If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

 

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Conclusion & Solutions

If battering is a two-way street, so is its solution. And fortunately, the solution to physical and psychological abuse lies in focusing on prevention – especially the skills to handle personal criticism I discuss in Part I.

Are Laws Against Physical Abuse Helpful?

Legal restriction are not the most powerful restraint operating on men. It is the fear of losing the love of the woman. And the self-loathing that emanates from months of slavishly attempting to rebuild trust. One way or another, the man who physically hits a woman has traded one minute of power for months of powerlessness.

Cross-culturally, laws that punish physical abuse do appear to have an inhibiting effect on physical abuse.103 But not a big inhibiting effect.104 In approximately 85% of domestic violence assault and homicide cases, police had visited that home address at least once in the two previous years.105

Punishment is often society’s cop-out from complexity. For example, imprisoning the abusive husband of a pregnant wife is often a cop-out from dealing via pregnancy counseling with the complex anxieties pregnancy creates. Yet, incentives for couples to take part in pregnancy counseling cost less than using taxpayer money to keep a husband in prison. To say nothing of the anxiety a pregnant woman feels when her husband is in jail ( as opposed to counseling with jail as a back-up).

Both the laws against battering (and the attitude those laws reflect) did doubtless contribute to the 21% reduction in severe wife-beating. However, the biased application of those laws against male batterers doubtless leads to the less than 4% reduction in severe husband-beating, as well as to the increase in minor husband-beating (but not minor wife-beating).

The problem runs deeper with mandatory arrest laws. Once a person is arrested for domestic violence she or he is less likely to be re-arrested than someone to whom the police just gives advice,106 but that doesn’t tell us how many people just stay away from calling the police again when the result the last time was a criminal record for life. Also, they tie the hands of the police – turning them into automatons rather than professionals with judgment. It is better to respond to a call for help with a low profile car and police trained in communications work, with the authority to make a range of decisions depending on the situation.

Mandatory arrest laws are usually applied with extreme bias against men. When they aren’t, the results are a bit ironic. Feminists pushed for those laws, but when the police arrived, even when the woman had called, it was often so apparent to the police that the woman had been the main abuser that the arrest rates of women for spousal abuse doubled since implementation of mandatory arrest laws in Los Angeles.107 Many feminists have thus begun opposing what they previously supported when they thought only men would be arrested.

Given Suzanne Steinmetz’ observation that since 60% of families have experienced abuse since marriage,108 strict laws arresting abusers would be like laws allowing the actual arrest of anyone exceeding 55 miles per hour. Most of America would be in prison.

In brief, laws and police intervention can neither be dismissed as irrelevant, be enforced in a sexist manner (and expect not to be eventually found unconstitutional), nor be made so loose as to include virtually everyone. Most importantly, though, imprisonment is more expensive than empowerment. And imprisonment is less effective than empowerment.