As a Baltimore judge handed a three-year prison sentence to her longtime boyfriend for the latest in a series of assaults against her, Denice Ringgold stood next to the prosecution table in Room 5 of the Eastside District Court. For a second, she smiled.
She thanked District Judge Alan J. Karlin and Assistant State's Attorney Bobbie Dickens, who both told her that bringing charges against Lawrence T. Bell -- 43 and no relation to the politician of similar name -- may have saved her life. But Ringgold, 39, knew better: It was Bell's life, not her own, that likely had been saved.
"I bought a gun recently," Ringgold said in the courthouse hallway, "and I was prepared to defend myself if the judge let him out and he hit me again."
Ringgold's case underscores a little-noticed result of programs designed to protect women from domestic violence: a precipitous drop in the number of men killed by their wives or girlfriends. The decline is so great that it has driven down the total number of domestic slayings nationwide, including male and female victims, by 36 percent over the past 20 years, government figures show.
Recent academic studies and a Justice Department report, released this spring with little fanfare, detail the phenomenon. In 1976, the numbers of women and men killed by their "intimates" -- the government's term for spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends and same-sex partners -- were fairly close: about 1,600 women and 1,400 men. By 1996, the number of female victims nationwide had slipped to about 1,300 a year, a 19 percent decrease.
But the number of men killed by their partners nationally had nose-dived to about 400 a year in 1996 -- a 70 percent fall. Police say the figures for Maryland and Baltimore City reflect the decline across America.
"As the society makes progress in violence against women, we've provided women with more services and resources," says James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. "And the biggest beneficiaries are men."
"That is a tremendous irony," says University of Missouri-St. Louis Professor Richard Rosenfeld, "that does not get all that much attention."
Women more aware
Rosenfeld and other scholars say the steeper decline in wife-kills-husband homicides shows, paradoxically, that efforts to raise awareness of domestic violence have been more effective in reaching women than men.
More than two-thirds of domestic slayings of men are, in fact, confrontations precipitated by violence from the victim, surveys show. In most parts of the country, police reports on domestic assaults against women are at or near all-time highs. But with more shelters, more domestic violence hot lines, and more responsive police, America's estimated 3 million battered women now have alternatives to striking back at their abusers, scholars say.
Contributing factors
Lawrence W. Sherman, chairman of the criminology department at the University of Maryland, College Park, cautions that there are contributing factors to the decline, besides increased domestic violence services. These include:
Gun control laws and public awareness of gun safety seem to have slightly reduced the risk of domestic homicide, according to Fox and the Justice Department study. The percentage of domestic slayings committed with guns has dropped from 71 percent to 61 percent in the past 20 years.
The slowing marriage rate, combined with changes in dating patterns, have reduced the number of intimate relationships, on average, in which young men and women are involved.
With more women in the work force, wives and girlfriends have the financial independence to leave abusive partners.
But recent research suggests that even when controlling for the above factors, the decline in domestic homicides represents an important success story for those American cities which have led the way in dedicating services and police to domestic violence.
Rosenfeld, the Missouri professor, and Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently completed a study of domestic violence in the 25 largest U.S. cities. Those with the longest-running and most extensive services for battered women saw the steepest decline in domestic slayings. Says Rosenfeld: "Cities have made enormous progress on this issue in just 20 years."
Baltimore's history of dealing with domestic violence encapsulates the progress American cities have made in the last generation, and the challenges that remain, researchers say.
When Charm City's shelter for battered women, the House of Ruth, opened in 1977, it was one of the first in the country. The Baltimore City state's attorney's office, under Kurt L. Schmoke's leadership, established a domestic violence unit in January 1983. But police and city officials acknowledge that they were slow to follow up.
Baltimore Police Col. Margaret Patten was a major commanding the Northern District when she started the police force's first domestic violence unit -- an attempt to target household battery in the same way officers focus on prostitution, drugs and other vice crimes. With little support from superiors, Patten bought many of the paper supplies for the unit at an Ace Hardware outlet. That was five years ago, in 1993.
Thomas C. Frazier became commissioner in 1994, and Baltimore's police department, with funding from the federal and state governments, has been more aggressive in fighting domestic violence since then, Patten says. All nine police districts have domestic violence units. The department is distributing battered woman safety guides in English, Spanish and Korean.
Today, most domestic violence calls end with an arrest. The Baltimore Police Department is one of a handful nationwide that requires officers to indicate after every call, from petty theft to shooting, whether the incident was related to domestic violence. If so, officers must write a report that is routed to that police district's domestic violence unit, which follows up with a letter or call to the victim. After the third domestic violence report from the same residence, officers are required to see the victim.
Police say intervention helps, because the majority of homicides occur in households in which violence has never been reported. Across the city, calls to police for domestic violence are up, from 13,000 at the beginning of the decade to 24,000 in 1997. Police believe that reflects a greater willingness of victims to seek help before fights turn deadly.
"It's the households where the women don't know about the police and the resources out there that you end up with one spouse or the other dead," says Patten.
In recent years, the mayor's domestic violence coordinating committee, co-chaired by Patten and District Court Administrative Judge Mary Ellen T. Rinehardt, has focused on the courts and health care providers as places to identify and protect domestic violence victims. The House of Ruth employs victim coordinators at the Eastside District Court, and its legal clinic handles 3,000 clients a year, up from 100 clients in 1984.
The Baltimore Health Department began performing domestic violence assessments in January of every adult woman who comes to its 11 clinics. Monique Sheppard, assistant to the health commissioner, says each woman is asked if she has been threatened by a current or former partner, and if she has been hit, kicked, slapped or forced into sexual activity in the past year.
Of 3,715 women screened through June, 460 answered yes and were given contact numbers for counseling and the police. To encourage honest responses, Sheppard said the health clinics respect women's wishes about reporting domestic violence crimes. The counselors will only call police if a woman asks.
"We've been critical of the city over the years," says House of Ruth Executive Director Carole Alexander. "But I think in the past several years, their perception of violence against women has changed from denial and indifference to, 'This is a serious problem.' "
Recent statistics reflect that seriousness: Over the past four years, the total number of slayings annually in the city by intimates, male and female, has fallen by half, from 25 in 1993 to 13 in 1997.
More resources needed
Nevertheless, Alexander, Patten and city officials say more resources are needed. House of Ruth is building a new shelter with 84 beds, more than three times the current 26, but Alexander says that is still not enough space to match demand. Jail overcrowding means that most men arrested for domestic violence return home immediately. And fewer than half of the approximately 7,200 temporary orders of protection issued by the courts each year in the city are served on the abuser.
The scene at the Eastside District Court, where the city's first domestic violence docket was established in January 1997, hinted at this lack of resources. Sixty-five defendants were on the docket on a recent Friday that was described as "slow" by a public defender, and the courtroom itself was crowded with 116 residents and 17 police officers overflowing 10 rows of seats.
Nevertheless, women who showed up to press charges against their partners on that Friday uniformly praised the work of the police, prosecutors and judges. A dozen women there agreed that law enforcement's intervention had averted more serious violence in their homes.
All 12 admitted to thinking of killing their abusers.
For her part, Ringgold said beatings she suffered at her boyfriend's hands left bruises on her legs and caused a miscarriage. The Northeast Baltimore woman said that in retaliation, she had attempted to stab him with a kitchen knife, and had to be talked out of shooting him by her children.
"If it wasn't for this court, one of us would have ended up dead," Ringgold said. "And I don't think it would have been me."
Pub Date: 8/31/98