If you didn’t know better, you might think the small gray pendant hanging from Jeanne Mahoney’s neck was a good-luck charm.
“This is my peace of mind,” said Mahoney, a 51-year-old mother of six, fingering it. “I’m counting on it to save my life some day.”
The pendant links Mahoney to a home security company. If her ex-husband shows up at her home, she can use it to summon help with the push of a button.
The small electronic transmitter, provided by the Abused Women’s Active Response Emergency program for battered women, is one piece in a patchwork quilt of assistance, including shelters, protective orders and anti-stalking laws, available to women who fear abuse from men in their lives.
But such resources offer only limited security to women facing the threat of domestic violence. And recent legal efforts to make them safer have encountered sharp setbacks.
In July, an anti-stalking bill that would make it a felony to cross a state line to threaten or intimidate a battery victim got bogged down in the U.S. Senate despite broad bipartisan support.
The trouble came over a proposed amendment that would prevent people convicted of domestic violence from owning firearms. The amendment is stalled because some senators were wary of angering the National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful lobbying groups on Capitol Hill.
And at the end of July, a Virginia judge ruled unconstitutional a 1994 federal law defining rape as a violation of civil rights and allowing victims to sue their attackers.
The law, the Violence Against Women Act, argued in part that attacks on women affect their job performance and therefore have an effect on interstate commerce. But the judge rejected that notion.
“It’s clearly a setback for women who may have sought the law as their only means of redress,” said Brenda Smith, counsel for the National Women’s Law Center in Washington.
Kathy Rodgers, executive director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, said: “That law reverses hundreds of years of cultural norms that say it’s all right to beat your wife or rape your date. It proved that politicians took violence against women seriously.”
The Virginia decision “will not be the last word,” she said.
Out of 60 million couples in the United States about 12 percent will have an incident of at least mild violence by the man, such as pushing, shoving or slapping, in any given year. About 3.4 percent of all couples typically experience “severely abusive” incidents of kicking, choking or threatening with a knife or gun.
These figures are from a 1985 survey of 6,002 households by Richard Gelles, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island. It is still considered to be one of the most definitive studies of the problem.
In 1993, according to FBI statistics, 1,530 women were killed by their husbands or companions. Many of the men who killed their wives were living separately from the victim at the time of the murder, experts say.
The anti-stalking legislation, introduced by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), included a proposal by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) that would bar anyone convicted of a crime involving domestic violence, including misdemeanors, from owning or possessing a gun.
Lautenberg argued that too many domestic violence cases are handled as misdemeanors and as a result aren’t subject to the federal law that prohibits most convicted felons from owning or possessing guns.
But the Lautenberg amendment misses the point, said Elizabeth Swasey, director of the National Rifle Association’s CrimeStrike division.
“The issue that should be addressed surrounds the plea bargaining that occurs in domestic-violence cases,” Swasey said. “If we really care about the protection of women, we should start treating domestic violence like the serious crime it is instead of backing into it with amendments like these.”
