Don’t Call Me Crazy

-- By AngelineAndersen - 30 Apr 2012

Criminal law generally only allows for the use of deadly force in self-defense when one is faced with an imminent and deadly threat. Although this rule has the laudable goal of discouraging premeditated murder, it also rests on an assumption that given enough time, a reasonable person can rely on the assistance of the state to protect them from harm. This assumption ignores the ugly reality that in some situations, and especially for victims of domestic violence, it is actually more reasonable to believe that the state will not assist you at all.

Evidence

I have called the police twice in my life and they didn’t come either time. One of these occasions actually directly relates to the topic at hand. An acquaintance’s shitfaced boyfriend was beating the shit out of her – not for the first time – so a few friends and I managed to get him out of the house and get a few locked doors between the two of them. He passed out in the yard, and we sat there waiting for the police to come and pick him up, and they never showed up. After about 90 minutes, he woke up, and walked away. And this is me – a white girl, from a fairly privileged background, with the financial means, social ties, and family support to never feel truly stuck – I always have the option to move to another city if necessary, and I have a variety of places to run to if I wind up in a fucked up situation and need to get out. I can’t even begin to imagine how it is for an indigent woman, or a woman of color, or a woman in an abusive relationship, or a woman who has no means by which to go somewhere else, and especially not for a woman experiencing all of those things simultaneously.

And unfortunately, the argument that the state does not adequately protect its citizens, and especially ignores victims of domestic violence is substantiated by evidence beyond my own personal experience. Consider some of the findings the Congress considered when discussing the ill-fated Violence Against Women Act: One study in Texas indicated that the police did not respond to calls from one out of three battered women. At the Sheriff’s Department in Los Angeles, the practice with domestic violence calls was to put them at the bottom of the response list, rather than treating them as an emergency. A California court later held that this policy passed rational basis review, on the grounds that domestic violence “rarely leads to serious injury or death.” A Washington DC study showed that even in cases where a victim of domestic violence was actually bleeding from her injuries when the police arrived, arrests were still made less than 15% of the time. Combined with the holding of DeShaney? v Winnebago County Department of Social Services, that the state has no affirmative duty to protect a citizen from abuse, the government has left victims of domestic violence with no one that they can count on to protect them, and no way to seek redress against the state for this failure to protect.

What We’ve Tried to Do

Even though society at large is probably not ready to accept a conclusion that it is entirely reasonable for victims of domestic violence to believe that the state will be unable to help them, and therefore reasonable for these victims to take action to protect themselves and end their cycle of abuse, there is at least some recognition that victims of domestic violence may be a special case. We see this primarily through the use of Battered Womens Syndrome as a defense, which has been used in some jurisdictions to allow battered women to escape convictions for violent behavior when differently situated parties would have been convicted. However, several feminist scholars, with whom I agree, point out that this is problematic in that it perpetuates a damaging stereotype of battered women as powerless, passive, and mentally reduced.

What Needs to be Done

As I can not imagine a way in which self-defense law could be broadened to include victims of domestic violence who reasonably believe that the state will not help them, without allowing all sorts of other, less socially desirable forms of premeditated murder, I believe that the solution to this problem must lie elsewhere. At the very least, we need to make it a reality that victims of domestic violence can reasonably rely on the state to protect them from their abusers. A decent starting point for this would be if Congress rewrote VAWA to allow suits against state actors rather than individual abusers. Although this would not provide victims of gender violence with the direct vindication that the original text of VAWA would have, it would create some sort of state duty to protect women from domestic violence, which would hopefully lead to better protection, and at least allow those who suffer from a lack of protection to have some form of redress.