This is my friend and fellow loudmouth Wendy Murphy…
By Wendy Murphy
The Patriot Ledger
October 24, 2009
It’s October, which means it’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month. But we don’t really need an “awareness month” anymore. There’s so damn much domestic violence, we’re in a chronic state of awareness.
What we really need is a revolution.
First the facts:
- A woman is beaten every 15 seconds in this country.
- Nearly two-dozen victims of Domestic violence are already dead this year alone in Massachusetts. Other states report similar numbers.
- As many as ten million children a year are exposed to domestic violence, causing them to suffer emotional and psychological harm, not to mention that they grow up believing that smacking your spouse is part of a “normal” relationship. No surprise then that boys who watch their fathers beat their mothers are far more likely as adults to do the same thing to their female partners.
- According to the Justice Department, women suffer violent victimization more than four million times a year. Approximately one-third of the crimes are committed by intimate partners.
- Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury for American women between ages 15 and 44.
- Among homeless women and children, half are on the streets because of domestic violence.
- Medical expenses resulting from domestic violence amount to around four billion dollars annually.
Now a few of the embarrassing reasons for so much suffering:
- Most cases of domestic violence are not reported to law enforcement because victims fear retaliation, are financially dependent on their abuser, and/or because they believe the justice system will not protect them or deter the violence.
- Of the cases accepted for prosecution, only about half end in conviction while one-third are dismissed by the prosecutor.
- For the small percentage of cases that end in conviction, the punishment is usually trivial.
In sum, there are three main reasons why women are abused in such large numbers by men who claim to love them:
- Offenders aren’t being punished!
- Offenders aren’t being punished!
- Offenders aren’t being punished!
Some argue that punishment doesn’t stop domestic violence and that we need to do more “education and prevention” to change the way males are raised so they will learn to respect women more. These tend to be the people who are paid to do “education and prevention”. In other words, they aren’t in the business of fighting for justice – even though some research shows that the only thing that stops violent men is incapacitation (read: jail).
Even if education and cultural re-training might help someday, while we’re waiting around for our species to evolve, we need to do one of two things: either give all endangered women a 45 caliber equalizer or start sending more batterers to jail.
Anti-incarceration advocates will tell you that prison isn’t fun – and that it often spawns a toxic mental software that makes men who enter come out worse when their sentence wraps up.
But if fear of becoming a monster in prison, and respect for women aren’t enough to deter a man from beating his wife, he’s already toxic. Putting him behind bars at least prevents him from hurting others.
Punishment isn’t the only way to stop violence, but it is a legitimate and effective feature of our legal system. Lots of research shows how states that send a higher percentage of criminals to prison have lower rates of crime, even after controlling for things like poverty and urbanization.
But incarceration is a dirty word in the lexicon of some liberals who claim that locking people up gives the government dangerous amounts of power and threatens the freedom of the individual.
They’re wrong.
The freedom of FEMALE individuals is actually greatly enhanced when criminals who target women for violence are incapacitated.
But our legal system doesn’t care. And despite decades of disastrous statistics, our political leaders don’t care, either. In fact, nobody in a position of leadership is even complaining about the lack of justice for victimized women much less doing something about the fact that the law has created a hierarchy that devalues women’s lives by decriminalizing domestic violence through the lack of meaningful punishment.
Earlier this month, there was a big to-do in DC about women’s issues in the Obama Administration. Lynn Rosenthal, whose responsibility it is to deal with violence against women on behalf of the President, gave a lovely talk about all sorts of things, but never once mentioned the profound failure of criminal law to redress domestic violence. Deval Patrick and his administration have been equally impotent on this important issue.
Obviously, the men who promised “change” and “hope” for a better society weren’t referring to battered women. Neither leader has shied away from talking about tough punishments for criminals on Wall Street, but see if you can find a similar statement from either guy about the far more dangerous criminals on Main Street .
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