Socko Performances on Campus

College lovers, it seems, beat each other up quite often

When Sociologist James Makepeace, 35, surveyed undergraduates at Bemidji State University in Minnesota during the spring of 1979, he came on a finding that surprised him: one of every five students reported being punched, slapped or shoved by their dates or lovers. Says Makepeace, an expert on premarital family violence: "It used to be said that a marriage license was a hitting license, but now we've discovered that on college campuses there's an awful lot of hitting without the license."

After a similar poll at Oregon State University, Family Life Professor June Henton and Assistant Professor Rodney Gate estimated the number of violent lovers at about 25%. At sunny Arizona State, Sociology Associate Professor Mary Riege Laner found, in a study that may put to rest American illusions about carefree campus romance, that more than 60% of the nonmarried upper-class students had encountered "some kind of violence" while dating.

Most incidents are relatively minor. But some of the students reported being regularly beaten, kicked, bitten and pelted with objects. A few even spoke of threats with guns and knives. The case of Valerie, 20, and Steve, 23, two students at a large Western university, is in some ways typical. The couple had only been dating for three months when Steve slapped Valerie because he thought she was flirting with another man. Like most campus couples who later come to blows, they moved in together. After they began living together, his objections to imagined infidelities snowballed into furious, furniture-tossing tantrums. He sometimes hurled Valerie to the floor, dragging her around by her hair, and, she says, "literally beat the hell out of my face." Several black eyes later, Valerie walked out.

In their fear and confusion, few college women--and even fewer men--are willing to admit having been the victims of violence. As one woman student at Arizona State said of her regularly bruised and beaten but steadfastly silent girlfriends: "Before they'd consider it abuse, they'd have to have broken bones."

Jealousy over a third person was cited in nearly half the violent blowups. Most of the rest grew out of arguments over sex or drinking. Yet experts wonder why college students seem so unable to settle these disagreements without black eyes and broken noses. Married couples fight, but it is thought they often do so partly because they cannot escape each other, living in an unbreakable tangle of loyalties, commitments and angers. College students, however, are free to walk out. Many of them have also disavowed traditional sex roles. They advocate sexual freedom and claim they can handle its consequences. The macho man and helpless, victimized woman are supposed to be on their way to extinction. Sheila Korman, 28, a counselor at the University of Florida, wrote her master's thesis on sexual aggression in dating. "I think it comes from a number of sources," she says, "including economic frustrations and tensions and the feeling that you have no power in the world. So you show your power against someone who can't retaliate." Psychologist Paul Schauble, another counselor at the university, says there has been "perhaps a 10%" increase in violent squabbles among couples seeking counseling over the past two years. Not all the women, he says, are blameless victims of brutes: some are needlers who figure that the man cannot retaliate, and others provoke violence as a way of breaking through male indifference.

Sociologist Laner blames cruelty at coeducational institutions in large part on a "violence-loving society" that has nurtured this college generation on murder movies and newspaper stories detailing crimes of passion. Other experts speculate that lack of parietal rules has put too much sexual and emotional strain on the young. College students have always had a hard time deciding what comes first--school work or a loved one. On today's openly sexual, highly competitive campuses, even the most solid balancing act can come unbalanced. In such a zero-sum scenario, each hour spent with one's partner is an hour away from the books, and resentment builds. According to Princeton's Karen Tilbor, assistant Jean of student affairs, "ambivalence" about priorities is at the root of violence among college couples.

But students often find separation harder to live with than abuse. Reason: fear of loneliness or of losing the status that comes from having a steady date. Tom, a 24-year-old student at a large Southwestern university, continued to date a hot-tempered classmate who, like a caricature of a wronged wife, regularly tossed plates at him and twice pushed him downstairs. Tom put up with such attacks for 22 months. "It was the first 'heavy' relationship I ever was involved in," he later explained. "You get so caught up in it you can't step out of it even though you know you're getting slugged every other week."

Some experts also note that many of these students have a tendency to see aggression as a kind of affection. They cite Oregon State students' response to questions about the "meaning of violence."

Nearly 30% of the couples had at some time taken abuse as a sign of "love." And a number considered violence a "normal," even healthy part of a love affair. Three-quarters of those who had been involved in an assault said it did not do their relationship any harm. More than one-third felt that hitting, or being hit, actually improved their relationship.

A few experts, like Sociologist Dr. Kersti Yllo of Wheaton College, Norton, Mass., speculate that "loving" violence may partly be a byproduct of women's push for equality. Uncertainty about once traditional roles, she reasons, makes men more anxious to assert themselves and women more anxious to fight back.

Still, many experts see the same old patterns in the new college violence. After all, says Makepeace: "Women are still the primary victims."

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