Quotes of the Day

Marie Trintignant was just 4 years old when she began her dramatic career. For the dark-haired French girl, the 1967 film Mon Amour, Mon Amour was a family affair starring her actor father, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and directed by her mother, Nadine. Last Friday, her family came together in grief. In a private clinic in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a chic western suburb of Paris, the actress died, at 41, from injuries sustained five days earlier in a dispute with the latest love in her varied romantic life — Bertrand Cantat, 39, lead singer and guitarist with Noir Désir (Black Desire), France's most popular rock group. Comatose, her skull cracked and her brain swollen from cerebral hemorrhaging, Trintignant was flown home on Thursday from Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to die on French soil. In Vilnius, Trintignant's mother had been directing her in a TV film on the life of the French author Colette, a writer whose main themes were the joys and pains of love and female sexuality in a male-dominated world.

"She was in a rush, and she told me that she was off to see her love," an extra on the film set told the French daily Le Monde. "That was the last thing she said to me." Cantat, who is being held while Lithuanian police continue their investigation into possible manslaughter charges, went before a court in Vilnius on Thursday to give his version of events. "It was an accident after a struggle and craziness, but not a crime," he testified. (Cantat himself was hospitalized after the incident, treated for alcohol poisoning and a suspected drug overdose. He also had a bruised hand.) While police in Vilnius try to determine whether the actress, who had four sons, was beaten in the couple's hotel room — as her family alleges — or whether she was injured in a fall after being struck or pushed, the Trintignant family has filed a civil complaint in France, accusing Cantat of inflicting "voluntary blows" and of "non-assistance to a person in danger." Le Monde quoted a Cantat lawyer as saying the singer did not immediately realize the gravity of Trintignant's injuries and believed she had fallen asleep. Some hours later, he allegedly became concerned and alerted her brother Vincent — a director's assistant to her mother — who phoned for help.

Marie Trintignant's tragedy, involving stellar names in French cinema and a charismatic, politically outspoken figure on the country's rock music scene, has shocked France. "We are all dreadfully aware of the injustice of a destiny so brutally shattered," said President Jacques Chirac. The death also focused new attention on domestic violence in Europe and brought home two oft-repeated truths: that such violence can occur in any relationship, regardless of age, sex, class, race, culture, income or education; and that statistics only hint at the depths of the problem, since their rise often reflects increased reporting of violence rather than an actual rise in attacks. "This problem is a curse throughout the world, and the E.U. is no exception," says Barbara Helfferich, cabinet officer in charge of equality for the European Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, Anna Diamantopoulou. "And stereotypes don't apply.''

Betsy Stanko, a University of London criminologist, agrees: "If you think in categories, you lose the clues." To Stanko, who has worked on domestic violence for 25 years, "controlling behavior" is a consistent theme. "When someone walks away from control, violence may escalate." While research suggests there are no social or ethnic characteristics that determine domestic violence, she adds, there are factors and situations that influence the tendency toward violence — which is more often than not committed by men against women. Alcohol misuse is one. And when violence has happened once, it is thought more likely to recur. For many women, pregnancy can exacerbate existing violence.

Less than 10 km from Trintignant's hospital room in Neuilly — in the immigrant neighborhood of Gennevilliers, northwest of Paris — the Escale women's center seeks to help women and children at the other end of the social spectrum. Here, the women, many of whom come from Africa, are poor, sometimes cannot read, write or speak French, and often are beaten by a daunting social-services network as well as by their husbands. "These women do not have the resources to get help on their own," says psychologist Martine La Berge. "They don't know how to use the system to get themselves out of a violent situation."

For many women, particularly those in Europe's immigrant communities, leaving a violent relationship can seem impossible. "We have to recognize that when we're speaking to Asian women, for example, their problem may be imprisonment or forced marriages," says 43-year-old Sandra in Bristol, who asked that her real name not be used. She draws on her own past experiences with a violent partner in her work with Women's Aid, Britain's domestic-violence charity. Though it is difficult to generalize, south Asian women may find it hard to reach out for help, for fear of bringing sharam, or shame, upon a family in a tight-knit community. "She is not just leaving the perpetrator, she is leaving her only support structure," says Rita Rupal, director of Newham Asian Women's Project in London.

When a woman does break free from a violent partner, her move is sometimes a trigger for new violence. In Lindau, Germany, 15-year-old Verena (German papers have not used last names) died last week, shot by David, her 20-year-old boyfriend of three years, who then shot himself. The apparent motive: Verena was overly enthralled by German pop idol Daniel Kublbock, and left David when he demanded that she stop her infatuation. Tabloids focused on Verena's "pathological love" for a performer whom she did not know personally, rather than on David's pathological, alcohol-fueled reaction to it. "The deeds of men are too often apologized for," says Ruth Syren, who heads a women's shelter in Mannheim. "When a man has an alcohol problem and beats his wife, he has two problems."

"It's too easy to blame unemployment, poverty, alcohol and so on," agrees the E.U.'s Helfferich. "The real problem is that violence is accepted as a private matter and not a criminal matter." But that is changing, slowly, in many places. "We get calls from women who have put up with a lifetime of abuse," says Sandra of Women's Aid. "They were brought up in a generation that says you put up and shut up, you've made your bed, now you lie in it. Nowadays, families and friends are trying to be supportive — and younger women are more aware."

One such woman is Laetitia Bossé, 24, who decided to speak out 18 months ago. Now a volunteer counselor at the Center for Prevention of Marital and Family Violence in Brussels, she left a jealous and violent boyfriend, a Frenchman of Moroccan origin who is the father of their 5-year-old daughter. "After he hit me, he would cry and beg for forgiveness," Bossé says. "And because I loved him, I would forgive him." The most important lesson she has learned is that "you can't change these kinds of people — you have to leave and start over." Adds Bossé: "My daughter won't grow up with a violent father, so she won't accept a violent husband. The circle has been broken."

New laws are on an abused woman's side. A German bill that took effect last year bans violent partners from the home and often other locations frequented by an abused partner and their children. And the Spanish parliament rushed through a bill that gives almost instant protection against violent partners and empowers magistrates to order legal aid and other assistance. Justice Minister José María Michavila wants to see tougher measures against "one of the blackest stains on our society," including making even the first instance of domestic violence a crime, providing provisional custodial sentences for violent partners and permanent loss of child custody.

Isabel Llinas, head of the Institute for Women in Mallorca, still vividly recalls the first — and only — time that her husband of 15 years attacked her. It was an unexpected knife assault two years ago, witnessed by her daughter, then 13. "We had been going through an unpleasant separation and he refused to accept it," she says. Left for dead on the bathroom floor, she was in a coma for two days and lost her spleen. Her husband later killed himself in prison. She considers herself one of the lucky ones. "I was able to go back to work, and I had a job to go back to" as a hotel manager, unlike many women who return to their violent partners because they have nothing to live on and nowhere to go. Llinas blames Spanish machismo for much of the domestic violence in her country. "Latin culture taught women to think that the man was boss," she says. "We have to educate children in the schools that men and women should share domestic chores and that the man is not above his wife."

"Almost every case of domestic violence involves some sort of sexual violence," says Catherine Valadaud, head of the Louis Labé Center, an emergency-housing service in Paris. "In the cases of rape within a marriage, it is extremely important that women realize that they are victims. Society still sees it as a woman's duty to have sex with her husband, no matter what the conditions. We need to change the way we think."

Still, many men continue to view themselves as the victims. "Hardly any man, even today, comes to us due to a consciousness that he is guilty," says psychologist Hans Schmidt, co-founder of JederMann, a German organization working with male perpetrators of domestic violence. "They say they could not assert themselves in any other way, their hand slipped — that they would not have had to become violent if their female partners had acted differently." In 26 sessions of group therapy, the men explore — often through role play — concepts of violence, masculine behavior and role models.

"To have the picture of what is really happening, you have to interview women," says Linda Laura Sabbadini, director of statistics on conditions and quality of life for ISTAT, Italy's National Institute for Statistics. "People have the idea that sexual violence is committed by strangers, that it happens in the street. On the contrary, almost 80% of sexual violence in Italy is done by people known to the victim and takes place much more frequently in places you do not expect it: the car, the house, the houses of people you know."

As bad as the situation often is in western Europe, it is even tougher for women in Russia and other countries of central and eastern Europe. A 2002 survey by the Women's Council of Moscow State University indicated that 18% of Russian women suffer "regular and cruel physical treatment" at the hands of a husband or lover. Many abused women turn to the Russian Association of Crisis Centers for Women, rather than to the police, for help. Some 96,000 did so in 2002. Few domestic-violence victims trust the police to properly investigate a complaint and bring a culprit to justice, and over 12,000 women are thought to die annually at their partners' hands. The authorities tend to view domestic violence as a family affair rather than a crime, and the police often call complaints "saucepan cases." Varvara Vikhrova, 20, is one of the fortunate victims. Last month, as the Muscovite was talking in the courtyard of her house with a man with whom she and her husband, Ilya, 29, were acquainted, "Ilya just popped up from around the corner, said hi to the man and slammed his fist into my face so hard that my nose is still swollen." He threatened to beat her again if she did not "behave."

Vikhrova, the mother of their 3-year-old son, saw a doctor right away and obtained a medical certificate, which she took to the police. The authorities told her they could either pack Ilya off to prison for three years for assault and battery, or fine and warn him — but a second offense would mean five years in prison. "I chose the second option," she says, "because I was afraid that three years later, when he came back from jail, he would beat me to a pulp." The couple are now divorced.

Colette, Marie Trintignant's final character, explored the dark battles between independent identity and passionate love. In a world where, for so many women, that love can give way to violence, only changed attitudes and official action can help them heal.

• MARYANN BIRD
• The tragedy of actress Marie Trintignant shows domestic violence respects no social boundaries.