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Battering follows a cycle: first a buildup of tension, then a violent explosion, and finally a period of remorse and apologies that rekindle hope that the batterer will change and remain loving. Karla Digirolomo, 26, executive director of the New York State Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence, describes her experience in her first marriage as typical. When she was pregnant her husband broke her nose. She told everyone she had fallen down. The obstetrician never questioned the bruises on her body. "I felt worthless, totally to blame, responsible for my husband's actions. I kept thinking, 'If I had done something different, things would improve.' You gradually change. You think, 'If I can stop doing x, y or z, then nothing will happen.' You assume all responsibility."
If the woman does not leave or seek help after the first episode, it can be taken as a sign of acquiescence, which usually leads to more violence. But it is extremely difficult to pack up and go, even if a woman can afford to. Explains Jane Tolliver, a counselor in the Atlanta Y.W.C.A.'s battered-women's program: "They've been told by their ministers and their families that a good woman can change a man." These women represent society's traditional values. Says Tolliver: "They are nurturing. They want successful marriages. And it is precisely those things that trap them."
Often a battered woman has grown up with violence and accepts it as a pitiful form of caring, or at least as something inevitable in a relationship. She may feel desperately that the world is a dangerous place and that she needs a protector, even a man who beats her. Ashamed, terrified that any resistance will provoke greater violence, isolated from her family and friends, often without any means of support other than the husband, many a battered woman sinks into despairing submission, from which the only escape is eventual widowhood, her own murder (or, perhaps in a flash of retaliatory rage, her husband's), or suicide. According to a four-year study of a major metropolitan hospital completed this year, 25% of all women's suicide attempts are preceded by a prior history of battering.
Domestic violence is lethal, and not only to women. A 1978 article in Police Magazine reports that 40% of all police injuries, and 20% of all police deaths on duty, are the result of becoming caught in a family dispute. Risks aside, answering domestic-disturbance calls is the bane of policemen everywhere. "We end it for an hour or two and do a lot of paper work," says Officer Lawrence Santos of Harlem's 25th Precinct. To a frightened woman, though, even a reluctant policeman offers more hope than an insensitive one. Sergeant Louis Mancuso of Manhattan's Ninth Precinct, for example, does not think arrests are always the best solution. He believes there are often extenuating circumstances, observing after hearing about one brutal assault, "Maybe she wasn't giving him what he needed sexually." Detroit Executive Deputy Police Chief James Bannon explains such lingering attitudes. "Police officers are as violent in domestic relations as others. Probably more so."