an injury, you have reasonable cause to believe a felony has occurred,” said Sgt. Bob Medkeff, who for eight years trained Los Angeles officers to respond to domestic violence calls.

Now, just as the idea of mandatory arrest gains wide acceptance, some women’s advocates are beginning to have second thoughts about the whole idea.

Some say the trend shows a backlash among officers who resent being stripped of their discretion by mandatory arrest laws. Zorza cited a study of Boston police that showed just seven officers made half of the arrests of women in domestic violence cases.

“There is an attitude in law enforcement that says, ‘If you are going to treat us like kids [by requiring an arrest] we’re going to follow the letter of the law,’ ” said Alana Bowman, the Los Angeles city attorney’s special assistant for domestic violence.

Others say inexperience may be more of a problem than attitude, in the LAPD at least.

Because of all the turnover in recent years, “they have a young force,” said Gail Pincus, who trains officers in handling domestic violence. “The law is, ‘If you see a visible injury, make an arrest.’ Because they’re young and inexperienced, they do what the law tells them,” without determining who warranted the most blame.

In charging that police have problems in deciding whom to arrest, women’s groups cite the rise in several states of dual arrests, where both parties are taken to jail. Rather than doing the tough work of sorting out what happened, they say, police arrest everyone who causes an injury.

Some experts say male abusers are manipulating the new laws. They cite the Sacramento man who scratched a scab on his ear to make it bleed. Then he called the police and had his wife arrested. A Northern California man went into the backyard and hit himself on the head with a brick. Police were hauling his wife off to jail when neighbors ran out and said they saw the man injure himself.

In Los Angeles, a man born with a bump on his head got his wife arrested three times before police wised up, said Pincus, co-chair of legal issues for the county’s Domestic Violence Council, an advisory board of representatives of public and private agencies.

Pincus, who runs two counseling groups for male batterers, said some abusers freely admit using the system to get revenge. She said “the holding cell is the great school,” where men share their favorite techniques for getting back at women.

Until 1994, there were fewer than half a dozen counseling groups exclusively for female batterers in Los Angeles. Now there are more than 30.

However, Bev Slover said that in the Long Beach therapy group she runs for female batterers, most of the members are really victims. One woman was arrested for scratching her estranged boyfriend’s face after he broke into her house, Slover said.

Men’s groups, however, argue that the new statistics are finally revealing the truth about domestic violence.

Dr. Alvin Baraff, who runs a Washington counseling center for men, said he has begun to notice that men are much more willing to admit being abused.

In the past, he said, those who reported it “were desperate or brave. Men are brought up not to ask for help and they’re supposed to take it like a man. What kind of man are you if you can’t control your wife?”

Mandatory arrest laws may have helped open up reporting of such problems. After Wisconsin toughened its statutes in 1989, the number of men referred by the courts for counseling doubled. Referrals of women increased twelvefold.

Based on arrests made in 1994, men made up 25% of the victims of domestic violence in Connecticut, an increase of one-third since mandatory arrest policies were adopted in 1986.

Jim Schniekowski, founder of the Menswork Center in West Los Angeles, added that gender stereotypes may be breaking down: “There is a growing impulse to give women support for being aggressive. As a consequence, we’re getting more” aggressive behavior by women.

A study by researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that wives initiated serious attacks on their husbands at a 33% greater rate in 1992 than in 1985.

Far from being hostile to women, most men’s advocates say, police traditionally have not taken abuse by women seriously. In one high-profile case in 1991, police found Michelle Chapman, 46, at her Tujunga home. She told them to take her husband away “before I kill him.”

Despite a long history of drinking problems and fighting in the Chapman household, police ignored the threat and left after talking to her but without checking on her spouse. Thomas Chapman, 52, was beaten to death after they left.

“The officers just relied on the fact that it was a woman and women don’t usually kill men,” said James A. Frieden, who filed a suit against the police on behalf of the family. “If it had been the other way around and the woman was the victim, that would not have happened.”

In 1992, Chapman was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 11 years in prison. The lawsuit was dismissed.

Police say they are hamstrung by the rigid domestic abuse policies. “We can no longer arbitrate like we used to do. We’re caught in the middle,” said Lt. Anthony Alba, a spokesman for the LAPD.

Officers’ “ability to make decisions in the field about who should or shouldn’t be taken to jail has been taken away from them,” he said. “If there is an injury, you have to put somebody in jail.”

To counter the tendency to make dual arrests, Los Angeles and other jurisdictions have further refined policies by directing police to try to determine the “primary aggressor” in a dispute.

Sandy Jo MacArthur, who directs domestic violence training for the LAPD, said new recruits go through a 14-hour class teaching them to differentiate between wounds received in self-defense from those incurred when attacking.

But Mitch Robins, who heads the LAPD detective unit in Van Nuys that investigates spousal abuse cases, complained that officers are frequently confronted with radically different stories from the combatants in cases with no witnesses. “How in the hell are you supposed to tell who started it?” he asked.

The difficulty of judging such situations is one reason police are up to three times more likely to make an arrest in an assault involving a stranger than in a domestic case, according to Eve Buzawa, a criminal justice professor at the University of Massachusetts. That is true even when the circumstances are nearly identical.

Denise Gamache of the Battered Women’s Justice Project said she has resisted pushing for a mandatory arrest law in her state of Minnesota because of the problems elsewhere.

“At its best,” said Zorza, the author of the mandatory arrest study, “it may be a tool that advocates and others may utilize in an attempt to end the violence. At its worst, the law may be utilized as a weapon to exploit and further victimize battered women.”

But advocates say the answer is not to return to the past, when police drove off and let sparring couples “work things out.”

“Maybe the answer is to come up with ways to better protect women,” said Buzawa. “We put all this money into batterers’ treatment. But certain women are prone to being in these relationships. More than 50% of the women studied in a Quincy, Mass., [domestic violence] project had previously been in an abusive relationship. Maybe some of the women ought to be in treatment so they don’t find themselves in relationships like that again.”

At the Van Nuys jail, the Encino woman was told her bail would be reduced to $250 from $50,000. The tearful woman vowed to leave her husband and his “I am the man, I am your boss” attitude.

After the woman left, Hampton said she had been seeing a lot of these cases.

Asked if any of the cases involved men with serious injuries, she replied: “I don’t have one.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Switching Roles

The number of women arrested for domestic violence in Los Angeles has nearly quadrupled in the last nine years. Likewise, more men are becoming victims of violence at home.

Domestic Violence Arrests

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WOMEN WOMEN AS % OF TOTAL MEN 1987 340 7.0% 4,540 1988 457 7.6% 5,583 1989 501 7.2% 6,492 1990 519 6.7% 7,277 1991 669 8.3% 7,425 1992 732 9.0% 7,426 1993 941 10.7% 7,856 1994 1,079 12.5% 7,580 1995 1,262 14.3% 7,513

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Note: There are more victims than arrests because not all domestic disputes end in an arrest.

Source: Los Angeles Police Department