Public policy for violence against women: 30 years of successes and remaining challenges

Abstract

Thirty years ago only two scholarly articles had been published on what was then referred to as “wife battering.”1,2 The Washington, DC, police department employed an informal “stitch rule” when responding to domestic calls.3 Police would make an arrest only if female victims had an injury that required a number of surgical sutures to close the wound. By the middle 1970s, the inattention to violence toward women stood in stark contrast to mounting evidence that domestic violence was not a rare and isolated personal trouble. Social scientists4 and advocates5–7 alike reported on persistent patterns of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse of women by their intimate partners. Concern for violence was embedded in the more general women’s movement. As the modern women’s movement gained momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, attention to violence and battering gained momentum as well. By the early 1990s, violence toward women had reached the status of a social problem with a place on the public policy agenda. The public had come to realize that violence toward women was a health and justice, as well as a personal, problem. A poll conducted for the Family Violence Prevention Fund in 1995 found that 83% of American adults polled stated that domestic violence was an extremely or very important social issue.8