We have experienced a similar drop in reports of other violent crimes.

These data come from several sources. The Justice Department interviews samples of families. Their employees visit about 50,000 apartments and houses and ask people, in private, what violent treatment they have experienced in the last six months. Those numbers make up the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The Federal Bureau of Investigation collects numbers from police departments all over the country, and puts them into its Uniform Crime Reports. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also gathers numbers from cities and hospital emergency rooms. Each of these survey methods has its sources of inaccuracies. Since the early 1990’s, however, they have all pointed in the same direction: down.

Why Less Battering?

Two-thirds or more of the victims of battering are women. Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, economists at the University of Arkansas and Wake Forest University, have run multivariate regressions on data from the NCVS and from counties. They find that with everything else held equal, women were less likely to be battered if: they lived in a county with legal services for low-income people; or they or their female neighbors stayed longer in school; or they lived in higher-income households or had higher incomes themselves; or they were elderly. Anna Aizer, an economist at Brown University, has found that, with everything else held equal, domestic violence falls when women narrow the gap between their earnings and mens’ earnings.

During the 1990’s and 2000’s, those patterns helped thousands of American women. More towns and counties set up legal services offices for battered women, funded in part by the federal Violence Against Women Act of 2000. More women continued past high school to community college or a four-year college. The economic boom of the 90’s raised many households’ incomes and many women’s personal incomes. Women also dramatically raised their earnings relative to men’s. Last, the whole U.S. population aged.

These studies, and many others, suggest that women with good options outside their relationship can either leave a husband or lover who mistreats them or insist on better treatment.
The numbers support what feminists have argued for centuries, before and since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor.

What now?

Nobody knows. No one knows how severe this recession will be. Nor does anyone know what effect a recession of any given severity would have on U.S. domestic violence rates. Researchers found that when more men lost their jobs in Minneapolis in the 1980’s, battering rates rose (Tauchen and Witte, 1995). On the other hand, economists haven’t studied links between a national economic downturn and rates of domestic violence.

What can we expect?

Hard times. We can be grateful that the rate of domestic violence has fallen by more than half since 1993. The scale, though, of the battering that Americans are now living through, or not, is hard to grasp. A team of Harvard researchers monitored over 2000 federally-funded domestic-violence service centers for one 24-hour day: November 2 to November 3, 2006 (Iyengar, et al., 2008). During that single day, 48,350 people used the service centers. That amounted to 16 out of every 100,000 Americans. That is a much higher number of victims than the Justice Department and FBI reports reveal to us (though possibly on the same trend-line).

Do you know where your shelter is?

Whether or not the recession increases battering, more Americans will suffer more from battering because the resources to help them will shrink. Their savings have already shrunk. Their personal incomes will shrink. The incomes of their friends, cousins, and church members will shrink. The local, county, state, and federally-funded services offered to them will shrink.

Our local domestic-violence service centers will need our help. So may members of our own families. Will we be able to give effective help with less money? Maybe, if we can figure out the best ways to help victims and prevent battering. In future articles, we’ll explore what district attorneys, physicians, activists, and victims think are the best services and deterrents. Maybe we can do better than “maybe.”

Charts from:

Intimate violence: Bureau of Justice Statistics report on intimate violence

Overall violent crime: Bureau of Justice Statistics report on violent crime

Female-to-male earnings: U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage: 2007″ Carmen DeNavas-Wait, et al., Current Population Reports, August 2008.

Further Reading

Anna Aizer, “Wages, Violence, and Health in the Household,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 13494, October 2007.

“Crime and Victims Statistics,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, last revised on August 29, 2008.

Shannon Catalano, “Intimate Partner Violence in the United States,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, last revised on December 17, 2007.

Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, “An Economic Analysis of Domestic Violence,” Review of Social Economy, 1997, vol. 55, issue 3, pages 337-58.

Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, “Explaining the Recent Decline in Domestic Violence,” Contemporary Economic Policy, January 2003.

Radha Iyengar, et al., “50,000 People a Day,” NBER Working Paper No. 13785, February 2008.

Anne Dryden Witte and Helen V. Tauchen, “The Dynamics of Domestic Violence: Does Arrest Matter?,” NBER Working Paper No. 4939, November 1994.

In Concord, soon afterward, a similar scene unfolded. A 50 year-old Army veteran, Job Shattuck, and hundreds of other men drove their vehicles onto the central town green and sent a message to the judges they should stay out of the courthouses until some solution to the mass foreclosure and eviction crisis could be worked out. The Concord judges, also prudent, went home, too.

Some people have begun calling this loose-knit group the Regulators. As their symbol, they have chosen a sprig of hemlock. One spokesman, Plough Jogger, said, “The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers….”

These events took place in 1786. People kept shutting down courthouses until February of 1787. The practice spread to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maryland, and South Carolina.

What Precipitated these Actions?

What happened was: a war, then a recession, then a call-in of debts. After Independence from Britain, British creditors asked Boston merchants to repay their debts. The sudden and severe post-war recession, though, left the Boston merchants short of cash. They leaned on their debtors. Those people, mostly low-income and rural, had very little cash at all. Some farmers offered to repay their loans in kind, with grain or cows. The merchants rejected those proposals and began legal action. Many men in the bottom tier of debtors had made sacrifices during the War of Independence, had fought in the Continental Army, had felt the heady thrill of standing up for themselves, and still had their guns. They weren’t ready to get thrown out of their homes and livelihoods quite so soon. As they had learned to do during the 1770’s, they organized and resisted.

You say “Viva Che”; I say “Viva Shays”

Americans may remember studying this drama in high school as “Shays’s Rebellion.” Daniel Shays didn’t join in, though, until September 19, when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts indicted three of his friends. Rumors flew that in a week the Court was going to meet again, in Springfield, to indict Luke Day. Shays pulled together seven hundred men and went to Springfield. He got permission to hold a “parade” through the center of town. Lots of on-duty soldiers joined the parade. With drums banging, fifes shrieking, and feet stomping, the marchers’ sentiments were audible. The judges postponed their hearing, then gave up and adjourned.

After this demonstration, sadly, protestors and soldiers met in armed conflict. As best I can tell, as many as ten men were killed in battle or surreptitious attacks. Leaders were arrested, including Shays, convicted and sentenced to death, then pardoned. Shays died many years later in New York, poor and obscure, like nearly everyone else in the rural Northeast.

The Effect on the Elections

The demonstrations, the petitions, and the fighting had political repercussions. In the next Massachusetts elections, candidates who supported relief for debtors won a majority of seats in the Legislature and passed their legislation. The same thing happened in Rhode Island.

Today

As far as I know, the Regulators never flew a flag. If they had, it might have looked like this one:

Parts of this story will repeat themselves, but which ones, where, and with whom? In your area, are people threatened with foreclosure or eviction organizing? Are judges delaying proceedings so that other measures can be experimented with? What are your state legislative and congressional representatives and candidates saying?

Further reading

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, 2001