Frequency of Domestic Homicide Falls

Back when Los Angeles Police Det. Pat Barron was a patrol officer, he had a standard tactic for separating abusive spouses.

He would make a solemn face, mumble something about the power vested in him by the state, then declare a 48-hour divorce. It even worked sometimes.

Today, Barron laughs at the memory, so at odds with modern practices. Changes in the social, political and legal environment concerning domestic violence have been profound, transforming law enforcement practices and giving more people ways out of bad relationships. The result has been one of the most striking crime trends of recent years: a decline in homicides between romantic partners, and, it appears, in domestic violence in general.

Experts have tracked the drop in domestic killings over nearly three decades, noting an especially sharp drop in the rate between husbands and wives.

National crime data released last week show that although homicides between spouses increased slightly in 2000, the numbers remain close to a 25-year low at an estimated 900 or so per year. That’s down nearly 60% from the more than 2,000 that occurred yearly in the late 1970s.

Killings between unmarried lovers also have fallen, to an estimated 732 in 2000, down from about 900 in the mid-1980s.

The trends have not benefited all groups equally. Men and African Americans of both genders have seen especially steep declines in victimization rates. But overall rates, including killings between former spouses, have been declining too.

In addition, according to the results of a U.S. Department of Justice survey to be made public today, the overall rate of violence against women from spouses, lovers and former husbands, has declined 41% since 1993, to about 6 victims per 1,000 women.

While reported incidents of violence provide only a rough measure of domestic violence, the newest data seem to indicate what some researchers have long suspected: That falling domestic homicide rates may indicate that fewer people are getting injured in the context of love relationships.

Murder, though, remains easier to measure, so domestic homicide still draws most scholarly attention.

And because the trends have been largely impervious to the dips and bumps that characterize crime rates in other categories, some experts say they indicate a genuine shift in the underlying social environment--not just temporary demographic changes.

They cite factors ranging from heightened public consciousness to new laws, to the decreased availability of handguns in some urban areas. The decline, they say, also is a little-celebrated byproduct of high divorce rates, which allow people to flee bad marriages more readily.

“There is absolutely no doubt about the drop,” said criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld at the University of Missouri St. Louis. “It has been so consistent for so long and is so substantial that the only argument about it is why it is happening.”

Despite the encouraging numbers, the declines in spousal homicide rates have not been widely touted. Some domestic violence activists even dispute them, or at least play down their significance.

“The problem still exists,” said Ellyne Bell, executive director of the California Alliance Against Domestic Violence. Besides, if people get the idea it doesn’t, she added, support for reforms may wane.

There is another reason why the trend has been greeted with a muted response in some quarters: Domestic homicide rates have declined so much faster for men than women. Even though domestic violence advocacy work largely has been carried out by women, for women, it is men who have benefited most. Abusive relationships--once nearly as deadly for men--are now relatively much more risky for women.

Although the number of women killed by husbands, partners or former spouses has declined 25% nationwide since the mid-1970s, the number of men killed by their wives or girlfriends has declined much more steeply--nearly 70%, from nearly 1,400 per year to under 500, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Women Twice as Likely to Be Killed

Women are more than twice as likely as men to be killed by a romantic partner.

Most experts think the reason is that battered women are less likely to kill their abusers in self-defense. The so-called “burning bed” murder, made famous by a 1984 made-for-TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett, is much less common.

Women simply have more options, said Northeastern University criminal justice professor James Alan Fox, citing shelters, transition programs, hotlines, restraining orders. Giving women other exits has meant fewer resort to killing men.

Small wonder that leading activists such as Lynn Rosenthal, executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, offers a tempered view of the movement’s success.

“We have put some Band-Aids in place,” she said. “Fewer and fewer women are in that very desperate situation where there is no way to escape. . . . But we have a very long way to go.”

The story of how domestic violence emerged as a national campaign begins with early policy efforts in the 1970s. Through the 1980s and 1990s, more states adopted restraining order provisions and mandatory arrest laws, which have since become standards.

In California, the first sweeping domestic violence bill approved by legislators in the late 1980s has been tweaked and amended in subsequent years. And in 1994, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) sponsored the landmark Violence Against Women Act.

The federal law earmarked $1.6 billion over six years to fund shelters for battered women in every state, a national hotline and training programs for police and prosecutors, and required nationwide legal changes.

When the act was reauthorized last year, it had no fewer than 75 co-sponsors, said Claire M. DeMatties, a senior counsel for Biden.

Police Training Helps Address Problem

Back in the early 1990s, Biden had trouble convincing even some female lawmakers to support it, she recalled. In the intervening years, though, ending domestic violence has become a kind of apple pie political issue few politicians dare oppose, a measure of cultural change on a large scale.

The reforms have been felt at the street level in police departments across the country. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, officers are trained to view domestic violence incidents as part of an escalating cycle, and they work less to defuse conflicts than to try to break the cycle.

The LAPD and county Sheriff’s Department call in specially trained domestic violence response teams after making arrests. This may be one reason why the LAPD has been rewarded by a steep decrease in partner killings, from about 70 per year in the early 1990s to around 30 recently, said Barron, who helps oversee the department’s domestic violence program.

But while legal changes have been far-reaching, one of the most effective deterrents to domestic violence lies outside the realm of policy: divorce.

High divorce rates appear to have eased the pressures that result in spousal homicide, Rosenfeld said.

The effect is nothing new. As far back as the 19th century, divorce laws were reformed in part because authorities were fed up with husbands and wives killing each other, he said.

In more recent times, laws that provide for financial support for divorced women and children, and a changing job market for women, have further expanded opportunities for people to escape abusive relationships, experts say.

Lori Minick, 38, of the San Gabriel Valley, who seeks to help other domestic violence victims, said having a good job was key to her escape from an abusive marriage--and it wasn’t just the money.

“If I hadn’t had my job, I wouldn’t have had any confidence,” she said. “I got that from my work, from my career, and it saved me. It showed me I am somebody, that I am worth something . . . it balanced what I got when I got home.”

Another factor is that all kinds of long-term domestic attachments are on the wane, Rosenfeld said.

Not only are people less likely to marry, they are less likely to stick with their live-in boyfriends and girlfriends.

Whatever this says about the state of romantic commitment, it does minimize people’s exposure to the homicide risks, he said; fewer, more short-term relationships means love is less likely to turn murderous.

Change may be slow, but domestic violence trends still offer a striking lesson about violent crime in general, said Jacquelyn C. Campbell, professor at the Johns Hopkins University school of nursing.

Far from being an immutable part of the human condition, or a reflection of individual pathology, violent patterns can be changed.

“People oftentimes don’t think about structural changes making a difference,” she said. “They can.”