The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,247

advice on students that no responsible parent would ever give a daughter. When MacDonald asked the associate director of an Office of Sexual Assault Prevention at a major university whether they encouraged students to exercise good judgment with guidelines like “Don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed,” she replied, “I am uncomfortable with the idea. This indicates that if [female students] are raped it could be their fault—it is never their fault—and how one dresses does not invite rape or violence.... I would never allow my staff or myself to send the message it is the victim’s fault due to their dress or lack of restraint in any way.”

Fortunately, the students whom MacDonald interviewed did not let this sexual correctness get in the way of their own common sense. The party line of the campus rape bureaucracy, however interesting it may be as a topic in the sociology of belief, is a sideshow to a more significant historical development: that in recent decades, a widening of social attitudes and law enforcement to embrace the perspective of women has driven down the incidence of a major category of violence.

The other major category of violence against women has been called wife-beating, battering, spousal abuse, intimate partner violence, and domestic violence. The man uses physical force to intimidate, assault, and in extreme cases kill a current or estranged wife or girlfriend. Usually the violence is motivated by sexual jealousy or a fear that the woman will leave him, though he may also use it to establish dominance in the relationship by punishing her for acts of insubordination, such as challenging his authority or failing to perform a domestic duty.71

Domestic violence is the backstop in a set of tactics by which men control the freedom, especially the sexual freedom, of their partners. It may be related to the biological phenomenon of mate-guarding.72 In many organisms in which males invest in their offspring and females have opportunities to mate with other males, the male will follow the female around, try to keep her away from rival males, and, upon seeing signs that he may have failed, attempt to copulate with her on the spot. Human practices such as veiling, chaperoning, chastity belts, claustration, segregation by sex, and female genital cutting appear to be culturally sanctioned mate-guarding tactics. As an extra layer of protection, men often contract with other men (and sometimes older female kin) to recognize their monopoly over their partners as a legal right. Legal codes in the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, the Far East, the Americas, Africa, and northern Europe spelled out almost identical corollaries of the equation of women with property.73 Adultery was a tort against the husband by his romantic rival, entitling him to damages, divorce (with refund of the bride-price), or violent revenge. Adultery was always defined by the marital status of the woman; the man’s marital status, and the woman’s own preferences in the matter, were immaterial. Well into the first decades of the 20th century, the man of the house was entitled by law to “chastise” his wife.74

In Western countries the 1970s saw the repeal of many laws that had treated women as possessions of their husbands. Divorce laws became more symmetrical. A man could no longer claim justifiable provocation when he killed his adulterous wife or her lover. A husband could no longer forcibly confine his wife or prevent her from leaving the house. And a woman’s family and friends were no longer guilty of the crime of “harboring” if they gave sanctuary to a fleeing wife.75 Most parts of the United States now have shelters in which women can escape from an abusive partner, and the legal system has recognized their right to safety by criminalizing domestic violence. Police who used to stay out of “marital spats” are now required by the laws of a majority of states to arrest a spouse if there is probable cause of abuse. In many jurisdictions prosecutors are obligated to seek protective orders that keep a potentially abusive spouse away from his home and partner, and then to prosecute him without the option of dropping the case, whether the victim wants it to proceed or not.76 Originally intended to rescue women who were trapped in a cycle of abuse, apology, forgiveness, and reoffending, the policies have become so intrusive that some legal scholars, such as Jeannie Suk, have argued that they now work against