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| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
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| | | Evidence | |
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< | I have called the police twice and they did not come either time. On one of these occasions, an acquaintance’s intoxicated boyfriend was assaulting her. We got him out of the house, he passed out in the yard, and I called the police and described what had happened. After about 90 minutes, the abusive boyfriend woke up and walked away. I stayed awake for another few hours, wanting to talk to the police when they arrived. They never came. The abusive boyfriend spent the night passed out in his van half a block away, and in the morning, convinced his girlfriend to take him back. This experience, and its consistency with almost every other experience that I have had with the police, has led me to the believe (reasonably, I would argue) that I cannot rely on the police to respond when I ask for help. And this is me – a white girl, from a privileged background, with the financial means, social ties, and family support to never feel truly stuck. I cannot even imagine how it is for an indigent woman, or a woman of color, or a woman in an abusive relationship, and especially not for a woman experiencing all of those things simultaneously. | >
> | I have called the police twice and they did not come either time. On one of these occasions, an acquaintance’s intoxicated boyfriend was assaulting her. We got him out of the house, he passed out in the yard, and I called the police and described what had happened. After about 90 minutes, the abusive boyfriend woke up and walked away. I stayed awake for another few hours, wanting to talk to the police when they arrived. They never came. The abusive boyfriend spent the night in his van, half a block away, and in the morning, convinced his girlfriend to take him back. This experience, as well as almost every other experience that I have had with the police, has led me to the believe (reasonably, I would argue) that I cannot rely on the police to respond when I ask for help. And this is me – a white girl, from a privileged background, with the financial means, social ties, and family support to never feel truly stuck. I cannot even imagine how it is for an indigent woman, or a woman of color, or a woman in an abusive relationship, and especially not for a woman experiencing all of those things simultaneously. | | | | |
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< | Unfortunately, the argument that the state does not adequately protect victims of domestic violence, is substantiated by evidence beyond my own personal experience. Consider some of the findings that Congress considered when discussing the Violence Against Women Act: One study in Texas indicated that the police did not respond to calls from one out of three battered women. At the Sheriff’s Department in Los Angeles, the practice was to put domestic violence calls at the bottom of the response list, rather than treating them as an emergency. A Washington DC study showed that even in cases where a victim of domestic violence was actually bleeding from her injuries when the police arrived, arrests were still made less than 15% of the time. Combined with the Supreme Court's ruling in DeShaney, (holding that the state has no affirmative duty to protect a citizen from abuse), the government has left victims of domestic violence with no one that they can count on to protect them, and no way to seek redress against the state for this failure to protect. Making this a perfect, if tragic, example of how the law often works punitively than therapeutically when operating on "the bottom", many jurisdictions also hold victims of domestic violence criminally culpable for failing to protect their children from the abuse of their partners. | >
> | Unfortunately, the argument that the state does not adequately protect victims of domestic violence is substantiated by evidence beyond my own personal experience. Consider some of the findings that Congress considered when discussing the Violence Against Women Act: One study in Texas indicated that the police did not respond to calls from one out of three battered women. At the Sheriff’s Department in Los Angeles, the practice was to put domestic violence calls at the bottom of the response list, rather than treating them as an emergency. A Washington DC study showed that even in cases where a victim of domestic violence was actually bleeding from her injuries when the police arrived, arrests were still made less than 15% of the time. Combined with the Supreme Court's ruling in DeShaney, (holding that the state has no affirmative duty to protect a citizen from abuse), the government has left victims of domestic violence with no one that they can count on to protect them, and no way to seek redress against the state for this failure to protect. Making this a perfect, if tragic, example of how the law often works punitively rather than therapeutically when operating on "the bottom", many jurisdictions also hold victims of domestic violence criminally culpable for failing to protect their children from the abuse of their partners. | | | What We’ve Tried to Do |
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