Breaking the cycle of violence.

When she was in law school 20 years ago, Bonnie Campbell thought she would become a criminal defense lawyer. Instead, she wound up one of the nation's top law enforcers, a twist in her life story that seems fitting, given where she's been.

Campbell is the director of the U.S. Justice Department's Violence Against Women Office, created by Congress in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to coordinate federal and state efforts to light domestic abuse and other violent crimes with women victims.

She travels the country urging a "community-based, interdisciplinary" approach by police, prosecutors, judges, and social service providers to ensure that victims receive aid, protection, and, ultimately, justice. And she has hundreds of millions of federal dollars to dole out to help states do the job.

Her office also prosecutes new federal offenses in cases where abusers cross state lines, and the office encourages use of the MM civil rights provision, which allows women to sue their assailants for damages when the attacks can be shown to be motivated by gender bias.

Campbell has dealt with these issues in her personal as well as her professional life. As a prominent Iowa Democrat in the late 1980s and as a candidate for state attorney general in 1990, she was pursued by a stalker. After her election, she strengthened the state's domestic violence statute and wrote one of the first antistalking laws in the nation.

A constant motivator for her work goes even farther back, to 1974, when Campbell's half-brother was convicted of murdering a 16-year-old girl during an attempted rape.

TRIAL Associate Editor Julie Gannon Shoop spoke with Campbell recently at the Justice Department in Washington, D. C. Named last year one of the nation's 25 most influential people by Time magazine, Campbell belies the weighty label with midwestern affability, a modest and cramped office, and a willingness to speak openly about her life and work.

I've been wondering how it feels to be considered one of the 25 most influential people in America.

That's a very daunting label. The thing that impressed me the most was that anyone who does what I do would be selected for that honor. Talking about battered women and sexual assault of women and girls is hard work, and I don't know that it's ever really been recognized in such a high-profile way. So I was flattered not only for myself, because it's a wonderful honor, but I think it speaks to society's recognition of the impact of violence against women.

Let me start with the numbers. It seems like there are always statistics being thrown around about the incidence of domestic violence. Do you have figures that you consider reliable?

We don't know how many women are battered or how many women are raped because we don't all count them the same way. And we also know that these are crimes that are traditionally underreported by the victims.

In the Violence Against Women Act, there is a specific mandate that we conduct a massive research effort, and we're in the process of doing that now through the National Institute of Justice and the National Academy of Sciences.

What we typically look at first of all are the Uniform Crime Reports, which are data gathered from all the states by the FBI and then published. That gives us the number of reported cases. Of course, there are lots of cases that are not reported.

Then we look at the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is self-reported. People are talking to a surveyer, they're not reporting to the police. Those numbers are dramatically higher. The most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, for example, reported 5 million violent victimizations of women age 12 and older, and a good percentage of those attacks were by intimates.

So the number I use is a very conservative number. Conservatively speaking, there are 5 million violent victimizations, of women in America every year.

Recently, the Bureau of Justice Statistics had someone look at hospital emergency department reports. Interestingly, the numbers suggested that the incidence of domestic violence is actually four times greater than even our National Crime Victimization Survey indicated.

We honestly try to avoid giving numbers of victims because we know at the outset that the measures we're using aren't capturing the same information from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

There are too many victims. That is a safe statement.

Advocates for battered women have always complained that law enforcement has not taken this problem seriously. What are some ways this office teaches local authorities to deal with this crime and help victims?

First of all, we need to recognize that police officers and prosecutors and judges are just like the rest of us. They come to the table with the same biases and cultural myths about who battered women and rape victims are.

So we know we have to have a multipronged attack. We have to try to elevate the public's understanding of these issues generally, and, very specifically, we know that people who are charged with enforcing the law have to understand the special dynamic involved in domestic violence.

Our funds provided by the Violence Against Women Act--roughly $2 billion over a six-year period--go back to the states according to a population formula. The statute says that a quarter of the money has to be spent on law enforcement, a quarter on prosecution, a quarter on victim services, and the remaining quarter is discretionary. We specifically suggest that those discretionary monies be used for training and education of law enforcement personnel and for setting up specialized domestic violence investigative or prosecutorial teams or even domestic violence courts.

We're doing our training of the FBI, U.S. attorneys, and ATF whenever we can. But beyond that, we work very closely--the attorney generally personally, as well--with judicial associations, police groups, and prosecutorial groups, and we try to encourage them to do more training.

What kind of training are you talking about, specifically?

First, there's training about how to investigate a domestic violence case, which is very important because it's different from investigating other crimes. We know there is a likelihood that victims will recant because they're afraid and they're in danger. So we need to treat these cases as we would a homicide. If the victim testifies, great. If she doesn't, then let's figure out how to go forward without her.

In addition to doing that kind of training, we also sprinkle in a lot of what's different about these cases emotionally and contextually. It's easy to get frustrated with battered women if you don't know what's really happening in their lives. Very few of us live believing that the person we're sharing our home with might well kill us. That's a pretty horrifying environment by anyone's definition.

So we try to link the police and prosecutors up with advocates for battered women and often with battered women themselves, so that once they understand what's happening, they can become as supportive of these victims as they would be of any other set of victims.

Your personal experience as the victim of a stalker must give you an unusual perspective on these crimes. How did that experience affect you as an advocate for women crime victims?

It's interesting because we're using the term "stalking" right now, but at that time I had never heard that term.

This man stalked me for probably five years. He started out calling my husband and making rude, ugly comments on the phone. It didn't scare my husband at all. My husband would shout at him and slam the phone down, and that was that. But we did discuss it because it happened a lot.

Then I became state chair of the Democratic Party in Iowa in 1988, and that was a time when the presidential race was playing out in Iowa and there were candidates coming through all the time. So I was on television a lot and on the radio and in the newspaper.

People don't realize this, but in that year we had over 100 candidates running for president, only seven of whom were sane. So I had a lot of "nut" mail, and I read it all.

After a while, I realized that one person was writing repeatedly and that it was the same person who was calling my husband. He'd shifted his attention to me. When he called my husband, it seemed to be about issues or class--he had, I'm sorry to report, the mistaken notion that we are wealthy people. But with me it had very much a sexual suggestion.

Did he start calling you?

Started calling, started writing notes, but I didn't imagine that I had any remedy because he didn't threaten me directly. I felt threatened, and over time the letters got more threatening.

Then he began to indicate that he had been places where we had been. For example, Jesse Jackson came to Iowa to be a guest speaker at one of our large donor events. I had gotten to know Rev. Jackson pretty well and really admired him. So I gave him a nice introduction, and he came up and gave me a hug on the stage. This drove the man, the stalker, who happened to be in the audience, completely crazy.

When I got home that night he called and said, "I saw you up there hugging that guy," so I knew he had been in the room because the event hadn't yet been on television. There were several other incidents like that.

So time goes on, and I'm running for attorney general and again getting a lot of attention from the media--buying media, for that matter--and his letters get more intense. His behavior gets more intense. He's slipping messages under the door at my campaign office and even under the door at my home, which is pretty bold.

And his messages began to take on a real sharp edge. A couple of times he had been seated close enough to us at restaurants to hear our conversation, or standing close enough to us at the grocery store to hear our conversation.

At that point could you recognize him by sight?

I had no idea who he was. I had never seen him. Of course, we spent a lot of time speculating who he might be.

Shortly before election day, we scheduled a fund-raiser for the day of a football game. One of my supporters who is a talented artist drew up a caricature of me hiking a football. We posted these flyers all over town advertising this five-dollar, sloppy-joe-type fund-raiser.

The stalker took this picture of me and put stab marks in it and wrote all this crazy stuff on the bottom and stuck it under the door to my campaign office. My husband intercepted it. He didn't want me to see it until after the election, because there's something very, very upsetting about seeing that.

Well, I won the election. The night before I was to be sworn in, I got a phone call from this man, and he said, "I sure hope you make it through the day tomorrow, because I'll be there, I'll be in that room, and you won't know who I am." It terrified me. I dropped the phone like it had an electric shock in it.

It totally destroyed my ability to enjoy the day. But he still hadn't done anything. "I hope you make it through the day tomorrow" isn't a threat. So my husband spotted the U.S. attorney at the ceremony and said, "You know, this guy has been after my wife and me, and I can't stand it anymore. Has he broken any laws?" And the U.S. attorney said he'd look into it.

That's a long way of getting at the point: It was terrifying. This man changed the way we lived our lives. I didn't go out alone--ever. We moved into a secure building. And there was no stalking law to prosecute him under.

Did you ever catch the man?

The FBI found him, and he identified himself as a "colonel in George Wallace's army." When it came time to prosecute, I myself didn't think we had a very strong case, so we didn't prosecute him. But he never bothered me again, and it's my fervent hope that he never bothered anyone else.

Is that when you decided Iowa needed an antistalking law?

As attorney general, I began holding public forums on violence against women. I went to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a young woman in the audience said, "Would you consider a stalking law like California passed last year?" And that was literally the first time I had ever heard the term "stalking." And I said, "You bet." I got my lawyers to dig up the California statute, and we had our own version introduced in the next session of the legislature.

I didn't write the law for me, because I had protection. I wrote it for all the people who didn't.

Haven't some of these laws been challenged on constitutional grounds?

They've been challenged, but mostly they've been upheld. When they haven't been upheld, legislatures have been very quick to look at the law and rewrite it in such a way that it is constitutionally acceptable.

Every state now has a stalking law. A recent Justice Department survey indicated why these laws are important. The survey found that more than a million women and nearly 400,000 men are stalked every year.

Let's talk about the civil rights provision of the Violence Against Women Act. Do you know how may victims have actually sued their attackers for damages?

You may recall that one of the big concerns about the civil rights remedy when it was being debated in Congress was that it would open the floodgates to litigation, that there would be thousands of women racing to the courthouse door to file these damages lawsuits. That hasn't happened.

There have been a handful that we know about. I'm sure there are others around the country that we don't have any way to know about. Some cases have been filed, some have been settled.

Several federal district courts have disagreed on whether the civil rights remedy is unconstitutional. Why do you say Congress was within its power when it passed this provision?

A Virginia judge ruled last year in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic and State University that the Supreme Court's Lopez decision, which came down after the Violence Against Women Act passed, now makes the civil rights remedy unconstitutional. We strongly disagree with that, and we do it every time we know there's a case wending its way through the system.

United States v. Lopez struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act because Congress failed to make a case that interstate commerce was affected by guns in schools. That's not the case with the Violence Against Women Act. We made a legislative record. We showed how violence against women does in fact connect to interstate commerce.

First of all, employers see an enormous impact from violence that starts at home and goes to the workplace, and from workplace violence against women that may not be connected to domestic violence.

Also, there's the fear women have about traveling freely. For example, if you were a visitor in Washington, D.C., would you walk from here to a nearby department store at 7 o'clock at night? If the answer is no, then that's a burden on you as a woman and has a clear and obvious connection to interstate commerce.

That record was made. Data were submitted showing the cost to employers of workplace violence against women, showing that women fear certain environments, showing that they fear traveling in certain places. That record was made in a compelling fashion in the legislative history. We've made our case.

Assuming that the Supreme Court eventually upholds the civil provisions of the act, will women who win these lawsuits actually be able to collect damages from their abusers?

No case has reached that point yet. As every lawyer knows, just because you get a judgment doesn't mean you get money. But sometimes you can. If you've got that judgment, and the abuser ever comes into money or he ever decides to get a job and make an honest living, you're sitting there with your judgment.

I think the civil rights remedy is fundamental. If you believe, as I do, that it is the fundamental right of every woman to live her life free of violence--it's a civil right, a human right--then there has to be a remedy beyond the criminal prosecution that may or may not happen. You have to have a way, in a civil action, to seek redress.

Maybe you're never going to see the batterer or the rapist go to jail, but he can be made to pay some of the real costs to you in lost wages and pain and suffering. That's a very important message for a civil code of justice to contain.

Recently, a television newsmagazine program reported on male victims of domestic violence. It suggested that the problem is much bigger than we might expect because men are ashamed to report being abused by women. Does your office address this issue?

I didn't see the show, but I certainly have heard about it. This is my reaction. It seems that consistently over the years about 5 percent of men who have been victims of violent crime have been battered by intimates. We are talking about a pretty good number of men living in danger and fear, and I suspect it really is much more difficult for them to come forward. And when they do, sometimes there is no shelter space available, because as you can imagine most battered women's shelters are a little reluctant to take a man in among a group of women and children.

However, I think this is an attempt to even the scales, to say, "Yes, but women batter as often as men."

The reality is that women are hitting defensively or they're hitting preemptively. Some women, because the violence occurs in a cycle--there's a tension-building phase, then there's the violent episode, then there's a period of remorse, and it all starts over again--some women, when they're in the tension-building stage, know the violence is coming, and they purposely provoke it to get it over with. I hear that, I believe it, I even understand it. You can see that qualitatively, there is a difference between incidents of women hitting men and incidents of men hitting women.

The crux of the issue for me is in understanding how the battered women's movement came about. It wasn't government being visionary; it was one battered woman helping another battered woman. Over the course of 20 years, battered women's shelters emerged all across this country, and only recently did they get funding from government entities.

If as many men were being battered as some people like to suggest, then I have to ask, Why aren't battered men's shelters cropping up across the country as they did for battered women?

I think the numbers are exaggerated. We do hear from men who are battered, we believe they are battered, but we never see it in the numbers that we see for women.

There have been a few high-profile criminal cases involving domestic violence in recent years, starting with the John and Lorena Bobbitt case and culminating, of course, with the O.J. Simpson trial. Do cases like these, and all the media attention that goes along with them, help or hinder your work?

I think the O.J. Simpson case was a national teach-in, but I'm not sure what it taught us. There will never be another case like that again. But it did shine a bright light on domestic violence. As a consequence, the public's understanding of domestic violence is very broad--and about a 16th of an inch deep.

The real challenge for us is to deepen the public's understanding of domestic violence. That's going to take more than a couple of notorious cases.

The two fundamental questions that I'm asked all the time and that have to be answered in the public's mind are, Why don't battered women leave, and why do men batter? They're simple questions to articulate, but they're very difficult to answer.

These big cases add to the public's body of knowledge, and they're important. I think generally the O.J. Simpson case firmly planted in the public's mind the notion that domestic violence can be dangerous. Some people didn't believe that in his case it went from violence to homicide, but the case planted that seed of awareness.

I'd like to ask you one more question, and it's a personal one. Years ago, you went through the difficult experience of watching your brother go to prison for the murder of a young woman. Did that experience play a role in bringing you to the work you do today?

Oh, yes, in ways I'm not sure I've ever had the understanding to articulate.

It's very hard to understand how someone you know, someone you watched grow up, could become that menacing person who would actually kill another human being. It's almost impossible to make the connection. We see criminals as that mug shot in the paper, someone certainly a lot different from me.

I had so many reactions to that experience. My first reaction was, they're just arresting him and picking on us because we're poor. I think how often poor people and people of color must think that now.

My brother was guilty, but I didn't know that at first. It took me a while to understand that it wasn't just because we were poor. He did it. It was hard to accept that.

During the trial I saw the family of the victim and their pain, which could never be erased. I saw their anger, their hatred, which I can't blame them for.

I'm still sorting out this accumulation of experiences because I'm asked and I'm forced to think about it. Ultimately--and I don't mean this in any dramatic way--I think I wanted to do something good just to counter something so bad. I have no doubt at all that that experience provoked me into thinking about law school--only what I had in mind at the time wasn't prosecuting criminals but defending them. And then my life didn't take that turn.

I'd like to think I would have done good things whether that incident had happened or not. But I know that it very much cemented a personal need in me to make up--not to that family, but maybe to other families--for the violence that happens in our society.