Getting Away with Murder: Weapons for the War Against Domestic Violence.

Raoul Felder and Barbara Victor Simon & Schuster, Rockefeller Center, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. 224 pp., $22.

Reviewed by Fredrica Lehrman

This book alerts attorneys that domestic cases often focus on the wrong question: "Why didn't she just leave?"

The right questions to ask are these:

"How can the abuser get away with that?"

"Where were the police?"

"Was the abuser arrested?"

"Was the abuser thrown out of the house?"

"Will the abuser stand trial and be convicted and serve a stiff jail sentence?"

"Will the abused person get police protection, financial aid, medical care, legal advice, and child support?"

"How will the abused person and any children survive, financially and emotionally?"

The authors, a divorce lawyer and a journalist, offer a twofold solution to what they describe as the "War Against Domestic Violence." First, the medical and legal communities need to work together to extricate abused people from their abusive relationships. Second, society needs to hold batterers responsible for the crime of domestic violence.

In a forcefully argued polemic, peppered with compelling anecdotal evidence, the authors compare the medical and legal response to domestic violence and make several suggestions to improve how both professions handle abuse cases. Physicians, who view domestic violence as a pervasive medical problem, have written materials to help doctors address it. Under the leadership of Robert McAfee, the American Medical Association published Diagnostic and Treatment Guidelines on Domestic Violence in May 1994, and physicians Patricia Salber and Ellen Taliaferro published The Physician's Guide to Domestic Violence: How to Ask the Right Questions and Recognize Abuse ... another way to save a life in 1995.

Felder and Victor encourage the medical community to use simple language rather than medical jargon to record and report injuries so that those outside the medical profession can respond more swiftly and effectively. The authors also recommend that hospitals hire full-time advocates for battered people, use computer systems to track patients who seek frequent care at different hospitals for injuries consistent with domestic violence, and develop questionnaires to help identify people who have abusive partners. Many of these suggestions have already been adopted by hospitals and medical centers across the country and have proven effective.

Felder and Victor also encourage doctors to report to law enforcement authorities all injuries suffered as a result of domestic violence. As of March 1994, 45 states and the District of Columbia have laws mandating the reporting of injuries due to weapons, crimes, violence, intentional acts, or abuse.

Many physicians are reluctant to report domestic violence injuries because reports may deter people from seeking medical attention, violate patient autonomy and confidentiality, and lead to inadequate responses by the legal system, which may jeopardize the patient's safety. Moreover, patients who distrust the criminal justice system are likely to make up other excuses for their injuries. Nonetheless, doctors who are reluctant to report domestic violence often will record their diagnostic suspicions even if patients give other explanations for their injuries.

The authors acknowledge that pitfalls do exist; however, Felder and Victor envision a system in which the legal community effectively takes over once the medical community has confirmed a case of domestic violence.

The authors advocate a legal response that swiftly and reliably punishes a batterer for violent actions.

Until all components of the system are in place, there may be gaps in protection for some abused people. Nevertheless, efficient cooperation between the medical and legal communities, initiated by mandatory reporting, can benefit battered people.

The book also explores how the criminal justice system perpetuates the secrecy common to domestic violence. Analyzing the prejudices of many police officers, the criminal and civil laws that address domestic violence, arrest policies, and courtroom procedures, the authors conclude that the criminal justice system needs to focus more on the rights of the injured person than on the rights of the batterer.

The authors suggest that all batterers should be arrested for assault with intent to kill. They propose that the ultimate charge against the batterer, whether a felony or a misdemeanor, should be based in part on

* the level of intimacy between the parties;

* the degree and severity of the abuse suffered;

* the risk posed to any children;

* the possibility of future injury or attacks; and

* the batterer's criminal, drug, or alcohol history.

These proposals may prove challenging to legislate and implement.

This book offers an arsenal of useful and practical community-wide strategies to combat domestic violence. For instance, the authors argue that child protective services must learn to recognize links between child abuse and domestic violence and must then offer appropriate services to abused parents as well as to children. The authors give examples of actual coordinated systems that seem effective and can serve as models for other communities.

Shift in Perspective

The authors' vision champions a shift in perspective from secrecy to openness and from blaming injured people to blaming batterers. By insisting that a batterer's conduct is the root cause of domestic violence, the authors implicitly open the door to the use of innovative and classic tort law as an invaluable weapon in the war against domestic violence.