Shock--and Action

Kathleen “Katt” Jolly had laughed off threats made by her former boyfriend after she broke off with him a year ago. Or so family and friends said at Jolly’s memorial service.

The 42-year-old artist was killed in her Tarzana home by the ex-boyfriend, who then fatally shot himself. It happened on Valentine’s Day.

How many times have we heard the numbing figures? Almost half of all women slain in this country are killed by their male partners. Each year, an estimated 4 million women are physically abused by their husbands or boyfriends. We never want to believe that it can happen to someone we know. Or to us.

Then someone like Jolly comes along and puts a face on the numbers.

A “flower child,” said her stepmother. “A really incredible artist,” said a friend. “A mother. A daughter. A sister. My daughter,” said her mother. “How dare he?”

The shocking fact is that women in this country are more at risk from men they know and love or loved than from assaults by strangers. Even more shocking is that domestic violence is so common that it has almost ceased to shock us.

Last week, a 60-year-old Sherman Oaks man hired a limousine driver to take him to his ex-girlfriend’s house in Canoga Park. There, in front of the horrified driver’s eyes, he shot his 54-year-old ex-girlfriend, who remains in critical condition, and killed himself.

In the same paper, a story told of a jury convicting a Palmdale man of first-degree murder for stalking his ex-wife, forcing her vehicle off the road and stabbing her to death. Another murder-suicide, of a 33-year-old woman by her ex-boyfriend, occurred late last week in Pomona.

Wife-beating was once so accepted that it was governed by a common-law “rule of thumb”: a man could chastise his wife so long as the stick he used was no thicker than his thumb.

Yes, we have made progress in the 30 years since feminists began protesting the treatment of battered women. Police training procedures, once limited or nonexistent, now require that officers take domestic violence seriously. Shelters and hotlines have been established. Perpetrators who violate court orders are sent to jail or anger management classes. Counselors better understand the forces that keep women in violent relationships and how to help them break the cycle.

But the killings continue. Even had Jolly obtained a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend--another measure of how domestic crimes are being taken more seriously--there is no guarantee that it would have protected her. Police consider stalkers in such cases to be among the most persistent--and lethal--perpetrators of violence.

One recent--and hopeful--development is that men, individually and in groups, publicly and privately, have begun to try to change those assumptions.

In an emotional address last fall at Cal State Northridge, Los Angeles mayoral candidate and former state Assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa recounted his own childhood experiences with an alcoholic, abusive father, and called on community members to set an example for their children.

In Los Angeles and the Southwest, Latino men have formed circulos de hombres, based on Aztec traditions, to try to transform the age-old concept of machismo from tough guy to good guy. They also formed a nonprofit organization, the National Compadres Network, which has begun a campaign to target domestic violence.

Read a single week’s newspapers, and you will see how urgently such actions are needed, how little we can afford to stay numb.