Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life by Evan Stark

Author:Evan Stark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Mental Health, Sociology, Social Science, Marriage & Family, Violence in Society, General, Social Services & Welfare, Gender Studies, Psychology, Political Science, Social Work, Public Policy, Women's Studies, Criminology
ISBN: 9780199724956
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-02-28T21:00:00+00:00

Part IV

Living With Coercive Control

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9

WHEN BATTERED WOMEN KILL

Everyone in court was transfixed by the 911 tape, particularly Donna’s relatives. “I just killed my husband,” a voice reported to the emergency dispatcher. “I can’t take it anymore . . . with a gun . . . I’m dying. . . . I have my little son here.” Twenty-two-year-old Donna Balis did not look up. Sitting in handcuffs and leg shackles, she cut a pitiable figure and was audibly sobbing.

On that early February morning in 2000, the responding police officer found Donna in a nightgown on the front porch of her multifamily home in South Orange, New Jersey. She was “somewhat in a hysterical state and said she’d been involved in a beating,” Officer Munson reported. “She said she was tired of being beaten.” Donna was “cooperative” and showed him a .38-caliber revolver on top of the refrigerator. The gun contained five shell casings, but no live bullets. A medical examiner’s report identified a gunshot as the cause of her husband’s death. Gunpowder around the wound indicated that the weapon had been fired at close range. Donna was charged with the murder of her husband, Frank, and her bond was set at $250,000.

In the darkness, Munson testified, he couldn’t tell if Balis had been beaten. The prosecutor was more candid. He acknowledged that “Photographs of Balis’s body taken at the hospital after the murder do show bruises . . . Do I know where they came from? Only from what she said.” The dead man had no criminal record of abuse. An uncle of the dead husband told reporters, “The poor guy was working 16 hours a day since he came over here [from Yugoslavia] about 5 years ago.” Quoted in the newspaper, a neighbor described the couple as “quiet and . . . considerate”

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and were “shocked” by the shooting. The news also surprised Donna’s defense attorney, who had been the family lawyer. This was his first criminal case. “I had no idea any of this [the abuse] was going on,” he apologized sadly. “They always seemed like a happy couple.”

The few documents I received from the lawyer were little help. There were several medical visits that could have involved abuse. A hospital record of a bad sprain to Donna’s left wrist in April 1996 noted a “heavy object fell on left hand.” Several months later, a fracture of her right hand was attributed to her slamming the car door on her right third finger. Violence could have caused a presentation for “neck and back pain.” But so could the “auto accident” to which it was attributed. A note following an abortion in 1998 hinted at an element of control. She underwent the procedure, the doctor wrote, “at her husband’s insistence and against her wishes and religious scruples.” Still, abuse was only mentioned explicitly in Donna’s medical exam after her arrest and in the three-page statement she gave police. And this statement emphasized Frank’s general dissatisfaction with her behavior rather than violence.

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