Marital Violence and the Criminal Process: Neither Justice nor Peace

Abstract

Except when it occasionally results in a murder sufficiently bizarre to engender a front-page headline, marital violence has remained below the level of public consciousness. The iceberg quality of this problem is certainly related to the fact that middleand upper-class spouses tend to vent their aggressive impulses on one another through a buffer zone of separation agreements, eviction proceedings, divorce, custody battles over children, alimony payments, or any of a number of legal but expensive means of expressing the inability of two people to solve their differences within the same household. Violent public displays of marital discord occur with a frequency that should make the problem a major source of national concern and the object of carefully considered policies aimed at prevention, but they involve almost exclusively the very poor, and, niost acutely, the urban poor. The discrimination, poverty, and violence that illuminate the failures of our social policies find as significant and upsetting an expression in the steady stream of calls to police headquarters reporting acts of marital violence as in the more spectacular but ultimately less costly and more sporadic incidents of mass uprising. Social-policy makers and those in the helping professions have managed to avoid recognition of the need for intelligent social policies and services designed to cope constructively with the problems of marital discord. They merely dismiss the eruption of marital violence as criminal and do not notice that its causes and nature