Domestic Homicides: Perpetrators Should Be Held Responsible

Every day approximately 4 women are killed by their intimate partners. One third of all the women murdered in the US, are murdered by their intimate partners. The numbers have never stopped troubling me.

With domestic homicides being nothing new to the states we live in and our nation and world as a whole, it’s troubling that so many people can’t see the problem that is right under our noses. The problem of male violence against women is so vast; one would think it’s unmistakable. Unfortunately, however, male violence against women seems to go largely unrecognized by most who have not experienced it themselves. It is most severely unnoticed by the general public when it is happening within the context of an intimate relationship. Isn’t that illogical? Is this not the ultimate betrayal of trust? Is this not terrorism in its absolute worst form – within the supposed comfort of your own home? Is this not the epitome of civil and human rights violations – robbing women and children of their right to autonomy? I hear and read about the countless women and children who have experienced violence at the hands of the person who was supposed to love them most, and I wonder, how is it that people can manage to look the other way?

Last week, I read that on July 25, 2011 in New Gloucester, Maine, a woman, with the help of her friend, tried leaving her husband with her four children. Her effort to leave resulted in the woman and her friend being shot to death by the woman’s husband, all in the presence of the children. These murders brought the number of homicides in Maine to a total of 17 since the beginning of the year; at least half of the homicides have been the result of domestic violence.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that:

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  The total estimated number of intimate partner homicide victims in 2007 was 2,340, including 1,640 females and 700 males. Females made up 70% of victims killed by an intimate partner in 2007, a proportion that has changed very little since 1993.*


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  Females were killed by intimate partners at twice the rate of males. In 2007 the rate of intimate partner homicide for females was 1.07 per 100,000 female residents compared to 0.47 per 100,000 male residents.*

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  *We must keep in mind that many of the women who commit violent acts against their male intimate partners do so as a response to being battered by these partners.

Although the numbers are often important, the stories of women tragically murdered by their spouses are most important. These women should not go forgotten and most certainly shouldn’t be recognized only as a statistic.

On July 23, 2011, a man committed suicide after the mass murder of his wife and four of her family members at his child’s birthday party in Grand Prairie, Texas. The perpetrator and his wife had separated in December 2010 after she sought the relief of a protection order. In her request for this relief, she disclosed to the courts that she had been enduring severe physical and emotional abuse for a number of years. She told the courts of multiple incidents where her husband drew his gun on her threatening her life — she mentioned that he had even fired the gun in the house with the children present. After he shot her the evening of the 23rd, he stood over her body saying “I told you so” and continued on to kill four of her family members before killing himself. This man had no criminal history and interviews from her family suggest that they never would have guessed he would have taken it this far.

Her story is not unfamiliar. Many abusers go undetected by family and the law as he did. The little information about her story that I was able to obtain, suggests that she tried to leave him more than once and further suggests that he had a strong hold on her as many abusers do.“Just leaving” him was difficult for her as it is for most victims of domestic violence. Stories like hers are everywhere.

What often troubles me even more than the statistics and the numbers are the cruel responses people have with regard to these kinds of tragedies. Much of the public still misunderstands the dynamics of domestic violence and this never ceases to remind me how much growing our society has yet to do. Insensitivity toward victims of domestic violence is all too common.

On July 17, 2011, a 19 year old woman from Mankato, MN was stabbed to death by her boyfriend. Articles suggest that the perpetrator stabbed his girlfriend after she told him she didn’t want to continue dating him. Friends of this woman disclosed to the police that the boyfriend had a history of concerning behaviors. They described a recent incident where they witnessed him, angrily, throwing her phone into the lake the week before her murder. They further disclosed that in April 2011 the victim’s boyfriend slashed the tires on her car after an argument. This naturally pointed the police toward her ex boyfriend as the primary suspect.

The perpetrator cooperated with police and almost immediately confessed to murdering her. He explained that he stabbed his girlfriend during an argument in the car and when she tried to get away, he chased after her, pinned her down to the ground, and continued to brutally stab her. He left her dying body on a median, on a closed road, where she laid for hours before construction workers found her.

With tragedies like this, it should be reasonable to assume that people would naturally find the perpetrators to be 100% at fault and find no reason to blame victims for what happens to them. Often, that’s not the case. People who posted comments under these news articles suggested that it was her fault for not breaking up with him in a public location; she put herself in the position to be seriously harmed and killed. It might be easy to dismiss these comments as people who have nothing better to do than to be angry all over the web, but really, this is a common thread found everywhere. Many people feel like women are responsible for what happens to them.

When in a violent relationship, a woman is, alarmingly, 75% more likely to be killed when she leaves her abuser. The when, where, and how she leaves her abuser doesn’t guarantee her safety. Many people are unaware of this lethality risk and are unaware of the resources available to victims to help them get support while in their relationships or to create a plan in order to get out safely.

Unfortunately, blaming the victim is a practice that is all too common. Rarely do I come by an article pertaining to domestic violence that someone, somewhere can’t find a reason to blame the woman. Too many people are quick to ask “What about her?” “What could she have done differently?” Furthermore, if this were a woman killed on the street by a stranger, or if the victim was their mother, sister, or friend would people be asking the same questions? My guess is no. What is going on here? Seldom are people asking “What about him?” “What about his repeated abusive behaviors?” Or more broadly, “Why are men the primary perpetrators of violence?”

Women are disproportionately, when compared to men, victims of these violent crimes. Any website with victims of crime statistics will tell you that 1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic violence. 1 in 12 women will be a victim of stalking. 1 in 5 women will experience an attempted or completed rape between the ages 18-25. Furthermore, 98% of rapes and sexual assaults and 95% of domestic violence is perpetrated by men. These numbers are alarming but often seem to be overlooked and, as a result, women continue to be blamed for what happens to them.

It feels rather concerning there are still so many people unaware – as I once was – as to how big of a problem this really is. Is there any one thing to blame for male violence? No. Do we need to assess this as an issue and take action now? Yes. However, this requires momentum to create change.

Men need to feel challenged to not desire control over women. Men need to become allies and take action by assessing their own values and capabilities to assist in this change. Men should challenge other men to promote non-violence and respect toward women.

The most popular music, movies, and TV shows often normalize and even find humor in violence which is undoubtedly aiding the public’s minimal understanding around this issue. Jackson Katz, a leading anti-sexist activist, challenges men everywhere to assess these issues. He wrote a fantastic blog about the topic regarding media influence and I highly encourage reading it.

I challenge readers to assess these very issues for themselves and also encourage you to challenge friends and family to do the same. We can create change if we work together!

If you’re a victim of domestic violence,

call the National Domestic Violence Hotline to seek resources near you.

1−800−799−SAFE(7233) TTY :1−800−787−3224

The Plight of Padma Patil

The brother and father of Afshan Azad, who plays Padma Patil in the Harry Potter films, have been charged with threatening to kill her. According to the BBC, Azad's family are conservative Muslims and did not approve of her Hindu boyfriend. This disapproval led to threats and a physical assault by Afshan's brother and father in the last week.

This is an obvious case of violence against women and domestic violence. At Sojourn, we often stress the occurrence of intimate partner violence between a woman and her current or former romantic partner. However, Azad's assault highlights domestic violence in familial contexts by male family members. It is important to remember that the desire to control another person can and does emerge in familial contexts and that these situations can become violent.

Moreover, some news outlets have pointed to the similarities to Azad's situation and the growing number of Honor Killings in the UK. Honor killings are described by the UN as the murder of a family member (mostly female) by a fellow family member (usually male) to save the "honor" of the family. Wearing inappropriate clothes or engaging in sexual acts are some of the ways a female victim can bring dishonor upon a family. While Azad has not confirmed the details of her attack, her situation offers a platform for discussing the on going domestic violence (honor killings) against women by male family members today.

We, at Sojourn, hope that Afshan remains safe and feels the British law offers her sufficient legal responses to her emotional and physical assault. We also hope her horrific situation can raise awareness about family violence against women as well as the rise of honor killings in western countries.

Updates on this situation as it develops.

(Photo Via www.msmagazine.com/blog/)

The World Cup and Domestic Violence

As the World Cup begins the lovely staff of Sojourn thought a re-post from the feminist blog, The Curvature, could kick off a discussion of the relationship or non-relationship between domestic violence and sporting events.

Many media outlets and popular assumptions state that drunken and upset men (perhaps returning from a lost soccer match) are more likely to batter their spouses and partners.

For this reason, the England police department crafted new PSA's, warning telling men and women about the consequences of domestic violence with a World Cup theme.

While I applaud the English police department for attempting to curb the rates of domestic violence during this time, I find it aggravating that domestic violence is understood in such basic terms in these adds. According to the English police, domestic violence is just that -- physical violence -- against women. Of course physical violence is a terrible outcome of an abusive relationship, and the most visible, but domestic violence is also defined by many other behaviors: emotional manipulation, use children, money, pets, and denigration to control their female partners -- this is abuse, not just one crazy night of drunkenness.

Batterers have learned abuse. Simply warning them that if they beat their partners after watching the World Cup they may go to jail does not undo the dangerous and abusive tendencies of the batterer.

The Curvature explores more in depth,
http://thecurvature.com/2010/06/07/anti-domestic-violence-campaign-centers-world-cup-and-misses-its-mark/

William Fisher: Give Us Your Huddled Masses - But Battered Women Need Not Apply!

The Huffington Post
July 6, 2009
Posted: July 4, 2009 11:56 AM
By William Fisher
"Give Us Your Huddled Masses - But Battered Women Need Not Apply!"


Here's a note for the "to do" list of the Obama Administration's newly appointed Domestic Violence Czar - or Czarina in this case: Battered wives and significant others pose a serious law enforcement and public health problem affecting as many as one in four women in this country. But they are not just an American problem. Women are being whacked all over the world. And some of them are trying to find safety in America - and are being turned away.

Why? Because of the inept and bureaucratic foot-dragging of our Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Thanks to their sorry non-performance over more than a decade, domestic violence is still not a legal basis for seeking asylum in the U.S.

Consider the plight of Rodi Alvarado from Guatemala. At 16, she married a man who, for the next decade, terrorized her. He raped and sodomized her almost daily, beating her before and during the violations. Because he was unfaithful, he infected her with sexually transmitted diseases. He dislocated her jaw when he learned that her period was late, and violently kicked her when she refused to abort her baby, causing her to bleed for eight days.

She tried to run away, even to the other side of the country, but her husband - a former soldier - always found her. One night, he woke her to whip her with an electrical cord, pulled out a machete and threatened to cut off her arms and legs if she ever tried to leave him again. He broke windows and mirrors with her head. He pistol-whipped and threw a machete at her, punched her and dragged her by her hair.

Mrs. Alvarado repeatedly sought help from the police in Guatemala, but to no avail. She pled her case to a judge, but the judge said the same thing: They don't involve themselves in domestic matters.

Finally, in 1995, she did the most difficult and desperate thing she could do to save her life. After 10 years of cruelty, at age 28, she fled Guatemala and sought asylum in the United States.

There was only one problem. The U.S. has no asylum provisions that cover victims of domestic violence. Mrs. Alvarado was ordered deported. Under U.S. law, asylum applicants have to show they can't go home because they face persecution because of religion, race, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. But not domestic abuse.

Enter a sympathetic immigration judge, who granted Mrs. Alvarado a temporary stay of deportation. That was in 1996 - thirteen years ago. And for thirteen years, Mrs. Alvarado has remained in this legal limbo. She hasn't been deported - she works as a housekeeper in a California convent. But she can't achieve any legal status and can't be reunited with her son and daughter, who remain in Guatemala. She hasn't seen them in thirteen years.

The reason: For more than a decade, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have been playing musical chairs with a new asylum regulation that would cover victims of domestic violence. Without such a regulation, Mrs. Alvarado's case cannot come before a Board of Immigration Appeals, which is supposed to re-decide her fate.

The musical chairs have bounced Mrs. Alvarado's case from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, and now to the Obama Administration.

Opponents said new asylum rules would lead to a surge in claims, an assertion disputed by a large and bipartisan group of immigration, legal and religious advocates.

Those proposed regulations saved -- and stalled -- Alvarado's case. In 1996, an immigration judge granted Alvarado temporary asylum, finding that the abuse she suffered and the government's inability to protect her constituted persecution. But newly-installed Bush immigration service opposed the decision, and Alvarado's case went before the Board of Immigration Appeals, a Justice Department panel that reviews immigration cases.

The board ruled that Alvarado was not eligible for asylum and ordered that she be deported. But on her last day in office, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno voided that ruling and instructed the board to reconsider the Alvarado case after the immigration service finalized the proposed regulations. A month later, George W. Bush took office.

The next stop in this cruel bureaucratic game was the desk of John Ashcroft, then Bush's Attorney General. Ashcroft certified the case to himself, making him effectively the judge. He said he would decide Mrs. Alvarado's fate. But he didn't. Instead, he kicked the can down the road, deciding neither to grant nor deny asylum to Alvarado. A decision, he said, should await new regulations from the Department of Homeland Security.

Wonder of wonders, the DHS actually drafted a regulation to make domestic abuse a valid legal basis for asylum-seekers. But the Department of Justice disagreed with the draft. In the years since then, the DOJ and the DHS have failed to agree on the domestic abuse asylum regulations. Ashcroft's inaction simply complicated the problem. Just before he stepped down, he passed the responsibility for the Alvarado case to his successor, Alberto Gonzales, who faithfully followed in the quicksand footsteps of his predecessors: He did nothing. And his successor, Michael Mukasey, did exactly the same thing: Nothing.

The DHS says it will not press for Mrs. Alvarado's deportation regardless of how much longer it may take the agency to finalize the new regulations. But that's cold comfort to Mrs. Alvarado. At the current pace, she could be a very old lady by the time the DHS and the DOJ decide to actually do something.

That's where Obama's new Domestic Violence Czar could be a huge help. Lynn Rosenthal is an experienced advocate for abused women. She was executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and executive director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She has focused on domestic violence issues like housing, state and local coordinated community response, federal policy, and survivor-centered advocacy.

Reporting to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, she will have the ears of the two guys at the top of the tree. And it may be helpful that Biden has had a long-standing interest in the domestic violence issue, dating from his days in the Senate and his key role in enacting the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

Immigration experts say they are more encouraged than ever that cases like Mrs. Alvarado's will be resolved by the Obama Administration. No doubt Ms. Rosenthal's cup will runneth over with issues of purely homegrown domestic violence - which the stresses of the recession have apparently caused to spiral out of control. Perhaps the relatively tiny number of battered women seeking asylum in America will be assigned a low priority.

But further delay would simply exacerbate a gross denial of justice. So even at a time when immigration in general remains one of the third rails of American politics, Lynn Rosenthal needs to find the time to flex a little White House muscle with the DOJ and the DHS. She needs to ensure that the process of writing one new regulation doesn't again fall victim to another decade of bureaucratic bungling and inter-agency turf wars.

So Rodi Alvarado can see her kids again.

Domestic Violence is terrorism

act of terrorism, terrorism, terrorist act - the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear.

domestic violence - the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against an intimate partner or other family member in order to attain control over them to achieve the illusion of powerfulness; this is done through a pattern of intimidation or coercion or instilling fear.

Batterers are terrorists

In the wake of the tragic events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, domestic violence service providers nationwide witnessed an increase in our clients’ post-traumatic stress which directly correlates to the traumatic affect of the attack on the nation in general.

Terrorists, as we are coming to learn, are people who feel slighted, who feel an injustice has been done to them, who feel they are victims of an oppressor, and that their violence is justified to right the “wrong” and balance the scales.

Batterers, as we have always known, feel exactly the same way. They are known for blaming everyone else for whatever goes wrong in their lives, blaming everyone else for their own actions and failures, and they justify their abuse by blaming their victim.

One Sojourn client, who was born and raised in the Middle East and has lived in the USA for many years, discussed her experience as a long-term battered woman in the context of the 9/11 attacks. She told us the following:

• Terrorists blame America for all their troubles, just as my husband blames me for all his troubles.
• These terrorists were very intelligent, and were able to outsmart law enforcement, just like my husband.
• The terrorists have intelligence and other resources, but they use them for malicious and destructive purposes rather than for positive ones, just like my husband does.
• The terrorists destroyed themselves in order to destroy Americans, just as my husband is destroying his own life just to get back at me.
• Terrorists at first seem crazy, but in fact they are quite calculating in their actions, just like my batterer.
• Terrorists are successful at creating terror and fear in others, and people begin to live in dread, fearing what they will do next. This is the way I live and have lived every single day for many years.

The terrorist attack on September 11, was designed, in part, to make citizens of this country no longer feel safe in their own homes, on their streets, in their cities. Victims of domestic violence – both women and children – never feel safe, no matter where they are.

Among the many losses suffered by victims of terrorism is the fundamental right to liberty. Much discussion currently is centering on what Americans must be willing to sacrifice in order to feel safer. In much the same way, battered women must make choices which partly or entirely disenfranchise them. Women who are living with their batterer “walk on eggshells” in a constant state of hypervigilance. Not free to speak their mind, come and go, choose their friends, or decide for themselves, they are virtual prisoners in their own homes. Women who attempt to leave their batterer must give up their home, their neighborhood, their daily routine, church, gym, job, car, pets, and belongings to live in hiding. Occasionally, they must give up their identity. Too often, they lose custody of their own children.

For years and years, many American women have been living with terrorists. It’s taken all those years to make changes in the law to address the issue.

by Pat Butler and Erika Stewart