NZ : What to do with men who batter
World News
What to do with men who batter
14.03.2004
By ROGER FRANKLIN
By all accounts except, oddly enough, that of the wife who killed him, Cecil Carver was a dreadful man. Grouchy in the morning - when he bothered to get up before noon, that is - he grew testier as the day's drinks kicked in. By mid-afternoon, when he was nicely primed, the 39-year-old Oklahoma deadbeat was ready to take offence at just about everything.
That's why Teri Lyn Carver sorta, kinda blames herself for what happened when she took charge of the TV remote control and insisted on watching Surviving a Lover's Attack, an afternoon talk show about domestic violence.
She thought Cecil might benefit from realising how much he had in common with O. J. Simpson, and since they were smoking joints and her hubby's thinking was getting a little fuzzy, she helpfully pointed out the similarities.
Cecil didn't take well to the comparison, and pretty soon was rummaging for the .22 automatic pistol that he sometimes produced for emphasis when words failed him. Then he put a single shot into the headboard beside Teri's neck to demonstrate, as the deadpan local cops put it, "that he did not like his wife calling him a violent partner".
They struggled, Teri won control of the gun and, as her husband raised both arms shoulder-high, she squeezed off a round from 2m away that hit him in the heart.
She says it was an accident - that the gun went off accidentally - but that made no difference to Cecil, who was quite dead when the ambulance arrived.
A no-hopers' tragi-comedy? An Odd Spot for the next day's papers? A lesson about the perils of watching daytime TV?
It's a lot more than that, says Linda Mills, controversial professor of law and social work at New York University. She says couples like the Carvers demonstrate the absolute inadequacy of all prevailing approaches to the punishment of domestic violence and treatment of offenders.
To say that the arguments she presents in her new book, Insult to Injury, have made her many enemies is an understatement.
From the left, feminists have seized on her assertion that mandatory arrest and sentencing of accused men is counterproductive. And they are livid that her analysis of the statistics shows that women are just as often the instigators of domestic violence as their men.
To those feminist critics, she has betrayed the sisterhood by arguing that women should have the right to drop charges against their batterers.
In most American states, they no longer do. The moment they call the emergency operator, the matter is out of their hands. To Mills, that approach is "paternalistic and extremely counterproductive".
When the law locks up a basher, says Mills, the attacker will emerge from prison embittered, more angry than he went in and far more likely to bully and abuse. The net result - more violence, more damaged kids, and women who must live in poverty because the family breadwinner is making licence plates instead of paying the rent.
As Mills noted, having just opened the latest bundle of clippings from her publisher, Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Megan Gressor summed up the attitude when she accused her of seeking a return to the days when partners "could assault one another with impunity".
Meanwhile, from the right, the attacks have been just as vicious. Here's what former Ohio domestic-violence prosecutor C. Douglas Kern wrote of Mills' book in the conservative National Review: "In lieu of punishment, Mills wants 'intimate abuse circles' from which crafty, manipulative abusers will learn a new lexicon of buzzwords and catchphrases with which to dazzle judges and probation officers at future sentencing hearings."
Brutal men, he adds, will feel "nothing but contempt toward covens of experts yammering about communication."
Mills has been vilified so much, so often, and from so many quarters that she insists it no longer affects her. "I figured that if I'm coming under fire from both left and right, I must be on to something."
She told the Weekend Herald: "As a feminist, I wholeheartedly believe we have gone about this the wrong way. Violence against women may be increasing - I doubt that it is, personally, it's just coming to our attention more often - but calling it a crime doesn't address the underlying issues."
What might do the trick, she argues, would be for the legal system to reserve prison cells only for "the incorrigible, the pure evil offenders and abusers" while sentencing the rest to encounter groups moderated by therapists. There, victims, relatives, friends and neighbours could confront abusers with the human faces and bruised psyches of their victims.
"That way, instead of greeting you with a scowl when released from jail, it could be a smile of thanks for caring enough to make the effort to take part in a process that made a real, genuine, restorative difference.
"That has to be better than treating women as if they are simple children and taking away from them the prerogative of dropping charges. Jail or not, 50 per cent of women return to their abusers anyway, so trying to find another remedy isn't pie in the sky, it's being realistic."
As realistic as, say, life in that Oklahoma shack where Teri Lyn Carver's copper-jacketed slug cut short her husband's plans for an afternoon of booze and brawling?
Teri, just released from jail after authorities declined to press charges, doesn't seem as sure of her innocence as the prosecutors who set her free.
"I would never hurt him," she says. "He wanted to spoil me. I wouldn't leave him. I loved him."
It's a quote that raises another perspective on domestic abuse, one that neither advocates of string-the-bum-up justice nor Mills seem to have taken into account: what can you ever do with folks who are just so stupid that, when all is said and done, they deserve each other's misery?
END
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3554520&msg=emaillink
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