"The Todal" <
deadm...@beeb.net> wrote in message
news:a26ood...@mid.individual.net...
>
> And those women who complain (in print or elsewhere) about their husband's
> pornography habit generally seem to be those who would like a frequent
> sexual relationship with their husband but find that he prefers to
> withhold his favours. Which leads to feelings of insecurity about not
> being as attractive as the models on the screen.
>
>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/21/double-imprisonment-battered-women
The Double Imprisonment of Battered Women
By Sadhbh Walshe, Guardian UK
23 March 12
a few years ago, a young woman named Natasha shot and killed her boyfriend
in the apartment they were sharing. He had trapped her in the bedroom and
was about to launch into another of what had become weekly "beatdowns",
where he would hit her with a closed fist. Prior to the killing, the
beatings had become more severe and more frequent, as were the threats that
he was going to kill her. None of this seemed to count for much at her
trial.
Natasha was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a
firearm (which was her boyfriend's) and was ultimately convicted of
manslaughter. She was given a 15-year sentence and is now in prison, along
with countless other battered women who found little protection from the
criminal justice system when they needed it, but who felt the full force of
its prosecutorial might when they took steps to protect themselves.
Every state in America has a self-defense law that allows an individual to
use deadly force in situations where a threat to his or her well-being is
imminent. If an intruder enters your home with a loaded gun, thereby posing
an imminent threat to your life, you're allowed to use deadly force to
protect yourself. When the intruder with the loaded gun (metaphorical or
otherwise) is your intimate partner and living in the house with you, the
imminence law frequently fails to apply – mostly because of the perception
that the abused woman could have, or at least should have, found a more
palatable way of ending the violent relationship.
I asked Natasha, in a letter, if there were other options available to her
to escape the abuse, short of gunning the guy down. She replied as follows:
"You asked if there was any other way to get away from [the boyfriend]. At
the time I pulled the trigger, I didn't think so. He'd cornered me in a
small bedroom with no way out except maybe jumping out a glass window or
simply undergoing yet another beatdown. He was fond of beating me, then
forcing me to perform oral sex on him right away. If my lips were bloody,
he'd force himself into my rectum. All of this, and then some, was entered
into the record at the psych evaluation."
Like many abused women, Natasha had made several attempts to escape the
relationship, only to be brought back [by the boyfriend] to face harsher
beatings and more death threats. Yet this failure to escape, or failure to
meet the "duty to retreat", is one of the main reasons that the self-defense
argument often does not work for women who kill because they think they are
in danger of being killed. The presumption is that a woman who is in a
violent relationship, and whose life has been threatened, should simply walk
away. In theory, it sounds like a piece of cake: just leave when he's
asleep, or at work, or whatever.
Reality is a lot more complicated.
Advocates for battered women cite four main reasons why they tend to not be
able to get away: the police and courts offer little substantial protection
(restraining orders and such are about as effective as the paper they're
written on, when it comes to deterring a determined batterer); shelters are
often full; leaving is financially impossible, especially when there are
children involved; and, finally, the women know, better than anyone, that he
will track her down and the violence will be even worse. In fact, women who
leave their batterers are statistically more likely to be killed than women
who stay.
Michael Dowd, a New York attorney dubbed the "black widow lawyer" for having
successfully defended a number of women who killed their abusive partners,
likens a battered woman's predicament to a hostage situation. Dowd has
"represented women whose lives in homes with abusive men were as dangerous
and hopeless as living in cell in Beirut being guarded by terrorists." But,
he writes, "if a hostage was told he would be killed the next day, we would
applaud the strangling of a sleeping guard in an effort to escape." A woman
who kills her husband in the wake of a similar threat is far more likely to
greeted with the clanking of the jailers' keys than with a round of
applause.