Fairstein, Linda

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FAMILY VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD

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NYLS Journal of International and Comparative Law Volume 15 Number 2 Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3, 1995 Article 4 1995 FAMILY VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD Linda Fairstein Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/journal_of_international_and_comparative_law  Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Fairstein, Linda (1995) "FAMILY VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD," NYLS Journal of International and Comparative Law: Vol. 15 : No. 2 , Article 4. Available at: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/journal_of_international_and_comparative_law/vol15/iss2/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@NYLS. It has been accepted for inclusion in NYLS Journal of International and Comparative Law by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@NYLS. Linda Fairstein*I am going to talk to you, obviously, about guns and family violencefrom my perspective, which is as a practitioner in the field.I am now starting my twenty-third year around the corner in the officeof the District Attorney, and eighteen of those years have been devoted toworking on crimes of violence against women and children in ourspecialized units that we have. We have the sex crimes prosecution unit,a domestic violence unit, and a child abuse unit. We have more thanthirty-five assistant district attorneys who work only on those crimes,which speaks very sadly to the volume of cases that we see.But four or five times a day, almost every day of the week, I have theopportunity to sit at my desk across the table from women who are comingin to report their victimization. I'm kind of surprised but pleased to seehow the Mr. Wetzel's research so incredibly supports, when I kept seeingKaren nodding her head throughout his talks, exactly what my experienceshave been as a practitioner.It's clear to me from the things that women say, day in and day out,and especially for the last five years, that the most pervasive fear thatwomen have for themselves in this city and for their children is gunviolence. Their concerns are the incredible proliferation of guns in thiscountry and in this city, the fact that guns are in the hands of younger andyounger criminals.I wrote my remarks for this report before reading yesterday's paper.I don't know how many of you saw the results yesterday of the surveywhich was undertaken by the City Council revealing that nearly fortypercent of the youths in this city between the ages of twelve and twenty-one admit to having carried a gun at some point in their lives, the concernthat metal detectors in our schools regularly expose children between theages of ten and fourteen entering schools with loaded weapons.I will tell you, and I'm sure if any of you have ever been on the otherside of a gun during a rape or a robbery by a child, most people will tellyou-the distinguishing feature between adults committing crimes withguns and children is that the kids have absolutely no idea of the value of* Chief of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit of the New York County DistrictAttorney's Office; Vassar College, A.B. 1969; University of Virginia School of Law, J.D.1972. She has served on Governor Cuomo's Task Force on Rape, the JudiciaryCommittee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the AdvisoryCommittee on Criminal Law of the New York County Lawyers' Association, and theFederal Bar Council's Board of Trustees.229N.Y.L. SCH. J. INT'L & COMP. L.human life. Don't try and bargain with them. Don't say, "Well, let mekeep my pictures of my children but take the rest of my wallet." Theywould just as soon shoot you as argue and have the conversation, whichis one of the most disturbing facts.And I think women are concerned in far more unity than men aroundthe country about assault weapons and the absolutely inexcusable presenceof assault weapons which are responsible for such devastation when usedin a criminal act.In minority communities, the fear is appropriately heightened becausethe likelihood of victimization is so much greater. The murder rate forAfrican Americans in this country is about six times that of whites. Blackyouths fifteen to nineteen are fifty percent more likely to be victims ofmurder than white youths, and shooting is the leading cause of homicidaldeath among black teens in this country.The report for 1992, the last year that I had one, is that 2500 school-aged children were killed by firearms in that year in this country.One arm of the gun and violence issue that is often overlooked thatwe see a lot of in prosecutors' offices is violence in the workplace. In thiscity, like many others, murder is the leading cause of death for people atwork. It is not industrial accidents, it is not transportation accidents orfires or falls, as it is in many cities and communities, it is not illness orstress-related conditions.Forty-five percent of fatal on the job injuries, The New York Timesreported in February, are homicides, and it is the leading cause ofoccupational death in states as far ranging as Connecticut and California,Michigan and Alabama. In New York City, when men are the victims ofworkplace killings, they are almost always caused by guns. The twohighest risk categories for gun violence murder in the workplace are taxidrivers and store owners. Rarely a week goes by when cases like thoseare not reported in the news.Nationally, homicide is the leading cause of death for women on thejob. Many are victims of robbery and/or sexual assault by strangers withguns. But more than twenty percent of those killings, of women killed inthe workplace, are a result of family or marital problems. Women whohave left home and separated from their husbands, women who havemoved to shelters, still remain very easy targets. When the husband can'tfind them or the estranged lover can't find them anyplace else, generallyhe still knows where she works. He can then wait for her or go to theworkplace and kill her there, or almost always in these cases after a seriesof escalating attacks of violence.Interestingly enough, in support of what Mr. Wetzels says, in thiscountry something like eighty percent of domestic violence deaths, in230 [Vol. 15FAMILY VIOLENCEeighty percent of those cases, police have been called to intervene to thehome. As you see what's gone on-what went on in Los Angeles in theSimpson case-at least five times to intervene at lower, nonlethal eventsbefore what ultimately escalates to a killing. So, of course, when theseworkplace shootings occur, when the domestic partner is going to theworkplace to find and often shoot the intended victim, there are manyothers often killed in the cross-fire and in the getting at that individual.I serve as chair of the New York Women's Agenda DomesticViolence Committee. We have been unable to get some of these concernsabout family violence taken seriously by corporate executives when wehave tried to get in and educate corporations about the problems of familyviolence and how they are not left at home but in the workplace. Sadly,one of the only ways we have found to get a response at an executive levelin most corporations is to emphasize the cost of the violence; not thehuman, not the jeopardy, not the human emotion of the situation, but toexplain what the cost factor is going to be to the business. Lost worktime, for example, to women who have been injured or whose childrenhave been injured is one significant measure of it. Legal expenses hasbecome another.In 1991, the cost to employers for murder in the workplace becauseof lawsuits brought against them for negligence was $4.2 billion based ontheir vulnerability. The New York Times just had a page Al story aboutthis recently. Some of you recall two years ago on 57th Street on the westside a young woman who was a Gap employee, twenty-two-year-oldcollege graduate was shot in the mouth in the workplace after beingstabbed with a screwdriver which didn't kill her so the gun was taken out,and that assailant was caught and convicted and her parents are now suingthe Gap for their negligence.By the way, medical costs due to firearm injuries in the United Statesexceed more than $1 billion a year, not including things like ambulanceservices and after-injury physical therapy. That's just the hospitaltreatment for firearm injuries. The estimated cost of treating one injuryis $15,000 to $20,000 a patient, and it reaches $150,000 a patient ifintensive care is required.On to sexual violence and abuse. Eighty women are raped in thiscountry every hour, according to reported figures, and in cities like this,that computes to about 3,000 incidents of reported rape a year for a crimethat is still calculated to be very underreported.Our greatest fear seems to be of sexual assault, sexual assault as asociety, seems to be stranger rape, attacks by assailants who are notknown to the victim. In fact, those of us who work in this business knowthat less than twenty percent of rapes occur between people who are not19951N.Y.L. SCH. J. INT'L & COMP. L.known to each other; that is far less likely. The rapist who doesn't knowyou, coming through the window is far less likely to happen than beingraped by someone who the victim knows.This category of so-called acquaintance rape is not just date rape,that's often reported now by the media and the women's magazines, butit includes every category of acquaintanceship. Therefore a substantialamount of it is marital rape, incest, abuse of both adults and victimsthrough dates, casual acquaintances, and then the whole category ofprofessional rapes, rapes that are perpetrated by dentists, doctors, lawyers,teachers, clergy, people who have a professional care-taking relationshipwith the victim. The acquaintance rape category is far easier for lawenforcement to investigate and solve. We know who the offender is, thevictim knows who the offender is. We just have to find him and lock himup.But these are the cases that remain much, much harder for the victim,the survivor of the crime, in the criminal justice system because of thepublic attitudes about this crime, the people who ultimately serve onjuries. These are the cases where the defense still blames the victim forsome aspect of the crime that makes it a victim-precipitated case: ithappened because of something she did to encourage or allow the attackto occur.Stranger rape cases, interestingly enough and the reason I wrote thebook, do extraordinarily well in the criminal justice system in this day andage. The conviction rate for those cases is quite high and victims aretreated quite well in the criminal justice system even, I may add, bydefense attorneys because they don't have to challenge the occurrence ofthe attack, the credibility of the victim, they just have to challenge theidentification.Acquaintance rape cases, the overwhelming number of cases that goto trial don't do nearly as well because the victim is not believed and hercredibility is the entire basis of the attack by defense attorneys, leads rightinto the whole field of family violence because one of the major problems,I think as both speakers have said, is the societal perceptions. This areaof victimization, family or domestic violence, is viewed as a privateproblem, it is viewed as a family problem, not as a crime; and for thoseof us who have worked in this field for a long time, changing thatperception has been the most difficult aspect of the work.You've heard the statistics about domestic violence. They arestaggering. The American Medical Association, a rather conservativeorganization, says that every fifteen seconds in this country a woman isinjured by a family member. Each year more than a million women seekmedical treatment for injuries inflicted by husbands or domestic partners;232 [Vol. 15FAMILY VIOLENCElast year more than thirty percent of all women who were murder victimswere slain by their husbands or boyfriends.The New York Times reported in April of this year that last year 2.9million children in this country were victims of abuse, physical and/orsexual, that half of these children were under the age of one.We in law enforcement know, I think, something that probably hastaken longer to come to public attention, that most women and childrenwho are victims of domestic violence are taken to the emergency room,are actually taken to the health care professional, if they survive theattack, by the offender. And the reason the offender does that is if thevictim survives the shooting or the beating or the stabbing, he, theassailant, can control the story that is given to the health care professionalso that the problem is not identified. Think of something like the LisaSteinberg case in New York. When she survived the beatings but was ina coma, it was her father who eventually took her to St. Vincent Hospitaland. did what is done in most of these cases: try to convince the healthcare professionals that what happened was an accident, "My wife's headis split open because she fell down the stairs, not because I hit her with afrying pan."And that is why we have come to recognize that abuse is identified infewer than one in twenty cases that enters the medical community, and asa result, the AMA is finally acknowledging that the medical responserarely addresses the cause of the problem, family violence, because it isnot identified at the hospital level. And so we have only undertaken thisyear in this city to implement protocols in all the city hospitals to trainemergency room personnel to separate the victim and the person whobrings her into the hospital to try and identify and better explore whatbrings her there. I can assure you that there's not a private hospital yetin the city that is doing that.There's a fundamental relationship between family dysfunction andsubstance abuse. An enormous proportion of domestic assaults by guns,knives or battering occur when the assailant has ingested drugs or alcohol.Alcohol is present in more than half of all domestic violence incidents.The most common pattern is drinking by both the offender and the victimwhen the incident occurs in the home actually.We have to remember, and I think Karen said this, that familyviolence obviously encompasses an enormous range of violent conduct, notjust spousal attacks. Child abuse, sexual and physical, there was a storyin The New York Times in May, a front-page story, an eighteen-month-old boy found in a plastic bag outside his Brooklyn apartment, eighteen-month-old did I say, dead of manslaughter, multiple blunt injuries to hishead, signs of rib fractures in various stages of healing that indicated past2331995]N.Y.L. SCH. J. INT'L & COMP. L.abuse. The next day his mother was arrested. Four of her five childrenhad been born while she was addicted to cocaine. Her sister hadrepeatedly called the Bureau of Child Welfare for intervention. The sistersaid they were supposed to come regularly but they just never came.So we have parents killing children, we have children, like Lyle andEric Menendez, shooting their parents to death, we have strangers caughtin cross-fire. Rarely is there just a single victim involved. You have thefront-page story a couple months ago of the man who shot his ex-girlfriendand then killed her three children and her parents, set fire to the bodiesand went to Yankee Stadium, when there were still baseball games to beplayed, and watched the game.A year and a half ago I participated in a conference in England onstreet violence, and that's why I was interested in this as an internationalforum. There were four Americans present, the others were drug expertsand the other twenty-five participants were Europeans and English. Thebiggest problem that the English had in terms of youth violence was soccerhooliganism, as they call it there, violent behavior at sporting events, andjoyriding, and the contrast, listening to all the Europeans speak and to theAmericans, was absolutely staggering.My presentation ended with the story, the last news story that I hadabout gun violence in New York when I got on the plane, which was acase in the Bronx in which a thirteen-year-old boy shot and killed the five-year-old girl who lived next door to him because she had dissed him bystepping on his shadow. The Europeans disbelieved that that was the kindof thing that was reported regularly, I mean, not as an unusual story inthis country.It's interesting, Karen's comments about keeping the family courtsgun-free. Those of you who are students here, if you ever walk around100 Centre Street, you see several times throughout the day a uniformedcourt officer peering behind and underneath those pathetic little trees thatare planted in front of the criminal courthouse. What he is looking for areguns. You know, we have metal detectors to get-because of the gunsthat are brought to that courthouse every day, and the idiots who show upfor their court appearances charged with-you know, awaiting trial onmurder and armed robbery and rape and other cases, literally come to thecriminal courthouse packing and get inside and reach the metal detectorsand realize they can't go to court to be heard on their cases with theirguns.So they walk outside and drop their guns behind the bushes in frontof 100 Centre Street, probably one of the best places to get a gun if youneed one in a hurry. I mean, it's quite sad.[Vol. 151995] FAMILY VIOLENCE 235So my colleagues and I, in this end of the business, watch thisescalation of gun use and gun-related violence with disbelief that we havebeen powerless to stop it, with despair in its effect, and with concern thatmany of the kids and all of the drug dealers in this city, I can assure you,are armed with much better equipment than our police department is.To me guns, gun use, and the volume of guns that are available arethe greatest problem facing us in terms of crime today.

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FAMILY VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD

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