what life is really like for families in the United States, in contrast to the cultural myths that we wish were true. From its beginnings in the mid- 60's, the Women's movement is forcing society to examine itself and changes are coming very quickly. By January 1978, when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a national hearing on women abuse in Washington, D.C., hundreds of advocates for battered women from all over the U.S. attended. The organization of what would become the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) began there. Forty lesbians among those advocates met separately to discuss battering in the Lesbian community and homophobia in the DV movement. The issue was so volatile that it was dropped and not discussed again, even among the attending lesbians, until two years later at the first NCADV conference. THE RECOGNITION OF LESBIAN DOMESTIC VIOLENCEThis first step of recognizing the reality of battering in lesbian relationships threatened the dream of a lesbian Utopia, i.e. a society with none of the social problems caused by the patriarchy. It took a few years after the heterosexual DV movement got going for it to begin to be discussed, even though large numbers of the original workers in the DV organizations were lesbians. Many lesbians wanted to believe that only bar-Dykes and butches or practitioners of S&M were batterers, or that battering within the lesbian community occurred seldom and was not "real" battering, and that in any case, it could be quickly resolved. This reluctance to address lesbian battering is ongoing. However, in all parts of the lesbian community, including among Leather Dykes and S&M lifestylists it is beginning to be acknowledged and a response is building. SIMILARITIES BETWEEN HETEROSEXUAL AND LESBIAN BATTERINGDenial and disbelief regarding the existence of and severity of domestic violence are present in both the heterosexual community and the lesbian community. People in both tend ...
