Re: Women who let boyfriends abuse their kids must pay the price

[Birth Control]

In article <t15gmn$2qo57$4...@news.freedyn.de>
forging asshole <governo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Every heroin user should be put down like a sick animal. Put some battery acid
> in their junk and let them shoot it up. Fuck them. They don't deserve to live.
>

Should we hold mothers responsible when their children are
abused by another adult? A growing number of activists and
journalists believe the answer is no. They argue that because
the mothers are often themselves being abused that it’s unfair
to punish them — either by incarceration or by removing children
from their custody — for the actions of these men.

A recent story in Mother Jones, for instance, decries the laws
that incarcerate women for their “failure to protect” children.
The author profiles a woman named Kerry King, whose live-in
boyfriend had been abusing her daughter for a year. She
frequently left the girl alone with the man who was using
heroin. She noticed bruises on the girl’s body. Her daughter
told her they were from when the boyfriend was “mean.” But she
claims she never thought the girl was in danger until one day
when he had his “fingers around her neck” and King tried to
intervene. That’s when he slammed King against the wall and told
her to hold the child down while he beat her with a belt. King
did as she was told, “hoping that if she complied, it would be
over faster.”

King was sent to prison for failing to protect her daughter, the
result, according to Mother Jones, of a “classist,” “racist”
“criminal justice system that makes mothers ultra-culpable,
blaming them for things that are largely outside their control.”
One Oklahoma attorney interviewed for the piece explained that
“it becomes insurmountable, the number of things [women] have to
do in order to be in compliance with what we think is a good
mother.” If that includes not holding down a child while your
boyfriend is beating her, the bar actually seems a little low.

What the critics fail to understand is that it is possible to
see these women as both victims and also adults legally
responsible for their children’s well-being. In most of these
incidents, the children are not the offspring of the man
involved. Rather, the woman has chosen him as a boyfriend,
brought her children into his orbit, and stayed with him long
after it was clear he was a danger. (The presence of a non-
relative male in a home makes the abuse of children about 11
times more likely than in a home where a child is living with
both biological parents.)

In a USA Today article last year, a team of reporters found that
women who were the victims of domestic violence and remained
with their abusers sometimes lost custody of their children. The
authors were outraged that investigators “criticized abused
mothers and their choices,” and that “mothers bear the brunt of
caseworkers scrutiny because they are typically their children’s
primary caregivers.”

Who is supposed to bear the brunt of the scrutiny if not their
primary caregivers? USA Today cites one woman whose infant and
toddler were temporarily removed from her custody after her ex-
boyfriend (with whom she apparently had regular contact) beat
her unconscious in front of the kids. Even if an adult doesn’t
lay a hand on the children, the notion that the children are
perfectly fine even while their primary caregiver is lying
bloodied on the floor seems strange. A man who beats his
girlfriend doesn’t always beat his children, but there is
certainly a much higher likelihood of it happening.
Nevertheless, some advocates are even arguing for less police
intervention in domestic violence cases because it might result
in involvement from child protective services.

An article from last year in The New Republic described a
similar group of women who were incarcerated and lost custody of
their children because of crimes they committed at the behest of
their abusive partners. The authors cite the case of Tanisha
Williams. After an abusive boyfriend, Patrick A. Martin, forced
her to help him commit murder in 2002, she ran away and had no
permanent address or way to support herself. She left her baby
in the car at night to procure drugs and sex work. “She swept
the place with her gun cocked. Only once it was clear would she
carry [the baby] inside.”

The author argues that the system is unfair because “Women must
. . . navigate gendered binaries in a system designed by and for
men . . . Female victims should fit a paradigm of innocence: a
petite, heterosexual white woman with a clean record.” The
problem is not that Tanisha is not white or even that she
doesn’t have a clean record. Whatever Tanisha’s criminal
punishment should be, there is no way that leaving a baby in her
custody is in the best interests of that child.

The New Yorker, too, took up a similar crusade a few years ago,
arguing that district attorneys were “criminalizing survivors of
domestic violence,” by prosecuting women for allowing their
children to be harmed by the men in their lives. As one lawyer
explained: “You can see a woman in a domestic-violence situation
here . . . and all the DAs want to do is punish her . . . I’m
reading ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ so maybe I’m just in a dystopian
mood.”

There is good reason to be in a dystopian mood, but it is not
because of the way the law treats these mothers. Those
experiencing the real dystopia are the children. The one person
who is supposed to protect them from predatory adults has chosen
over and over to place them in harm’s way. And now more people
want to ensure they will never be rescued.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “No Way to Treat a Child:
How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists
Are Wrecking Young Lives.”

https://nypost.com/2022/08/20/women-who-let-boyfriends-abuse-
their-kids-must-pay-the-price/