It’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month and a fresh pile of dead bodies reminds us that women and children are not worth very much in this country.
One Boston woman who was attacked recently by an armed serial rapist told the media she wished she’d been carrying pepper spray, as if she could expect to repel a bullet by squirting the guy with something from a spice rack.
The perpetrator had two prior rape charges dismissed when his victims were too intimidated to testify, but not a single political leader, advocacy organization or law enforcement official expressed outrage over the guy getting a complete pass, twice.
Equal justice means nothing until prosecutors stop dropping the charges at the whimsical request of victims and start treating violence against women and children as crimes on par with other serious felonies. When a key eyewitness in a bank robbery doesn’t feel like testifying, prosecutors don’t call it a day, they call the cops and have the witness forcibly brought to court. Crimes against the people we love should enjoy a greater law enforcement response than crimes against the stuff we own.
If we truly cared about women and children, we wouldn’t cavalierly hand them restraining orders and tell them to hide in secret “battered women’s shelters” when they fear for their lives.
We’d give them guns.
OK, maybe guns is too much, but wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, a rapist or batterer restrained himself out of fear that a woman was packing heat? Without some equalizing force, in law or personal power, we’ll soon become a nation of gun-toting mamas anyway when victims take matters into their own hands by desperation.
Many women have resorted to suicide because unequal justice is so out of control in this country, especially in Family Court, where judges often get it wrong because some “expert” wrote a report finding a child’s allegation of abuse to be false. While bad parents sometimes use their children for tactical gain during divorce proceedings, studies show that false allegations are exceedingly rare and that the real problem is abusive men winning custody when they don’t deserve it.
Even more perverse is the way court-appointed evaluators don’t see the protection of women and children as a moral imperative. One “expert,” who works for a seemingly prestigious program at Massachusetts General Hospital, recently admitted to finding children’s reports of abuse to be “false” or “likely false” 90 percent of the time. This is obviously a statistical impossibility, but because there is so little oversight of Family Courts, the resulting harm to children is effectively invisible.
Outright corruption was recently uncovered in California’s Family Court system, where judges were refusing to allow mothers even limited visitation rights. In one case, a mother was so distraught about a judge taking her children away after they reported their father’s sexual abuse, she shot herself and her children to death. Most people said she did the right thing because death was a kinder fate.
The rest of the world is paying attention to this unconscionable American mess. An international court recently ruled the United States is responsible for causing untold amounts of violence against women and children because it systematically fails to enforce laws that forbid crimes like rape and domestic abuse. The court urged better enforcement but the judgment is essentially meaningless because it, too, is unenforceable. In another recent case of international embarrassment, the government of the Netherlands granted political asylum to a battered mother and her children when the family court system here refused to protect them from vicious domestic violence.
The American legal system has failed women and children for so long, violence against them has become the tolerated norm. It’s time to give up the romantic notion that we can create stable families by ignoring children’s desperate cries for help, and that we can stop sexual and domestic violence with “treatment” and restraining orders.
Between now and whenever we start getting it right, these ideas might help keep the body count down:
Women and children should carry wasp spray. It shoots long and far, stings like crazy, and unlike pepper spray, you don’t need a license to carry.
Victims should videotape incidents of violence in the home, and otherwise learn to gather evidence without the help of law enforcement, then turn the evidence over to a trusted attorney.
Courtwatch programs should be set up nationwide to monitor the actions of judges known to rule unfairly against women and children. For guidance on how to do this, check out www.nationalfamilycourtwatchproject.org.
When human suffering is ignored and victims are browbeaten in the name of justice, the only thing women should not do is continue to obey the law blindly, in the naive hope that truth matters and justice always prevails.
Wendy Murphy is a leading victims rights advocate and nationally recognized television legal analyst. She is an adjunct professor at New England Law in Boston. She can be reached at wmurphy@nesl.edu. Read more of her columns at The Daily Beast.
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