Sparing the abusers.(Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Response to Intimate Abuse)(Book Review)

Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Response to Intimate Abuse, by Linda G. Mills (Princeton, 192 pp., $19.95)

TRUE story, from Insult to Injury: A man beats and rapes his wife; later, he holds a loaded gun to her head in front of her small children. His guilt is indisputable. Total punishment: six months of incarceration, followed by a term of probation. Now, complete the following statement. "The six months of incarceration was a travesty because ..." (a) "the sentence was absurdly short; serious crimes require serious punishment" or (b) "the sentence was absurdly long; the victim wanted counseling for the offender, not punishment, so incarceration was unduly harsh."

Did you choose (a)? Linda Mills, a professor of social work at New York University, says (b). Her book, Insult to Injury, rejects the mandatory-arrest-and-prosecution policies for domestic violence that now apply in nearly every jurisdiction in the United States. Under the regime that Mills proposes, men who torment their spouses and domestic partners can elude real punishment almost indefinitely, as victims will have the power to help them avoid arrest and prosecution.

Under the status quo, Mills complains, it is prosecutors, not victims, who make the decisions in the criminal-justice system. Policies that are tilted toward prosecution fail to acknowledge that women themselves perpetuate domestic violence by abusing children; and, of course, the system is biased against the poor, the black, and the disenfranchised. This is vintage left-wing criminology, with the flavor notes unique to the memorable 1967 harvest: Crime is never a choice, society is to blame, and punishment is merely avoiding the problem.

In lieu of punishment, Mills advocates Intimate Abuse Circles. May I propose that no aspect of crime has ever been or will ever be solved by the use of anything involving the words "Intimate" and "Circles?" Forget jail; now you can be "punished" with the punishment no criminal dreads: hours of harmless blather. Mills wants experts to meet with abusers, abusees, and their family and friends to discuss abuse problems. And whereas mandatory prosecution is "playing God," "human transformation should be the heart and soul of the Intimate Abuse Circle." Human transformation shall be achieved through the healing benediction of words, words, words.

Will ill-socialized men feel anything but contempt toward covens of experts yammering about "communication"? Such efforts will indeed earn the contempt of the more inarticulate abusers, most of whom are no strangers to the lectures of well-meaning professionals with degrees in social work. And the crafty, manipulative abusers will learn from these Intimate Circles a new lexicon of buzzwords and catchphrases with which to dazzle judges and probation officers at future sentencing hearings.

Mills is correct on one point: Current policies ignore the wishes of most domestic-violence victims. For this, I believe, we should be thankful. You can beat these victims senseless; you can scar them for life; you can torture them for days and reduce their children to whimpering nothings, and still the stories won't change: "I can't live without a man in my life"; "I need his paycheck because I just can't work a job"; "I know he'll change with some ...