As a Baltimore judge handed a three-year prison sentence to her longtime boyfriend for the latest in a series of assaults against her, Denice Ringgold stood next to the prosecution table in Room 5 of the Eastside District Court. For a second, she smiled.
She thanked District Judge Alan J. Karlin and Assistant State's Attorney Bobbie Dickens, who both told her that bringing charges against Lawrence T. Bell -- 43 and no relation to the politician of similar name -- may have saved her life. But Ringgold, 39, knew better: It was Bell's life, not her own, that likely had been saved.
"I bought a gun recently," Ringgold said in the courthouse hallway, "and I was prepared to defend myself if the judge let him out and he hit me again."
Ringgold's case underscores a little-noticed result of programs designed to protect women from domestic violence: a precipitous drop in the number of men killed by their wives or girlfriends. The decline is so great that it has driven down the total number of domestic slayings nationwide, including male and female victims, by 36 percent over the past 20 years, government figures show.
Recent academic studies and a Justice Department report, released this spring with little fanfare, detail the phenomenon. In 1976, the numbers of women and men killed by their "intimates" -- the government's term for spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends and same-sex partners -- were fairly close: about 1,600 women and 1,400 men. By 1996, the number of female victims nationwide had slipped to about 1,300 a year, a 19 percent decrease.
But the number of men killed by their partners nationally had nose-dived to about 400 a year in 1996 -- a 70 percent fall. Police say the figures for Maryland and Baltimore City reflect the decline across America.
"As the society makes progress in violence against women, we've provided women with more services and resources," says James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. "And the biggest beneficiaries are men."
"That is a tremendous irony," says University of Missouri-St. Louis Professor Richard Rosenfeld, "that does not get all that much attention."
Women more aware
Rosenfeld and other scholars say the steeper decline in wife-kills-husband homicides shows, paradoxically, that efforts to raise awareness of domestic violence have been more effective in reaching women than men.
