Wives aren't always the victims
A doctor in the Chicago area is severely beaten by his attorney wife once or twice a year. He keeps cosmetics at home and in his office to cover up the bruises and face bites. An Army veteran and multiple amputee living in Georgia says his wife routinely socks and kicks him "just for being so useless, I guess." A former Virginia television personality endured a 26-year marriage to a woman who regularly punched him in the groin and face while he was driving. Once she bashed his head open with two cans of Campbell's pepperpot soup.
These men are all members in good standing of a newly recognized fraternity of victims: the battered husbands. Though jokes about rolling-pin-wielding wives have long been a male staple, researchers are now finding increasingly that such bittersweet humor is all too often a black-and-blue reality. Says University of Delaware Sociologist Suzanne Steinmetz: "The most unreported crime is not wife beating—it's husband beating."
Steinmetz is the author of a book on family fighting called The Cycle of Violence. Extrapolating from her studies of domestic quarreling in Delaware's New Castle County, she estimates that each year at least 250,000 American husbands are severely thrashed by their wives. University of New Hampshire Sociologist Murray Straus projects an equally grim picture of this battle of the sexes. On the basis of his 1976 national survey of violence in 2,143 representative American families, he concludes that about 2 million husbands and about the same number of wives commit at least one serious attack a year on their mates. These range from kicks, bites or punches to murderous assaults with knives and other deadly weapons. Says University of Rhode Island Sociologist Richard Gelles, another student of domestic combat: "Men and women have always been equal victims in family violence. Fifty percent of the killings are men. Fifty percent are women. That hasn't changed in at least 50 years."
Hard statistics are admittedly impossible to come by, and the estimates infuriate some feminists, who feel that these figures distract from what they believe with considerable justice to be the far more serious problem of the battered wife. Indeed, it is women who are usually on the receiving end of the worst batterings in the home. Says Straus: "When there is a fight, the woman, on the average, comes out the loser."
Yet both Steinmetz and Straus point out that women are as prone as men to use violence on their mates. Whatever the result, most battered wives—and husbands—fight back. But about 600,000 husbands and 600,000 wives do not retaliate.