Violence Against Women

LAST month was National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, but it's November that will really put the issue of violence against women on the map.John Wayne Bobbitt was scheduled to go on trial today, accused of sexually assaulting his wife, Lorena Bobbitt; on Nov. 29, it will be her day in court. On June 23, as everyone must know by now, she cut off his penis with a kitchen knife.Lorena Bobbitt has said that she endured her husband's rapes and beatings throughout their marriage. But it's her sensational act that has made her a media icon and will put the two trials at the epicenter of the hottest gender debate since Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.

Every big issue produces a backlash. If the O.J. Simpson murder charges have churned up interest in domestic violence against women, the attention has also brought new publicity to arguments that women victimize men as often as men victimize women.''Women are part and parcel of domestic violence. Why does our culture refuse to hold women as well as men accountable for their participation in domestic violence?'' asked Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski in a widely distributed opinion piece (reprinted June 24 in The Sun)

THIS IS MY kind of women's magazine! Spare, at only 20 pages, the Women's Quarterly nevertheless manages to deal stunning blows to establishment pieties like day care, violence against women, the mommy track, sexual harassment and the "right to die."With humor and sarcasm -- but also doses of warmth and passion -- these women offer an intelligent refutation of the leading feminist nonsense that is swallowed so uncritically by the mainstream press.The lead story takes apart the Violence Against Women Act, a $1.5 billion goody buried in last year's crime bill.

Washington They were both attractive, successful, dynamic, bright. "From the outside looking in," says Leslie B. Ford of Baltimore, "we appeared to be the perfect couple with the perfect relationship."But from the inside looking out the view was far less idyllic."I remember countless episodes of how my husband blackened my eyes, bloodied my lips, how he dislocated my shoulder from time to time . . . how I miscarried our child after he beat me," she recalled yesterday at a Capitol Hill press conference at which proposed legislation regarding violence against women was discussed.

WASHINGTON -- Christy Brzonkala is nervous and seems a bit disoriented by her new -- and obviously unwanted -- role as a public champion of women's rights. After months of trying to avoid personal publicity about her case, to be heard next week in the Supreme Court, Brzonkala uncomfortably met a roomful of cameras and reporters yesterday. The encounter started early, her media adviser said, so she did not have to sit and wait at a head table, and be stared at and noisily filmed. Brzonkala, of Fairfax, Va., was 18 when she enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University five years ago. Weeks after the start of her freshman year, she told university officials she had been raped by two football players in a dormitory.

"First one group wants rights, next thing you know, the whole damn world wants rights." -- Poet Gil Scott-Heron.*"I have worked with women who were raped as long ago as 40 years ago and who were still trying to come to terms with it, still trying to regain control of their lives," said Cecelia Carroll, director of the Sexual Assault Recovery Center here."That's the thing you have to understand about rape," Carroll continued. "It is such a terrible, terrible, terrible thing. You feel that you have lost control of your person.

Last week, as I moved through the cafeteria line at lunch, one of the doctoral students from Johns Hopkins Hospital's Injury Prevention Center stopped me to ask why I haven't written anything about women and domestic violence.When she told me that injuries related to domestic violence appear to be the single most common cause of injuries to women, I resolved to do a column and asked Linda Chamberlain of the Injury Prevention Center to help me.What is domestic violence?Domestic violence against women is defined as a pattern of abusive behavior in which one person, usually a husband or boyfriend, victimizes a woman through physical abuse, emotional abuse, intimidation, sexual assault, social isolation or deprivation.

On the Web site for Encounters International, a matchmaking service, the romance between Nataliya and James was portrayed as the perfect mail-order bride love story. When they met in 1998, Nataliya Mikhaylovna was 27, a pretty divorcee from Ukraine. American James Fox was 34, owned two airplanes, and had paid an $1,850 fee to meet available women from the former Soviet Union. With the guidance of Natasha Spivack, founder of the Bethesda-based Encounters International, the couple met, married and lived happily ever after in Loudoun County, Va., according to the online testimonial.

Washington -- I didn't see Denise Brown, although I heard about the T-shirt she contributed. I saw Salt of Salt 'N Pepa. And either Cagney or Lacey, whichever one has dark hair.Toad the Wet Sprocket showed up. BETTY and Joan Jett were there.So was Jesse Jackson. And Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita, described as a singer/activist.But I didn't come for the celebrities.I didn't come for the nun carrying the pro-choice sign either, or even this choice sign: "Republicans Don't Need Abortions, They Eat Their Young."

Who'd have thought it? Baltimore and The Vagina Monologues are practically made for each other. Indeed, where this provocatively titled show is concerned, Eve Ensler, its creator, describes Charm City as "verging on a holiday zone." Ensler bases her assessment on two appearances in Baltimore - in 1998 at Center Stage, when the show was still a work-in-progress, and in 2000 at the Feminist Expo at the Convention Center, when, as she recounts in the introduction to the published script, "4,000 wild women" chanted the word "vagina."