Russia should not decriminalise wife-beating

VICTORIAN England was a good place to be an abusive husband. Even “the vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1869. Court reports were filled with accounts of men mutilating their wives and receiving light sentences. But things were starting to change. A law specifically criminalising violence against women and children was enacted in 1853. The women’s movement of the late 19th century called for harsher punishments and sexual equality. A century later the rise of feminism in the West and elsewhere brought new legislation, more sensitive policing and belated recognition that living with someone should not be a licence to beat her up.Russia appeared to embrace this idea, too. Last June the Duma, Russia’s parliament, adopted a law criminalising the beating of household members and mandating strict penalties for offenders. This reflected a consensus, at least among liberal urban Russians, that domestic violence was not a fact to be accepted but an evil to be fought, and that reluctant police needed to be told to intervene.