On Monday, it emerged that Paul Simon and his wife, Edie Brickell, were both arrested on domestic violence-like charges of disorderly conduct, following a "family dispute" at their Connecticut home over the weekend. According to the local police chief, the pair sustained only minor injuries, but "there was aggressiveness on both sides", and "they are both victims".



We only know what we know. The 72-year-old singer and his 47-year-old wife may both deserve to be in troubled water. But more often than not, duel arrests like this one occur in a bubble: police too often identify both parties as a victims in a case of intimate partner violence – and then arrest the woman anyway. Indeed, this was not what advocates had in mind when they pushed for better protections for victims of domestic violence. These laws, outside of the Simon home, are very much in dysfunction.

Twenty-five years ago, an aggressive "family dispute" might not have resulted in the arrest of either party, or even any charges. Back then, law enforcement saw domestic violence as a private matter to be resolved behind closed doors. In the late 80s, however, thanks in large part to the work of feminist activists who wanted the criminal justice system to take seriously the women behind those doors who were being beaten by their husbands, most states began adopting mandatory arrest laws – or at least pro-arrest policies – to hold batterers accountable.

Except now, as Sue Osthoff of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women (NCDBW) told me on Monday, "these laws are being used against the women they were designed to protect." According to data gathered by the NCDBW, the proportion of domestic violence arrests that involve a female defendant has more that doubled – from generally less than 10% from the 80s to early 90s, to often more than 20% during the 2000s – in the two decades since the wave of mandatory arrest laws was enacted.

If there was a corresponding dramatic increase in the number of male victims of assault, it might be easier to forgive this sharp increase in female arrests. Except, well, between 1998 and 2002, according to US Department of Justice statistics, 84% of spouse abuse victims and 86% of dating partner abuse victims were females, while men accounted for 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderers.

No matter how much misogynists might like to believe that women make false claims about domestic violence, or that they are equally or even more likely to perpetrate it than men, the evidence suggests otherwise. It even begins to suggest that law enforcement personnel are failing female victims just as much today with aggressive arrest policies as they were years ago while being so wilfully ignorant to women getting beaten up.

And yet, despite what the statistics tell us about the likelihood of women being victims and men being perpetrators, when cops show up at a domestic violence scene, they often have trouble identifying the primary aggressor. They have to arrest somebody, goes the interpretation of the mandatory laws, so they end up taking both parties into custody.

According to the NCDBW's Osthoff, who has worked with numerous women charged with crimes related to their own battering, the problem is twofold: law enforcement personnel are not being adequately trained to deal with the complexities of domestic violence cases, and batterers are getting increasingly savvy at using the system against the women they abuse. "We hear stories all the time about batterers self-inflicting wounds and then calling the police," she says. "When the police arrive and they see that both parties have sustained injuries, both the man and the woman will get taken in."

Other times a victim will be arrested along with her perpetrator, simply because she managed to inflict some wounds on him in the course of resisting the attack. While police are technically following the letter of the law with this "dual arrest" strategy, clearly they are overlooking its intent. Mandatory arrest laws were enacted in the first place because perpetrators were supposed to be held accountable for their actions, not to make it easier for victims to face criminal charges. Now the victims are struggling as much as ever to get justice.

There is a way forward: some police departments are working more closely with domestic violence advocates to get a better understanding of the complexities of the issue and to make sure that cases are properly investigated.

But you only need witness a high-profile (if perhaps not quite microcosmic) case as that of Paul Simon and his wife to realize that dual arrests can be a default before we know the full story. It's still very early, but I don't exactly find it encouraging that a police chief would make a public declaration that both parties were victims before having had an opportunity to conduct a proper investigation. Maybe Simon and Brickell are best left to resolve their issues on their own, but in most domestic violence cases, victims need a lot more help from law enforcement – a lot more of a bridge between trouble and the truth, rather than bookends.