Battered Child/Spouse Syndrome

Battered-spouse syndrome is more commonly called "battered-women's syndrome" because most of the victims are women, either wives or girlfriends of the perpetrators. In recent years, however, abused husbands and boyfriends have gained increased attention, as have same-sex abuse by gay and lesbian partners. With CHILD ABUSE, investigators are often at a loss because the child is too young to testify. In cases of battered-spouse syndrome, however, the problem is that often the victim refuses to testify. Guilt and shame are primary reasons, particularly for men who expect they will be ridiculed for being abused by a woman. Fear is an even stronger factor in abuse victims' silence.

Typical symptoms of a battered-spouse syndrome victim include the openly physical ones—bruises, black eyes, broken bones, cuts and scratches. The emotional symptoms include depression, lack of self-esteem, and hopelessness. Sufferers might be "hypervigilant" to any signs of conflict on the part of the spouse. Denial that a problem exists is a common response to questions from concerned friends, loved ones, or even medical professionals.

The phrase "battered-women's syndrome" was first used in the early 1980s; in ensuing years, lawyers began using the "battered woman" defense in HOMICIDE cases in which women killed their husbands or boyfriends. Many women claimed SELF-DEFENSE, explaining that the murder victim had been physically abusive for years. As the concept of battered-spouse syndrome became more clearly articulated in the 1980s and 1990s, the syndrome as a self-defense argument gained strength. In fact, it played into the clemency decisions of several governors, beginning with Governor Richard Celeste of Ohio, who in 1990, granted clemency to 25 women who had murdered their spouses. Their trials had been unfair, he concluded, because testimony about their abuse had not been allowed as evidence. Other governors followed suit in the ensuing years, including Maryland governor Donald Schaefer, Massachusetts governor William Weld, and California governors Pete Wilson and Gray Davis. Experts in DOMESTIC VIOLENCE explained to skeptics the reason why many battered women did not simply leave their husbands, either to stay with friends or go to a women's shelter. In some cases, they said, these women had been so emotionally broken that they were too frightened to leave. Some had been abused for so long that they had actually come to believe that they were responsible for their own abuse.

In the 1990s, a new movement emerged to point out that abuse can happen to men as well as women. The number of abused men was estimated at no higher than five percent of the abuse cases, and to a large extent it was not taken seriously. Advocacy groups for women claimed that for a man to claim that his wife or girlfriend physically terrorized him were absurd. Law enforcement officials often took abuse charges less seriously when the complainant was a man. In recent years, statistical evidence about male abuse has been gaining credibility. Moreover, gay and lesbian partner abuse has also begun to be taken more seriously. In 1999, a Brooklyn, N.Y. Supreme Court judge ruled that a gay man who had stabbed his partner to death could invoke battered-spouse syndrome at his trial.

The bottom line from a legal standpoint is that battered-spouse syndrome, like battered-child syndrome, requires solid and substantive evidence if it is to be used as a defense in a murder trial. A woman who has no visible physical signs of abuse might have been abused, but simply claiming to have been abused with no evidence at all at least warrants a thorough investigation. Cases in which women—and men—have claimed that an estranged spouse has been violent, simply to gain custody of their children, are not uncommon. The issue of battered spouses may be clearer in the first years of the twenty-first century than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but it continues to evolve.