| Atticus Grinch |
12-01-2009 03:27 PM |
Re: Welcome back E/O, leagl and Fringey: no one say the name "Penske" 3 times in a ro
This is slightly redundant of what others have already said, but this Slate piece makes the point that Tiger's story was controlled by laws that compel officers to make arrests for DV even when no victim makes a complaint. Hanna Rosin appears to believe that the ridiculousness results from the gender neutrality with which these laws were written, and that the fix is that they should be interpreted to apply only when the abuser is a man, or perhaps only where the context indicates a coercive relationship.
I'm inclined to believe these "must arrest" laws should be repealed outright. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that the solution to intractable relationship problems with troubling power dynamics is to disempower the victim further by removing any control she has over her victimhood. I don't think it's empowering for women to declare them victims and assume their ability to truthfully report their experience and condition is compromised. It's infantilizing, and it victimizes many women further to haul off the person who is, though an unworthy partner in the eyes of college-educated middle class liberals, still often better than no partner at all. We've substituted our collective judgment that a victim of DV should have all her decisions made for her. Meanwhile, many times what they are doing is collecting every penny of their own monetary resources to go downtown to bail the man out so he shows up to work the next morning and doesn't get fired and cost the family their home. It's a shitty situation made shittier by half-baked notions of people who have a much better idea of what it's like to be a woman but absolutely no idea what it's like to be poor, or worse, a single mother with no childcare options during working hours. It's like the police are asked to pat the woman on the head and tell her she's really better off without him, and won't you please shut up if you disagree? How is that empowering?
Anyway, just needed to vent that this Tiger absurdity is the natural consequence of a social policy that demands to be measured by its good intentions rather than any more useful metric, like whether it actually causes or exacerbates the suffering of real human beings who deserve to have a say in the fate of their families. |
