Domestic Violence

We tend to let domestic violence slide. The person who did it often walks, and plenty of onlookers assume the victim must have had it coming or that it was nothing more than a household spat. If that were true, why do police officers end up dead responding to these calls? Count how many women, and men too, carry injuries bad enough to need a hospital bed and reconstructive surgery, and never get it. Think about the kids who watch it happen. They may never take a blow themselves, but they absorb the lesson: when you're furious, you unload on whoever is weakest and can't fight back, and you do it especially when the real source of your rage is out of reach. Someone comes home angry about their day and goes looking for any reason to let it loose on whoever is there.

A husband and wife squabbling: that is not what this is. People wave it off as some minor scuffle not worth anyone's attention, partly because victims so often deny they were hurt, or deny the other person was violent, or could be. These are usually wives and children, sometimes husbands, sometimes an elderly relative, and they have to keep living in that house. Speaking up might only make things worse. Many have nowhere else to go and nothing to go with.

Officers who answer these calls know how fast they can turn deadly, so they may try to calm the aggressor and talk past behavior that is genuinely dangerous. Others brush the whole thing off: why can't these people sort out their own lives, and the victim probably provoked it anyway. The honest version is that police would be far safer showing up in protective gear with backup. You walk in not knowing whose side anyone is on, and that alone can get you hurt. Should social workers take these calls instead? Consider what happens with something like Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim flips and starts defending the one who hurt them.

Violence can be born inside the home, learned there, rewarded there, passed down there. And we mostly look away until it spills over, sometimes onto an outsider who steps in to break it up. There is a lot we could learn from the officers who handle these calls, from the way a situation twists and turns once they are standing in the middle of it.

You truly cannot predict what you are walking into. One summer in college I filled in as a psychiatric aide at a large asylum. I was running the cafeteria alone while three wards ate, and we were locked in because one of those wards was a locked ward. There was kitchen staff, but they wanted nothing to do with handling the patients. I recognized one ward; the other two I didn't. A patient started acting up, flinging mustard and ketchup around the room. I walked over calmly, tried to settle her, suggested she head to the bathroom and clean up. She slapped me across the face hard enough that I spent the next minute checking whether she had loosened any of my teeth. A nurse who knew her walked in, and the two of them left together without so much as a glance at me.

So where does it start, where does it get reinforced, and where does everyone decide not to see it? Trace back the people who go on to kill strangers and you often land on a history of violence at home. A cousin of mine, a judge in Northern Illinois, set up a special diversion court built around exactly this problem. That is the right instinct. Go after the cause instead of mopping up the results.

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