The murder of Carol Stuart in Boston last October received widespread national attention.
The initial barrage of prominence was surpassed two and a half months later in January, when Charles Stuart threw himself off a Boston bridge -- thus confirming fresh police suspicions that Stuart himself had been his wife's killer rather than a black suspect as he had charged.
Boston's black community was outraged by it all, and rightly so. The incident netted many victims, including hundreds of young, black men who had been harassed by police as they stalked black neighborhoods looking for the alleged killer, and William Bennett, the police's prime suspect for several weeks. Black people everywhere recognized themselves as victims of a racism that is quick to believe the story of a well-off white man playing off fears of black urban violence.
But in all the furor over the many victims, what appears to have been lost is that there was at first only one. Charles Stuart may have turned the murder into a racial incident, but it was first of all an act of violence against a woman. Seventeen days later there was another victim, when the son Carol Stuart had been carrying in her womb at the time of the murder died.
No one knows for sure why Charles Stuart murdered Carol Stuart. Insurance money seems to be the most common guess -- friends say Charles Stuart wanted funds to open a restaurant. But one close friend says that Charles told him last September that he had recently noticed that Carol "had the upper hand" in their marriage, and he was upset that she had refused to get an abortion and worried that she might not go back to work after the birth, thereby lowering the couple's income. Others say that Charles, who had studied cooking at a vocational school, felt threatened by Carol's education and career as an attorney.
Among all the speculation, what is clear is that life with Charles Stuart was no Camelot.
And what should be clearly remembered from the tragedy is that Carol Stuart's fate reflects that of many women, growing numbers of victims in a rising epidemic of violence.
According to the FBI, 31 percent of women murder victims are killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Unlike Carol Stuart's situation, in most cases a murder is preceded by a pattern of abuse. According to Women's Legal Defense, an estimated six million women in the United States are physically abused by their husbands each year; between 2,000 and 4,000 are beaten to death.
Battery is the single most common cause of injury to women, and one-third of all police time is spent responding to domestic violence calls. Two of every three pregnant patients seen in hospital emergency rooms have been victims of abuse. Between one-quarter and one-third of all abused women suffer "serial victimization, " with many beaten as often as once a week.
Experts estimate that one out of every six households in the United States experiences domestic violence, 95 percent of it from husbands toward wives. As Joan D. Stiles, public education coordinator for the Massachusetts Coalition for Battered Women, put it in the wake of Carol Stuart's death, statistically "the most dangerous place for women is in the home" rather than in the type of inner-city neighborhood where the Stuart shooting took place.
BUT LET US NOT FORGET that strangers do their terror as well. On December 6 a gunman in Montreal gave us a chilling reminder. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lepine entered the engineering school at the University of Montreal, dismissed the male students, and, yelling, "You're all feminists," opened fire on the women with an American-made semi-automatic rifle. When it was all over, 14 of them were dead. It was the worst mass killing in Canadian history.
On the body of Lepine, who killed himself after his spree, police found a letter including a list of 15 prominent women, names they conjecture he had taken from a newspaper. The letter stated that "feminists have always spoiled" his life. Lepine, who was unemployed and had been rejected by the Canadian armed forces, was struggling to complete courses in order to apply to engineering school.
In the aftermath, some press members and politicians were anxious to dismiss the incident as the isolated act of a "madman." But much of Canada paused, and mourned, and wrestled with the implications. Vigils were held, and people not only denounced the level of the violence -- rare in this country that had only 206 more murders than in the District of Columbia the previous year -- but also began to examine societal attitudes that feed the sexism and misogyny that erupted with such force on December 6.
That example is one that we would do well to heed. Violence against women is on a rampage in the United States.
Rape is the fastest growing crime, with a rape or attempted rape occurring every three-and-a-half minutes. As many as one in three women will be raped in her lifetime, according to the FBI. One study of male college students showed that 35 percent of them indicated some likelihood of committing a rape if there were no chance that they would be caught, and another study showed that 16 percent of citizens and 18 percent of patrol police officers interviewed believe that "it would do some women good to get raped," according to Women's Legal Defense.
Some encouraging trends show a deepening response to this outrage among us. More than half the states have enacted rape reform legislation that provides greater protection for rape survivors, according to Women's Legal Defense, and educational efforts are under way to draw attention to spouse rape and date rape. More rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women are appearing, as well as organizations working with rapists and batterers. Twelve states now require police officers to make an arrest in domestic violence situations, reversing a long-held, dangerous assumption that police are only mediators in domestic conflicts, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
But this is not enough. This pressing crisis deserves much more of our energy and commitment. As one step, we at Sojourners invite churches, communities, campus and youth groups to focus Peace Pentecost 1990 activities on the epidemic of violence against women. Let us set aside Sunday, May 27, as a day to raise our voices.
Speaking to the press, Nathalie Provost, a survivor of the Montreal massacre, gave this plea from her hospital bed: "You can make people understand men and women are equal, and we were made by God to live on the same planet, and we can have the same hope of life. We have the right."
For some that right is being brutally extinguished -- by individuals and political forces threatened by the notion of the equality and humanity of women. In the wake of the massacre, Montreal Mayor Jean Dore said that all people "bear a collective responsibility ... so that such an event will never happen again."
From the dramatic news stories to the anonymous, every-day hells that women must endure, the pain must call us all to action. We indeed bear a collective responsibility.
Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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