linkspam: Why didn’t you call the police? Part One
TRIGGER WARNING
NO VICTIM BLAMING IN THE COMMENTS OR YOU WILL BE BANNED. WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. AND MALICE AFORETHOUGHT. I HAVE. NO. PATIENCE. PERIOD. you have been warned.
Because you cannot trust them. No really.
Of course, not all of them do that. But how do you know that your cop won’t?
And even when you get a good cop, the system and society itself is really, really, really really, fucked.
And then to top it off, POC face the extra burden of cops deciding to frame men of color instead of investigating to find out the real rapist. (And do not even BEGIN to think that you can use that last sentence to start propagandizing about how all women are liars and how all rape cases are made up etc. I will delete your comment and ban your ass so fast your head will spin. Just go read this: The Duke Lacrosse Case: Exploiting the issue of false rape accusations Thanks Alas a Blog). The point of the comment is that race and class sometimes intersect in the criminal justice system so that instead of properly investigating crimes, the police will go after vulnerable populations because it is easier.)
I have not even begun to consider the maelstrom that is domestic violence and abuse. Nor have I begun to look at stalking. Or street harassment. Never mind the subject of how state violence intertwines with and perpetuates violence between individuals.
To say nothing of the truly complex and so important issues when class and race and disability and various sexualities and whatever else intersect. Think the police response to transwomen of color who have been raped and beaten and killed by boyfriends and sometimes the police themselves. Think the police response to undocumented gay immigrants being abused. Think police response to poor POC vis a vis rich white women. think police reaction to poor white gay domestic violence and rape, never mind gay POC domestic violence and rape. Think police response to disabled people who might be communicating though American sign language, or be blind, or mentally disabled. Think about religion fer instance. How might police respond to Muslim couples, what with the widespread prejudice in America now? As compared to Christians? And exactly WHEN is the federal gov’t going to fix the total fuckery that has made Native American women among the most battered and raped community in the united states? If police pay little attention to rape, how much do they pay to street harassment? And those threatening behaviors that are not illegal, like forcing someone to stay in a room and watch sex acts? And what happens when domestic violence and rape touch down in the middle of activists fighting the prison and police industrial complex? Call the police? Really? And what about sex workers Never mind sex workers who happen to be transgender? Hell trans people when murdered are regularly assumed to be sex workers even when they are not, and this is one more brick that is used against them. And then we have male POC survivors. Exactly how many of those, having been on the butt-end of police racially profiling them, immigrant raids and all the other manners of BS, are going to overcome that, plus societal pressures that say that men do not get raped because they always want sex, men don’t get beaten up because they are stronger than women, all of this; to report domestic violence and rape to the police? Precisely how do you think the police would respond?
See also :Types of Sexual Assault and Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence
And i can’t remember if I linked this and I am too tired to look through that thicket in html We Are the Dead: Sex, Assault, and Trans Women
*sigh* I am tired but I know I have missed stuff. So drop links and debate in the comments but again I warn you that victim blaming of any sort will result in comments being deleted and me resorting to banning if you insist on being an asshole.
ETA: Remember when I said our society was really fucked up? What about the Menz Indeed
In what is one of the most deplorable examples of “What About the Menz” I’ve ever seen, Milwaukee County’s chief mental health official, John Chianelli, decided to placate violent male psychiatric patients by housing female patients in the previously sex-segregated locked ward. When the integrated ward resulted in a surge of sexual assaults against the female patients, Chianelli then defended the decision as a “trade-off.” MORE
Our society is FUCKED.
Yes.
The criminal-legal system (and not just police, I think every other level of the system as well) definitely perpetrates additional trauma.
And anti-violence activists’ over-reliance on the criminal-legal system strengthens and reinforces the criminal industrial complex, one of the primary organizers and perpetrators of violence.
And there are situations of intimate partner violence where the dichotomy between survivor and perpetrator is not fully clear.
And though perpetrators should be held accountable, should they not also be able to access opportunities for transformation?
And communities are never pushed to examine their own complicity in violence.
And communities do not use violence as an opportunity for transformation.
To transform conditions in the community that allow violence to occur and work for a broader/deeper social justice.
…Many of the same critiques of the exclusively criminal-legal-based approach to violence also hold true for the hate crimes legislation being pushed by mainstream LGBT organizations.
Didn’t have time to click on all the links above, so some of these groups might already be linked, but for more info on transformative justice-based approaches to violence, see Generation Five, Harm Free Zones, Young Women’s Empowerment Project, INCITE.
Incite is there but I missed the others. thanks for your recs.
Rape culture is a hell of a drug, isn’t it? Police officers that downplay rape cases, just like in NYC. Police officers who engage in victim blaming language, just like the officer in Ben Roethlisberger’s case. Police officers not even TOUCHING rape cases in the LGBT community.
We don’t care about women in this world. We just dont. And it sickens me. In a day and age where women can be raped in public and nothing is done to help her, you wonder how we go on?
“It’s better for men to rape women than to attack each other.” Huh?
The inmates are running that asylum, all right.
This is.. depressing. I didn’t even click any of those links because I knew I wouldn’t want to see what’s there.
I won’t pretend that I am more knowledgeable than ignorant about about rape culture but I do think this question doesn’t always have to be victim blaming. The way I look at it is, if I were raped, I would call the cops. It would be hard. I may have to deal with a lot of shit from police, lawyers, judges, who knows who else. It may not do a damned thing but I’m a big proponent of doing what you can even if what you can do isn’t much. I like to feel like I’m doing something. Maybe when people ask that question, they sometimes just mean “are you taking care of yourself now?”
Its good that you have the strength and the faith in cops based on your experiences (which is a privilege) to make calling the cops an alternative for you. All I am saying with this linkspam is that a whole lot of people cannot lay claim to that, and that their choices must be respected and work done to make the system more equitable.
I agree with this post 100%. Although, I’m not actually a black woman, I’m a mix of many european countries…but I have grown up poor, and I have grown up controlled by men. And I also know that you can’t trust the police. My ex-boyfriend broke my nose so badly he knocked me unconscious and blood poured out of my mouth when I ‘came to’. I did not report him, because no one has ever listened to me when I cried out for help anyway.
This system of ours in America is truly NOT WORKING.
Just read about mentally ill women being used as bait for violent mentally ill men on What About Our Daughters. If the state of WI wants to speed to bankruptcy on a concorde, this moronic plan is about to do it. I sincerely hope the family members of the women institutionalized across that state are ready to sue the hell of the Mental Health system.
Violent offenders should be housed with other violent offenders and isolated from each other if the state is worried about people hurting each other. Offering up vulnerable women to deranged men is not only unconscionable, but criminal.
After her then-partner tried to run my mother-in-law and their children down, the police told her there was nothing they could do because it was her word against his. After she’d moved, the legal system sent him a piece of mail with her new address on it. He broke in and beat her current partner to permanent brain damage and stabbed her through both lungs, planning to kill his own children. He fled when she somehow managed to fight him off and was apprehended covered in blood and gasoline, threatening to immolate himself.
Both weapons used in the crime and found on him disappeared from the evidence locker before trial. The prosecution did not call any compelling witness, and he was released after less than a year and given parole. He has since been spotted at least once trying to get into mother-in-law’s current neighborhood.
We don’t trust the police or the legal system anymore.
My husband and his mother are white, and yet even with that privilege they were put through the hell outlined above. I can’t imagine the pain of those directly abused by the authorities, but I can grieve for them and for the lives lost and destroyed, like the little girl and her family in Detroit. Maybe some people put on the badge because they want to help, but more often the police system is used as an excuse for power-hungry thugs to hide from any responsibility.
Very upsetting to hear. Some people are evil.
I am a victim of domestic violence so first hand going to the police is so f-ing risky, but yet inorder to get assistance u need to go to the police. My abuse stay some hours in jail, yet when he comes out he’s ready to beat me up but this time he threaten me, so am I getting threw to him, I hope so. in order for people to assist they always say go to the police then we shall deal with u. if it was that easy dont u think i will go before u can tell me anything. Going to the police does not always guarateen that they always going to get caught, going to the police is basically wasting f–ing time plus getting ur a— beat.. So i say for verbal abuse, a threat becoming a reality shoudl i go to the police, if u dont know , rule number one u never want to tick off your abuser, trust me I know firsthand…
You know, I DID call 911, one time, in the actual moment of a particular event, but by the time the police arrived, he had gone through a long list of threatening statements, which actually made me even more afraid then before I’d called. When they knocked at the door, I was in the living room, they only spoke to him at the door, and they never actually checked me out, to see if I seemed okay. This is Burbank, CA police. They don’t have a very good track record in honoring human rights, so, no surprise that they left almost immediately without doing anything to ensure I was safe.