Letters to the Editor
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Let's be real
People-- even legit U.S citizens-- who are engaged in illegal activities are often reluctant to report crimes against them to the cops for fear of exposure. Fact of life. Should we grant amnesty to marijuana growers who are burlarized? Johns robbed by prostitutes? Paroled felons whose guns are stolen? Sympathy for victims is one thing-- overlooking their own violation of the law is another.
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Bad example
Should we grant amnesty to marijuana growers who are burlarized?
Look this is a bad example because the kind of burglars who target marijuana growers are really nasty. They specialize in home invasions. They rape and kill. So when the pot growers are afraid to report them, rapists and killers are going free.
The public seems okay with this though, just like they're okay with drunk drivers going free so the county jail can be used to babysit drug users.
That's another example where we're all fired up to show how moral we are -- even at the expense of human life.
I'm hoping that at least the public WON'T be okay with allowing children to remain trapped in a domestic violence hell just because mami's afraid to call the cops on papi because they're illegal.
Rule of law is supposed to prevent violence.
When rule of law is enabling or promoting violence, then we have to repeal those laws.
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Quimby (Coleman) - no surprise there.
Norman (Quimby) Coleman is one of the sleaziest characters Minnesota has ever sent to elective office. That he'd be OK with deporting a beating or rape victim in order to pander to the paranoid hard-right crowd does not surprise me in the least.
I am personally not in favor of illegal immigration, and there is one and only one answer to it, just to step to the side a bit here in order to address the overarching issue: Make the employment of an illegal immigrant a felony, make the second violation (or concurrent employment of two or more) punishable under RICO statutes, beginning with pretrial asset seizure.
Back to Norman Quimby, I am hoping strongly that he is looking for a new job after next fall. Minnesota deserves better.
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a marijuana analogy
Say I am raped and beaten. I could go directly to the nearest police station and report it. I know they will want to take my clothes and process them for DNA evidence. Oh, but there's a joint in my skirt pocket that's got some blood and semen on it. I could get booked for possession. Fair? Strictly speaking, probably. I did break the law by having that joint.
Prudent? Hell, no!
When someone reports being raped or beaten, law enforcement needs to be looking at that particular crime, not immigration violations.
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Justice vs. policy
Whether or not it's just to deport people who've immigrated illegally when they come forth to report crimes is beside the point: it's bad policy.
The problem here isn't whether to punish one person or two when a person who has illegally entered the country is abused. It's whether we should punish one person (the abuser) or zero -- abuse vistims will not step forward if they know they'll be punished.
This law symbolically threatens to punish a class of criminal. In practice, this law won't result in that class of ciminal being punished; it'll result in a different class of criminal being let off.
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I am curious
is there a Violence Against Men act?
didn't think so.
which once again proves feminism is fundamentally out to destroy men and men only.
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@brightstar
I fully support a Violence Against Men act. There's not nearly enough violence against men - especially perpetrated by women - so I think the government should really get out there and promote that more. Great point!
Just kidding. But really, dear. If you actually read some feminist theory you would probably agree with it. The fundamental principle is that gender restrictions make it harder for BOTH men AND women to realize wholeness. A lot of other things come up in discussions of this - particularly the many ways in which women are institutionally more weakened than men are by cultural and legal gender restrictions - and maybe there is too much bitching about how women aren't getting what they need because men are taking it for themselves. Not the best use of feminist energy, if you are too single-minded about it. But aren't you just counter-bitching about the same thing? Why not do some serious feminist research instead of just reading this surface-scratching news blog? Then come back and argue against the superficiality from your knowledge of fundamental feminist principles.
Well, no, I guess grousing is just easier. Not productive, but definitely easier.
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When Lynn says "immigrant women" what the bigot in her as to ignore is the "immigrant man"
We know as fact Lynn, not as your fantasy, that women cause 30-50% of all domestic violence.
Why Lynn, must you be a bigot and ignore the harm that women cause to men, or the injuries men have suffered from women?
A prior commenter just told us that feminist theory says that gender bias harms everyone, men and women, so why Lynn are you going on and on with your anti-feminist cant about immigrant women, and not discussing the real issue, this bill makes domestic violence against immigrants easier as they will fear deportation?
Personally, I think Lynn Harris should be banned from Broadsheet since she is clearly an anti-feminist.
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=836
DV Expert John Hamel: 'Majority of Mainstream Researchers are now Acknowledging the Gender-Inclusive Nature of Intimate Partner Abuse'
June 25th, 2007
Background: As I've noted on many occasions, the domestic violence establishment is not telling us the full truth about domestic violence, and many destructive family law and criminal law policies have been based on misinformation.
Research clearly establishes that women are frequently the aggressors in domestic combat, often employing the element of surprise and weapons to compensate for men's strength. Yet arrest and prosecution policies are stacked against men, as is the public dialogue on this important issue. Perhaps worst of all, misguided women's groups' distortion of the domestic violence issue has been the leading impediment to passing shared parenting legislation.
John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse, is one of the leading authorities in the field. Springer publications recently did an interview with John which can be found below.
An Interview with John Hamel
Both of your books are based on the concept that men and women are equally capable of abuse against each other. This runs completely counter to conventional thinking, which insists that men are always aggressors and women are always victims. What first led you to this line of research, and what prompted you to begin writing about it?
In 1991, I took over a domestic violence caseload and was trained in a variation of the well-known “Duluth” model. In the Duluth theoretical framework, domestic violence is caused by a patriarchal society that sanctions violence by men against their female partners. Women are assumed to be either victims or, when they are found to aggress against their male partners, to be doing so in self-defense.
In group, many of the men I was working with claimed that their female partners were equally or more abusive than they were, and wondered why I wasn’t treating them as well. I had been trained to automatically disbelieve such claims as victim-blaming. However, while many of my clients did in fact seek to displace responsibility for their actions onto others, I found other claims to be quite credible, so I changed my assessment procedures and began to insist on interviewing victims separately. According to the victims themselves, the majority of these cases did indeed involve mutual abuse and, and some featured a dominant female perpetrator whose partner was arrested after fighting back. This clinical data contradicted much of what I had been taught, and led me to conduct an extensive review of the research literature. What I found more than corroborated my clinical findings.
Would you say that the idea that both females and males can be both aggressors and victims is becoming more accepted among those in the field? Why or why not?
These notions are not new; they had found support as far back as the 1970’s, in the work of Murray Straus, Peter Neidig and other researchers. For years, studies conducted by these mavericks were dismissed, and in some cases suppressed, because of the long-dominant patriarchal paradigm advanced by victim advocates. Read the rest of this entry »