The Battered Husbands

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.

Some of the pummeled husbands are too old or sick to defend themselves, but most are able bodied. One type of victim is the baffled he-man who is afraid of unleashing his own violence. Says Steinmetz: "There is a feeling among beaten men: 'If I ever let go I would kill her.' " Another type is the passive, dependent man who has sought out a strong wife to shield him from worldly problems. Barbara Star, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California, finds that battered spouses are usually people who feel overwhelmed by life, repress all strong feelings and tend to blame themselves for whatever goes wrong. Most, she explains, are convinced that fighting back is useless.

At first battered husbands may overlook their wives' occasional outbursts of physical punishment and simply hope they blow over. But before long a flurry of wifely fists is part of the domestic routine. Says Family Therapist Norman Paul of Boston: "They think their wives' violence is part of family life. They have come to accept it." Paralyzed by shame and guilt, they are reluctant to seek help from anyone--family, friends, counselors or the cops. Explains Steinmetz: "Police are a symbol of manhood, and it is simply too much to approach a policeman and say, The little woman has just beaten me up.' "

Nor are the courts likely to seem helpful. When the Virginia TV personality, now divorced, finally retaliated and knocked his wife unconscious with a single punch, he was ostracized as a wife beater, lost his TV show and was ordered by the court to stay away from his home for three months. Says Straus: "Some people figure it would be worse if they hit back. They need the good things the marriage has to offer and put up with the violence because they don't have much alternative." Others restrain themselves because they have been brought up never to strike a woman. One such husband, says Gelles, was so determined not to strike back that "he virtually gave her a license to kill him."

Many battered men manage to convince themselves that their marriages are sound and their beatings are trivial. The British social worker Erin Pizzey, founder of a refuge for battered women in London, notes that abused men are so good at self-deception that they often refuse to acknowledge the beatings at all. "Mostly they don't see themselves on the receiving end," she adds, "even though they're scratched and bitten or hit by instruments." In fact, she says, many of the men who show up at her center are originally reported as wife beaters, but turn out to be beaten husbands.

Though only a few men are now willing to seek aid, some social agencies believe that the beaten male needs the same kind of counseling and support as that given to abused women. Adina Weiner, chief counselor at Atlanta's Council on Battered Women, even wants to change the name of her group to the Council on Battered People. Pizzey set up a house for battered men in London. She had to close it last year for lack of funds, but hopes to open another, staffed by nuns (because she feels they would be especially sympathetic). Says Pizzey: "These men are frightened by women. They need gentleness."

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