#leigh goodmark

[gatheringbones]

[“As Angela Y. Davis has argued, prison reform has often led to the creation of “bigger, and what are considered ‘better,’ prisons.” Proposals to create gender-responsive prisons and separate prisons for transgender people—what Critical Resistance’s Rose Braz has referred to as “boutique prisons”—follow this pattern.

A proposal to build a gender-responsive prison in California, for example, would have meant creating the capacity to cage an additional forty-five hundred people. Prison construction, in turn, feeds increased criminalization—once prisons are built, they must be filled. And, as law professor Kate Levine has observed, “if we make prisons pretty enough, people may believe that they’re something other than cages.”

Reforms express confidence that the criminal legal system is working—that it is creating safety, preventing violence, holding people accountable—and that it needs only a few tweaks. But there is no evidence that the criminalization of gender-based violence is doing that work. Policing, prosecution, and incarceration do not prevent crime and are particularly ineffective in preventing the kinds of survival-based actions taken by victims of violence. Fear and violence do not prevent violence. As organizer and educator Mariame Kaba has written, “a safe world is not one in which the police keep Black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.”

What the criminal system does efficiently and effectively is deploy violence to exert control—criminalization is “violence work.” The criminal system’s violence shores up powerful economic and social interests and marginalizes communities of color, particularly poor Black communities. Reform efforts are “doomed,” Butler has argued, because “they are trying to fix a system that is not actually broken.” As organizer Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot has explained, “the dehumanization and violence is the point.”Preventing the punishment of survivors of gender-based violence requires that we radically reconsider our response to harms. Abolition, and specifically abolition feminism, can help us get there.”]

leigh goodmark, from imperfect victims: criminalized survivors and the promises of abolition feminism, 2023

[much-discourse-wow]

Leigh Goodmark, Professor of Law at university of Maryland and director of the Gender Violence Clinic.

[emilieideas]

In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (2019)

“That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaparones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would morn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.” (77)

“abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.” (94)

“It’s obvious to us, now, that that is a squirrel and that is a fish and that is a bird, but how was Adam supposed to know that? He wasn’t just newly born, he was newly created; he didn’t have years of life experience to support this creative enterprise [of naming the world], or anyone to teach him about it. When I think about him, just sitting there with his brand-new fist under his brand-new chin, looking vaguely perturbed and puzzled and anxious, I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.” (134)

“‘By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,’ law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, ‘the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.’“ (138-139)

“you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal” (142)

“Afterward—when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House—you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. That is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme. You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything.” (224)

“What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?” (226)

“When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics.” (232)

“I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it’s all right, it’s going to be all right.” (242)

[weirdgirlfriend]

My undergrad is in sociology, so my reading was pretty different than the above two, and a lot less reading! I also did both AP Englishes in high school, so much less fiction reading in college. I went to a small liberal arts college for my first semester, and the whole freshman class was asked to read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (funnily enough we never discussed the book). In my second semester I took an early American literature class, and I chose to focus on women writers, so I read The Coquette by Hannah Webster Forster and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. I reread Incidents in the Life for a History of American Women class later.

For my sociology classes, I read A LOT of classical theory, but I especially read a lot of Engels and Goffman (yes I read the Communist Manifesto for class, yes we do exist lol). I read Evicted by Matthew Desmond and attended a talk he gave on the book at my school as well! For my Sexual Assault and Intimate Partner Violence, I read Gender, Power, and Violence by Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith and Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence by Leigh Goodmark. The last book I read in undergrad was Know My Name by Chanel Miller for a class on the #MeToo movement. I remember reading We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche but I don’t remember for what class lol. My reading in undergrad mostly consisted of reading research articles lol.

I’m still doing a lot of reading for my masters thesis such as Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport by Laura Robinson and Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sport by Michael Messner. Again, most of my reading in grad school consists of research articles and methods texts, but if you ever need information about any aspect of sexual violence in sport, I probably have an article for it.

curious to hear what kinds of books you guys had assigned to read in college, if anyone wants to share. in my first college, our freshman class was assigned “the beautiful things that heaven bears” by dinaw mengestu for one of our mandatory orientations (i believe he even spoke at one). i don’t recall what was assigned in my general literature courses exactly, though i know “medea” was one of them, but when i took an honors american masculinities elective i remember reading a variety of novels: “giovanni’s room” by james baldwin, “this is how you lose her” by junot diaz (hated that book but no one else agreed on how misogynistic it was), “rabbit, run” by john updike (everyone hated that one), “erasure” by percival everett (loved this one, dad is inexplicably reading it now), and “the things they carried” by tim o’brien (some stories were better than others). we were also going to read “stone butch blues” by leslie feinberg but it got cut at the last minute for time (funny enough, it was released for free on feinberg’s site that year. it was pretty big on tumblr during that time and shortly thereafter, but i never got around to reading it). i also took an honors detective fiction course but, due to many conflicting priorities at the time, never really got a chance to read the work (much to my friend whom i was taking the course with’s chagrin) and ended up withdrawing. i remember we were assigned quite a lot of sherlock holmes, agatha christie, and some lesser known work like that of c auguste dupin by edgar allen poe.

my second attempt at college has a reading list that is much easier to track (thanks goodreads!): “tartuffe” by molière, “candide” by voltaire, “narrative of the life of frederick douglass” (self explanatory), “the death of ivan ilych” by leo tolstoy, “hedda gabler” by henrik ibsen (i remember distinctively the professor calling the titular character a “bitch”), “the dead” by james joyce, “the metamorphosis” by franz kafka, “the waste land” and “the love song of j alfred prufrock” both by ts eliot, and “the dancing girl of izu” by yasunari kawabata.

…just now realizing all but agatha christie were written by men, and all but “hedda gabler” and “medea” center on them. hm.

[africanglobe]

AFRICANGLOBE – A woman who alleged Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax raped her in college was accused of harassing and threatening a man she had a relationship with, according to Maryland court records.

https://www.africanglobe.net/headlines/woman-accused-justin-fairfax-rape-history-tearing-men/

[feuilletoniste]

Somehow ended up on the truly stomach-turning site that is Amber Heard's Wikipedia page, and was reminded of the excellent book People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, which is really recommended reading for everyone. There's a lot of discussion of Anne Frank, which is to be expected, considering that she's probably one of the most famous dead Jews in history (except for maybe Jesus), which leads to this quote: "The entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world—as opposed to those who knew and loved her—lay in her lack of a future."

You see the same pattern in every oppressed group. An abuse victim is a martyr when she's dead, but when she's still alive she's sued for more than her net worth and humiliated globally on network television for weeks upon end. Dead black people are victims of the police and a racist society and should be listened to, but living black people are ignored and spoken over in favor of "woke" white people. Solidarity with Iranian women who have been murdered by the totalitarian theocracy they live in, but isn't burning the hijab a little Islamophobic? Solidarity with the Ukrainian people who want to be free, but wouldn't it be better if they would just stop fighting and ask nicely for peace? Solidarity with women who have been victims of rape, assault, physical abuse, emotional abuse, stalking, financial abuse, whatever, but hey, that Hasan Abi clips compilation of him making Amber Heard memes isn't gonna watch itself!

Leigh Goodmark said it perfectly. When is a battered woman not a battered woman? When she fights back. When she's still alive to tell her own side of the story.

[rapeculturerealities]

The woman wanted help.

In a call late one night in September 2016, she told a 911 dispatcher that her husband — a Boston Police Department captain — was “extremely emotionally and verbally abusive” and refused to leave their West Roxbury home. What’s more, she said, her husband had abused her in the past, according to police dispatch records obtained by the Globe.

The officers who arrived that night — all of whom worked under her husband’s command — took his gun and removed him from the home without arrest. The department’s spokesman recently called it a verbal dispute, not a crime. Despite a Boston police policy requiring a domestic violence unit supervisor be on-scene, no one from that unit ever showed up.

A week after the incident, the veteran police captain was quietly reassigned, tasked with leading another major BPD district. The domestic violence unit would find no fault or no issues, and no internal affairs investigation would take place.

As for the allegation that the captain had previously been abusive? Internal affairs never launched an investigation.

This case, just one of many reviewed by the Globe, highlights what many criminal justice experts and domestic violence advocates say is the haphazard — and historically lax — response by law enforcement to the longstanding issue of domestic violence within the policing ranks, where abuse is vastly underreported, experts say, and often overlooked by those in power.

“Most departments,” said Lou Reiter, a policing consultant and former deputy police chief with the Los Angeles Police Department, “want to just shut their eyes and cover their ears.”

Even as Massachusetts’ largest law enforcement agencies tout “zero-tolerance” for domestic abuse among their own, a Globe review raises questions about how officers here are investigated and how diligently policies are enforced.

Of the dozens of State Police and Boston police officers who have been investigated over the past decade for domestic-abuse-related offenses, more than half have gone entirely undisciplined, records show — while some have remained on the job despite multiple allegations against them.

At least twice, women officers with the Boston police have complained that the department didn’t take seriously their allegations of abuse against their husbands — also BPD officers. And while the department and Mayor Martin J. Walsh have praised recent proposed reforms, a department spokesman now says it’s unclear if one of those key initiatives will be implemented — reclassifying domestic violence claims against officers so they are treated as possible cases of excessive force.

The issue has taken on added urgency in the wake of a pair of high-profile, domestic violence controversies that have engulfed the two of the state’s largest departments.

Last month, newly appointed Boston Police Commissioner Dennis White was abruptly placed on paid leave after details surfaced of a 1999 allegation that he had pushed and threatened to shoot his then-wife, who is also an officer. Just four days earlier, a veteran State Police supervisor, Sergeant Bryan Erickson, was jailed in New Hampshire, accused of choking and headbutting a woman — as well as leading police on a high-speed chase from the scene.

Those cases stand out because of the prominence of the officers involved, but there are many more allegations of similar kind.

Since 2010, the BPD’s internal affairs unit has investigated at least 68 cases of alleged domestic violence against officers, according to figures provided by the department. Of those, just 22 — or less than a third — have been sustained by internal investigators, with nine cases currently pending.

Only two Boston police officers have been fired for domestic-violence-related offenses in the last decade, and one of those was later reinstated through the Civil Service Commission.

Sergeant Detective John Boyle, a department spokesman, declined to provide the names of officers investigated — or disciplined — as alleged perpetrators of domestic violence. Boyle cited a state law that protects the privacy of domestic violence victims.

Boyle was responding to a Globe review of internal affairs records, court filings, and past media reports that found that a variety of officers who have faced serious accusations remain on the force today.

Among them:

♦ Captain Timothy Connolly, who in 2019 was arrested and charged with two counts of assault and battery of a household member after his wife, an attorney, said he’d repeatedly pushed her and hit her once across the back of the head as she packed to leave their Milton home.

Charges were dropped last year when she declined to appear in court. Connolly is currently on full duty; an internal investigation is pending.

♦ Officer Ramon Kelly-Chalas, the focus of a June 2010 call from a woman who was found “crying and hysterical” outside her West Roxbury home, according to a police report. She told officers that when she’d declined Kelly-Chalas’s repeated sexual advances, he “pulled out a large kitchen knife above his head and stated she would be bloody if she didn’t sleep with him.”

Kelly-Chalas denied threatening her, telling police he was “just fooling around.” He later admitted to some of the facts in the case, though criminal charges were eventually dismissed. He remains on the force.

♦ Detective Windell Josey, who while working in the BPD’s domestic violence unit in 2008, was arrested and charged with assaulting his girlfriend at his Randolph home. Though criminal charges were eventually dismissed, an internal charge of unreasonable judgment was sustained, a department spokesman said. Josey received a one-day suspension. In 2019, he was among the city’s highest-paid employees, taking home $325,187.

Through Boyle, the department spokesman, all three officers declined to comment.

In a statement, Boyle said the department takes seriously any instance of domestic violence, and that its first priority is ensuring victim safety.

“Our rules and regulations make clear that no person is exempt, whatever his or her occupation, from the consequences of their actions that result in a violation of our code of conduct,” he said.

That commitment to victim safety, however, has been called into question by two women officers.

In 1999, the then-wife of BPD Commissioner White — also an officer with the BPD — said in an interview with a department investigator that she felt “the department was not taking her seriously,” according to an internal report.

White denied the woman’s claims and was not charged criminally. He is currently on leave as an independent investigation, spurred by Globe questions about his past, plays out. His former wife, who is still on the force, has declined to comment.

Those concerns were echoed a decade later, when a former BPD officer who’d left the department two years earlier alleged that then-BPD officer Leonard Brown, had been allowed to repeatedly violate a restraining order she’d taken out against him.

When she sought assistance from a department captain, she recalled in court filings, she was told to be sure she always carried her gun. She said the department showed little concern for her situation.

State Police, too, have routinely found themselves investigating allegations of abuse among their own.

At least 35 State Police employees — ranging in rank from trooper to lieutenant — were investigated for domestic-abuse-related offenses between 2010 and the spring of 2020, according to records obtained by the Globe through public records requests. Roughly half of those troopers had findings sustained, meaning investigators found sufficient evidence to prove at least one of the allegations against them.

At least two current troopers �� George Driscoll and John Hanna — have faced multiple domestic-violence-related investigations in the past decade. Supervisors found fault in at least one case for each man; Driscoll’s discipline is pending, according to the agency, while Hanna was suspended 45 days without pay. Details on their cases remain unclear and are not outlined in the records obtained by the Globe.

State Police spokesman David Procopio responded to only some Globe questions, and declined a request for an interview with someone in State Police leadership.

“We have no tolerance for domestic violence and thoroughly investigate any allegation of such conduct by Department personnel,” Procopio said in a statement. “Protecting and serving victims and survivors of domestic violence is a priority and an integral part of our mission, and our policies reflect this steadfast commitment.”

The true scope of domestic violence within the larger world of policing remains difficult to gauge, experts say, muddled by vague police policies, inconsistent record-keeping, and a lack of transparency within agencies. What few studies do exist suggest those in law enforcement are as much as four times more likely than members of the general public to become violent with an intimate partner.

Police possess a skill set that can make them “particularly good abusers,” said Leigh Goodmark, director of the Gender Violence Clinic at Maryland Carey School of Law.

Officers are taught how to command, control, restrain, and track people. Their badge grants them credibility and unique access to the criminal justice system, where they have relationships with prosecutors, judges, and social workers — as well as their fellow officers. That stature and implicit power can frighten victims into silence.

“They’re terrified” of calling the police, said Philip Stinson, a former officer and current criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “Because it’ll be his buddies that come out.”

As national views on domestic violence have evolved, some departments have taken steps to address the issue within their ranks.

Boston Police, for instance, adopted a nine-page policy in 2006 requiring any officer accused of domestic violence or facing a restraining order to immediately turn over his or her department-issued firearm, as well as any personal firearms as required by law. The officer’s district or unit commander is charged with ensuring those weapons are collected.

Asked to review the policy, Reiter, whose work includes helping agencies craft their own domestic violence policies, described it as, on paper, stronger than most.

How diligently it is enforced, however, remains unclear.

In 2016, a woman obtained a restraining order against Cesar Abreu, a Boston officer with a lengthy record of misconduct, after she said he hit her in the face during an argument and drove past her workplace, violating previous verbal orders from two judges to stay away from her.

“He carries a gun with him at all times, even when he is off duty,” the woman wrote in a petition for the protective order. “I am afraid he will get into one of his angry moods [and use] it against me.”

In April of 2017 — long after department policy dictated that Abreu’s personal and professional firearms should have been confiscated — department officials conducting a scheduled audit of station lockers discovered a Ruger 9mm handgun, 29 rounds of ammunition, and two magazines inside Abreu’s locker, according to court documents. Police officials resealed the locker and continued with the audit, Abreu’s attorney noted in court records, before a lieutenant assisting with the search “suddenly remembered” that Abreu was the subject of an active restraining order.

Abreu’s attorney, Peter Pasciucco, said that before the restraining order was issued, Abreu’s father had asked his son to remove the gun — which belonged to the father — from the father’s home. Abreu then put it in his department locker.

Internal charges tied to several misconduct allegations, including this one, were brought and sustained, and he served a five-day suspension. Abreu was also charged criminally with violating a restraining order, though charges were later dropped after his attorney successfully argued that the search of his locker was unlawful because there was no warrant obtained. Abreu, who has faced at least nine internal investigations since 2010, remains an officer in the department today.

Reforms sparked by last summer’s nationwide protests over police brutality have aimed to bring greater scrutiny to police misconduct.

A state police accountability bill signed by Governor Charlie Baker in December, for instance, gave a civilian-led panel the power to investigate alleged misconduct and revoke officer certification for certain violations. And in Boston, Mayor Walsh announced late last year that he was accepting all of the recommendations put forth by an 11-member task force that had examined the culture and policies of the Boston Police Department.

Among those recommendations: that acts of domestic violence by BPD employees be classified as the use of excessive force.

Task force member Jamarhl Crawford, who pushed for the recommendation, said it would ensure instances of domestic violence go on an officer’s personnel record, better allowing the department to track problem officers. The task force called for the reform to be in place within 90 days, or by mid-January.

But in an interview recently, Boyle, the department spokesman, said that change hadn’t been implemented — and couldn’t say whether it would be. Boyle said the department was currently reviewing both the task force recommendations and state police reform legislation to determine if that change, and others, are feasible.

Regardless, some experts said, even the most stringent policies mean little without a culture in which cases of domestic abuse by police are taken seriously.

“From the highest levels, people have to think that these cases are important, they have to be intolerant of abuse,” said former prosecutor Jennifer Long, chief executive officer of AEquitas, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit working to improve the handling of cases of sexual and domestic violence, stalking, and human trafficking.

“When reports are made of abuse they have to commit to investigations to ensure the truth is uncovered and abuse isn’t tolerated.”

[antoine-roquentin]

Although police departments have become more attentive to officers’ use of excessive force against civilians, the same scrutiny has not been applied to their potential for violent behavior at home. In the nineteen-nineties, researchers found that forty-one per cent of male officers admitted that, in the previous year, they’d been physically aggressive toward their spouses, and nearly ten per cent acknowledged choking, strangling, or using—or threatening to use—a knife or a gun. But there are almost no empirical studies examining the prevalence of this sort of abuse today. Leigh Goodmark, the director of the Gender Violence Clinic, at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law, speculates that one reason for the dearth of research is a reluctance to fund a study that will bring attention to an uncomfortable dilemma: that, as Goodmark says, “those policing the crime and those committing it are often the same person.”

At the Griffin Police Department, concerns about domestic violence have apparently been so slight that in 2018 the department hired an officer whose personnel record showed that he had recently been accused by his child’s mother of threatening her with a gun. In many other cities, domestic violence seems to be treated as similarly insignificant. This year, an independent panel found that the typical penalty for New York City police officers found guilty of domestic violence—some had punched, kicked, choked, or threatened their victims with guns—was thirty lost vacation days. In nearly a third of cases, the officers already had a domestic-violence incident—and, in one case, eight—in their records. In the Puerto Rico Police Department, ninety-­eight police officers were arrested for domestic violence between 2007 and 2010; three of them had shot and killed their wives. Only eight were fired.

Last summer, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, Alex Villanueva, articulated a common justification for not con­sidering domestic violence as a concern: in defending his decision to employ a deputy who had been accused of stalking and physically abusing his ex-girlfriend, he told a local reporter that it was “a private relationship between two consenting adults that went bad.” The violence was seen as unrelated to job performance, an activity that could be understood only within the context of a relationship.

But the factors that lead to abuse at home—coercion, authoritarianism, a sense of entitlement to violence—are also present in the work that police officers do on the streets. It should not be surprising that domestic abuse appears to predict excessive use of force—a link that scholars have suggested should alter the way that departments respond to both kinds of aggression. The Citizens Police Data Project, in Chicago, analyzed the records of Chicago cops between 2000 and 2016 and found that officers accused of domestic abuse received fifty per cent more complaints than their colleagues for using excessive force. Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University and one of the few scholars who has studied the issue, reached a similar finding: one in five officers arrested for domestic violence nationwide had also been the subject of a federal lawsuit for violating people’s civil rights.

[vouloirgai]

“In self-defense cases where a woman has killed a partner, the criminal justice system struggles to categorize her. Ninety-six percent of intimate partner murder-suicide victims are female, and almost all are killed by men with firearms; four women a day die of domestic violence. At first glance, Nikki seemed to skirt the statistics only in her refusal to take a bullet. But in doing so, she was plunged into a system that demands black-and-white categorizations: Offenders kill, and victims die; offenders are monsters, and victims are angels. “So, if your abuser is not a monster and if your victim is not an angel, they are not ‘victim-abuser’,” Leigh Goodmark, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and the author of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence, told me. “Very few people exist on these binaries.”

The government keeps scarce data on this phenomenon, but the advocacy group Survived and Punished estimates thousands of people who have defended themselves from physical or sexual violence have been “disappeared” into women’s prisons. Commonly, a prosecutor challenges their credibility. “Women are not believed,” said Rachel White-Domain, an Illinois post-conviction attorney who works with incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. “Women of color are never believed.”

Survived and Punished’s New York chapter has examined and disseminated the cases of women currently incarcerated for acts of survival, most serving time on murder or manslaughter charges. Kelly Forbes, who emigrated from Trinidad and settled in Long Island, reported that her abusive husband — who had prior convictions for sexual assault and attempted murder — woke her up one night by attacking her with an electrical cord, but she strangled him instead. She is now serving 21 years. Tanisha Davis, a Black single mom from Rochester, had plenty of evidence of the abuse she suffered at the hands of the man she killed, including multiple 911 calls, two orders of protection, and an altercation recorded in a voicemail message minutes before the stabbing. The jury sided with the prosecutor, and Davis was sentenced to 14 years in prison.”

[freedomtotalk]

Leigh Goodmark, director of Gender Violence Clinic University of Maryland: In homes where there are guns women are 5 times more likely to get killed by their male partners.

Vice News interviewer: But I just interviewed several women who are no longer living in the same house with their abuser, women whose exes threatened to kill them, their families, and their pets.... and the police told them they were on their own. They can't provide them with personal security 24/7 so these women had no choice but to purchase a gun to use it in self-.defense. What do you say to them?

Leigh Goodmark: “I know women who are sitting in jail right now because they needed a gun to make them safer because they were victims of domestic violence - but their partners ended up dead and nobody cared."

Those who stand for your right to bear arms simply see you as a consumer of the product that they're selling. They don’t care about you anymore than any other company does, they just want your money. If they could just take your money they would, but alas they must offer a service you are convinced you need. Like safety, for instance. But they’re the ones creating the need for safety in the first place by making your society more violent.

If you are a woman who killed a man in self-defense, I am on your side. I'd rather see you in jail but alive and well than dead and six feet under because you wouldn't raise a hand, not even to save yourself. Good for you.

Just be advised that the real reason why men are so violent is not because they are stronger or have guns, but because the Patriarchy indoctrinates them into thinking that they are inherently superior to women and are and should be towering over them in a position of overbearing power, and that they are entitled to killing women when they give them any lip. Take away a misogynist’s gun and he'll kill you in some other way. Just saying.

But what about the poor women, aren't they entitled to guns? Absolutely, I agree with you and bravo for your will to live. Just understand that if the Patriarchy doesn't kill you for your defiance, it will put you in jail for your feminism. That's not my opinion, that's a fact. 

But I'm sure you can continue to be a traditional house-wife and endorse the Patriarchy, and you can carry on voting for the misogynists who create the system that oppresses you, and you can continue to sponsor their multi-million dollar gun industry that has made them multi-billionaires while you rot in jail after you have paid for the privilege of using one of their guns on one of the protected members of their group.

TL,DR guns are needed in a Patriarchy that oppresses everyone except white men. Abolish the Patriarchy and the need for guns disappears.

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

Saw an “argument” about how if police were defunded who would deal with domestic violence victims and news flash the cops aren’t the best at it already, since they perpetrate it themselves. The fact that cops abuse and in some cases murder their partners and get nothing but a slap on the wrist for it, and get promoted, is fucked up. Like yes, let’s keep the people that perpetrate a large amount of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in charge of arresting other perpetrators, yep makes total sense. A good reading about IPV perpetrated by cops is Leigh Goodmark’s “Hands Up At Home”, it also deals with other problems within the force.

[gatheringbones]

[“Girls are frequently arrested for trying to protect themselves from or fighting back against abusive parents. When police confronted Diana after a fight with her mother, Diana said, “I was like: ‘What the fuck, like look at my face she beat me up.’ They are like: ‘She called the cops on you, so you are at fault ’cause if she beat you up why didn’t you call the cops on her?’ Dude I don’t want to get my mom in trouble plus anyways it’s my word against her and although I am the one looking all torn up.”

Girls are also arrested because it is easier to remove one child from the home than to arrest a parent and find shelter for the children. As a probation officer explained,

Say the police respond to a case of domestic violence. You have a 3-year-old girl, a 16-year-old girl, and the mother fighting. Say the mother grabbed that girl and started pounding her face into cement. They’re not going to take Mom to jail when there is a 3-year-old daughter there. But they need to separate the two of them. So a lot of times it really is the parent’s fault but the kid gets hauled away.

Although few of these cases ultimately result in detention (often because the violence is minor), law professor Francine Sherman has noted that girls are “traumatized by arrest, handcuffing, and in some case shackling, routine strip searches upon entry into detention, and the perception that she is being blamed for what is a family problem.”

Dating violence also brings young people into the juvenile system. About 16 percent of girls and 8 percent of boys experience physical or sexual dating violence; 22 percent of LGB young adults report dating violence. Being subjected to intimate partner violence makes young people more vulnerable to juvenile system involvement. Girls are more likely to commit nonviolent delinquent acts (like running away) when experiencing intimate partner violence. Young people also become involved with the system because of their own violence. Girls use violence with partners to express anger and jealousy at a partner’s infidelity, protest a partner’s “emotional detachment,” or get a partner’s attention.

While some studies suggest that young men and women use violence in relationships at similar rates, those studies fail to account for the type, amount, impact, and reason for the violence. Girls’ violence is generally less serious and causes less injury. Girls reportedly slap and pinch their partners most often, while boys are more likely to punch or sexually assault partners. Moreover, studies of heterosexual couples find that boys do not experience girls’ violence as frightening or controlling. Half of boys report laughing at their female partners when they use violence. One-third ignored their partners when they were violent. Girls are also more likely to use violence defensively, fighting back against their partners. Mandatory and preferred arrest laws that cover dating relationships have been linked to increased arrests of girls for dating violence, with Black girls most likely to be arrested.”]

leigh goodmark, from imperfect victims: criminalized survivors and the promises of abolition feminism, 2023

[nationaldvam]

Did you miss Leigh Goodmark and #TeamNRCDV's Heidi Notario on KALW? 🎧 Listen at the link here! SUCH a crucial discussion about how COVID-19 has impacted survivors, why the Violence Against Women Act's (#VAWA) reliance on police doesn't support survivors, and how to integrate transformative justice into this movement.

[vergess]

The abolition of prison reduces domestic violence and other violent crimes anyway.

If your goal is to reduce violent crime, then the current system which increases and ignores violent crime is unhelpful.

https://transformharm.org/the-domestic-violence-i-survived-taught-me-the-importance-of-prison-abolition/

In a system where the obscene amount we pay for human rights violating prisons and miliartized police instead goes to public health, community building, and other things that actually DO prevent crime (unlike prisons).

Your argument is that because prison abolition 'only' stands to improve things for the vast majority of people, instead of magically solving all violent crime forever, we should settle for the current, worse system.

The assumption that everyone who has been helped by the prison system would be abandoned to die by abolition is absurd. Even in cases where there ARE violent actors who ARE coming after a domestic abuse victim even in spite of the preventative benefits?

Those people don't get fucking thrown on the streets to die under an abolitionist structure. You're thinking of what we have now,where people who cannot risk calling the cops (poor,nonwhite,disabled,etc) already get thrown out to die when their abusers come for them.

As opposed to a well funded community watch where neighbors and community members can accompany victims to discourage violence by preventing the victim from being caught alone.

The thing people think cops do, except that only happens on fucking TV.

Honestly, the question of intimate violence is literally the first thing that anyone brings up in a discussion of abolition.

If you're not familiar with the dozens of alternatives to prison that ACTUALLY reduce violence and protect victims, then it's willful ignorance.

*sigh* I can't believe yall are gonna make me say this depressing shit again, but the majority of rapists and child molesters already don't go to prison. Only a small fraction of sexual assaults ever get reported, only a small fraction of those ever lead to arrest, and an even smaller factor of them ever get convicted and face prison time.

You repeatedly ask prison abolitionists "but what about the rapists?" Well I'm asking you, what about them? What does prison do to prevent sexual assault when most of our politicians and police are the ones committing the assaults? When prisoners themselves are sexually assaulted, often times by the guards?

Stop falling for the propaganda that prisons keep dangerous people away from you. They don't. The dangerous people get to walk around every day with guns and badges.

[wakeupbmore]

Repost from @murder_ink_bmore • Maryland’s longest-serving woman prisoner has been granted her release from jail. A judge ruled in favor of a joint motion brought by Lawyers from the University of Maryland and the Baltimore City SAO’s Sentencing Review Unit (SRU), resulting in the release of Eraina Pretty. Pretty pled guilty to 1st Degree Murder, Use of a Handgun in a Crime of Violence and Accessory After the Fact (in a different case) on September 19, 1978. Pretty was 18 at the age of the crime and has served 42 years. The SRU was approached by Lila Meadows and Leigh Goodmark of University of Maryland Law School, who represent Pretty. After a thorough review led by Deputy State’s Attorney Jan Bledsoe, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby agreed to support Pretty’s release. “The role of the prosecutor is not simply to seek future justice. The pursuit of justice is timeless, and that means we must also correct the injustices of the past,” said State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. “Ms. Pretty has served 42 years in prison. She has not only redeemed herself but exemplifies the need for second chances in our criminal justice system and while we recognize the hurt and trauma that lives everyday with the survivors of this unfortunate incident, we remain committed to ensuring restorative support as they heal.” While in prison, Pretty obtained her associate and bachelor’s degrees. She has a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Morgan State University. She also completed courses in pre-employment job readiness, personal computing, and introduction to databases. She also worked as a data entry clerk for over 20 years and spent time with Baltimore Braille Association assembling books for the blind. She served as a facilitator in the Stopping Criminal Activity, Recovery, Extremely and Maintaining (SCREAM) Program and worked with the Canine Partners Program for multiple years. She has received numerous certificates of appreciation for her leadership roles in events and projects, like self-help luncheons and Operation Smile, an organization that provides surgeries to repair facial deformities for children around the world... (at Baltimore, Maryland) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIzrihepqBd/?igshid=19z8fwozyqrbl