Batterers

Batterers are people who inflict violent physical abuse upon a child, spouse, or other person, but the term is relatively new. Batterers are numerous but relatively invisible in American society. Usually, only the most severe batterers come to the attention of authorities. Domestic violence advocates have long argued that batterers' invisibility is one of the sources of batterers' power. Most, but not all, batterers are men. Batterers do not differ in readily observable ways from nonbat-terers, but tend to differ from one another. Gender, income, substance abuse, and violence in the family of origin are the factors most often linked to battering, but batterers can never be fully distinguished from the society in which they learned to use physical and non-physical aggression to dominate others.

The term batterer can be applied to a broad range of individuals. A batterer is an individual who commits acts of physical violence and domination against an intimate partner or ex-partner. The violence is usually episodic rather than a one-time event. This entry's definition of batterer also includes a person who batters severely on one occasion. In most of those cases, the singularity of the one physical event is surrounded by a milieu of domination and nonphysical abuse, all of which predicts a second battering event in the future. The batterer and his partner may be married or never married, living together or dating, gay or straight, young or old. A batterer may assault a lifelong partner, a first date, or a person from whom he is estranged. Batterers are present throughout our society across all social groups, although groups within our society vary in the prevalence of battering.

This entry adopts the convention of using the pronoun he linked to batterers, although she can batter too. However, when injury, fear, and goal of the violence are considered, most batterers are men and most victims of batterers are women. In U.S. households, about 85% of intimate partner crimes are committed against women. Adopting the convention here of using he to refer to batterers is not meant to imply that women never batter, or that they should be immune to laws against battering.

Battering is against the law in all Western democracies, but has not always been so. The earliest recorded effort to curb batterers was 202 BCE when, at the end of the Punic Wars, Roman societal and family structure changes gave women more property rights, including the right to sue husbands for unjustified beatings. However, this was not the beginning of a movement, as 500 years later, the batterer and emperor Constantine had his wife burned alive when she was of no further use to him. In 1871, Alabama became the first U.S. state to rescind the legal right of men to beat their wives. During feminism's third wave, Erin Prizzey wrote the first dedicated book on battering in 1974, Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear, the title emphasizing the privacy element so necessary to battering. The first intervention programs for batterers began in the late 1970s, modeled on the consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement. In 1980, California became the first state in the United States to mandate treatment for men convicted of domestic violence.

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