Posts Tagged ‘trauma’
How bad Is it? ~ Skirting the Truth at Cairo, Telling it in America, Turned Down at Brown, Left to Tell after Rwanda
I was told to shorten my titles. This was the original:
In Cairo, Obama Delicately Skirts the Issue of Islamic Violence Towards Women, but Chesler (Honor Killings), LetsGetHonest (DV and Christianity), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel), Nonie Darwish (They Call Me Infidel), Immaculee Ilibagiza (Left to Tell, 91 days in a Rwandan bathroom) shoot from the hip on the dangers of ANY pride/shame/hate-based culture
Note: Of the above “notables” obviously President Obama’s OFFICE outranks the rest of us, but I’ve put 4 famous female voices (& mine) to 2 male to underscore, well, who and what the others have downplayed
[Have been told to shorten the posts, too, not just the titles. Working on it!]
This post, July 2 (2 days before “Independence Day” USA) had been on hold. Unlike several women featured here, I added my voice to theirs, telling it like it is, then self-censored out of fear: I felt MY contribution was too radical, too out-spoken, and too indignant.
Well . . . .
BUT, I have noticed the headlines since July 2nd — a litany of murder/suicides, family annihilations, and slaps on the wrist for men punching, stalking, kidnapping or threatening to kill women, after which they then kill. I had my children stolen for daring to report abuse, violations of court orders, and for refusing to “submit” to arbitrary orders on how to dumb down my smart daughters. I know what “shunning” is. I know what “enabling abuse” is.
I have never experienced fundamentalist Islamic violence against women, but the sense of the Christian version of it over here is starting to feel like a sort of ritual purging process. It is starting to ffeel like “No Exit” unless there is a miraculous parting of the Red Tape, a CLOUD covering my behind and a FIRE leading the way. We already tried the “appeal to reason” paradigm, or the “appeal to law” ONE, ALSO. We also did the “it’s not in your best interest” reason, but some people will pay a lot of money for the privilege of refusing to stop abusing. Like they say, truth is on the auction block, and was sold cheap, Lies fetched a higher price.
I pay attention, and have SEEN Protestant so-called Christian Caucasian men drilling young men how to dominate women twice their age in the name of their god, and been subjected to this as well. Recently. Yeech — Retch! What kind of “sanctuary” is that??
However, now that a suburban California back yard finally released ,29-year-old Jaycee Dugard and her 11 year old and 15 year old girls fathered by the man who kidnapped HER when she was only 11, I felt this post is quite appropriate:
This case is shocking for its combination of statistics (18 years! Missed opportunities! “We never knew!” “But they looked like a nice couple!” “I spoke with Jaycee on the phone, she was courteous and professional” (She was not only a sex slave, but also supported this man’s business while living in shack-like conditions in a back yard with her kids). A WOMAN called the police reporting that people were living in the back yard. Like my calls and reports to police that another man, their father, was going to kidnap MY daughters, her voice was not heard.
Are we willing to listen and change behavior YET? The behavior “we” need to change is to get smart and act on hunches. While people who take the scriptures too literally are castigated and censored, disdained in public media, how about some of us in the U.S. start taking the 3 charters of freedom: Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights literally for a change? Starting by knowing their INtents based on their CONtents! And then recognizing that humanity is a DNA thing, not a color thing or a gender thing! And the usage of “all men are created equal” in the first was NOT “men vs. women” and did not say, although it was so practiced, “all Caucasian landowning males.” It meant ALL EQUAL and not to be colonized, or, like Miss Dugard (sr.) was, pimped.
I am United States citizen by birth, and was never beaten, or degraded because of my gender before I married. Nor was I forced into marriage. But women of faith or no faith nowadays who attempt to leave, risk being stripped of children, or killed, for the act of — leaving their marriage and asserting legal rights they already have.
While our current President has described the angst and sense of loss he felt not having his father in his life growing up, the rest of us describe some of what it’s like to be a target of violence and punishment for the crime of having been born without a Y chromosome, for some, a life sentence punishable by death.
President Obama, pre-election, helping out Senator Bayh in Indiana, with some more Mother-Omission:
2006 – EVER TRYING TO RAM THROUGH ANOTHER BILL, FINE-TUNING & REDEFINING FATHERHOOD AND HEALTHY MARRIAGE
As one of my fellow-bloggers commented in Indiana Mothers for Custodial Justice: Evan Bayh is not his Father’s Son,
Senator Evan Bayh’s (fatherhood-promoted) own father Senator BIRCH Bayh, was in favor of equal rights for women: so much for a chip off the old block, and passing down values from father to son, politically.
According to this post (Verifiable Here) both Senator Evan and then-Senator Obama co-sponsored YET ANOTHER “Healthy marriage and Responsible Fatherhood” bill, which was defeated in 2006.
Like this Senator, and another well-known FR attorney from the Chicago Area, both the Senators also remembered all the Hoopla around Father’s Day, Fatherhood, Father Celebration, and etc., etc. (can we say “patriarchal?”) in June PR (June is Father’s Day month, FYI), but forgot the same on Mother’s Day, in May. Actually, in 2009 and (I found) 2008, PR around now-President and then-Senator Obama eclipsed this acknowledgement of where they came from, literally (they had mothers, right?), as the word “Mother” has become, as I blogged elsewhere, virtually invisible linguistically in connection with “families” on the whitehouse.gov site. The preferred term, for those of you not in the know, is “Parent” when it comes to the divorce situation, and “Women” when it comes to who’s having violence (including murder) perpetrated against them by, often enough by the father of mutual children.
~ ~ ~ ~
It is difficult to control a population aware of their “unalienable rights,” not intimidated by verbal derogatory talk, or economically dependent upon abusers or captive to them by the threat of death as they leave. Now one factor that often gives a mother courage and motivation to LEAVE abuse is precisely her motherhood, so no wonder it would be threatening to any:
Fear/Shame/Pride-based culture or religion.
The mother/daughter/son bond, culturally needs to be degraded and broken (stepmothers will do) if we are to have a truly sheepish culture that will do what they are told without protest. Family Court venue is GREAT for this, and I happen to believe was designed for the purpose, despite all the hoopla from under-funded (??), under-recognized (????????) fathers, especially those who like to minimize their own violence towards their own women, often prompting separation, which even that bill (above) recognizes is a primary cause of separation!
@@@
The link “parsing Obama” caught my attention, and led to an article from “Real Clear Politics” on the Cairo Speech.
I have just written on “Women” vs. “Mother” and the weak (# occurrences) presence of both when it comes to Family Issues being discussed under the current US Administration’s “White House” page. Not only were the words barely absent, but their usage (which I didn’t analyze and post — but noticed) was also weak. In looking for the word “mothers” I would have to assume that after the age requiring home nurse visitations, we don’t exist. For example, the President’s own mother was transformed into the word “parent” in a sentence highlighting absence of a father. To people who haven’t been through systemic prejudice against their “mothering” it may not register, but when examined, it’s blatant PR omission. It undermines the credibility of the whole page. (granted, the month was the month of Father’s Day, however, if someone has a record of this page during May and wishes to countradict my post, please feel free to comment).
SIMILARLY, when it comes to speaking in this nation, Egypt, the mention of Islamic violence (not bias, but violence) toward women, the omission is just as loud.
So, I just slapped up the article, with someone else’s commentary on it, for your consumption. Then I searched out and pasted up interviews, articles or book reviews from several women who do NOT Delicately skirt the issue of violence towards women, and hate talk in general. Two of these women came to America, and one of them, since coming, has converted from Islam to Christianity.
A third woman from Rwanda didn’t convert, but was already Christian. Her story isn’t about gender violence, but it was another “can’t put down” book of survival in the face of hate, and refusal to hate back. The individual verbal abuse or hate talk that often DOES escalate to physical domestic violence got me (in marriage, after marriage) sensititve to moods and fluctuations in language that might indicate an “event” about to erupt also precedes genocides or attempted genocides. The speech sometimes works the speaker or groups of speakers up, or justifies the abuse. Whether the Holocaust or Rwanda, hate talk is a danger sign. Just as PTSD from domestic violence does indeed have similarities with PTSD from actual war.
So, this had me also noticing books and commentaries on the languages preceding genocides or attempted genocides; Rwanda had caught my attention earlier from the book on which the movie “Hotel Rwanda” was based. This book details times when pastors protected, and times when pastors betrayed, those that were being hunted down. So I include the “Left To Tell” book because it seems relevant.
And I added my two bits. And a few links indicating that this fatherhood stuff is turning to vigilante behavior, unfortunately. And pointed out, again, what our Declaration of Independence was about….
On my blogroll to the right, is a little Youtube showing just how low my President bowed, casually, quickly, to the leader of a Muslim country, in the company of Queen Elizabeth and a G20 meeting. This disturbs me, and was of some serious debate in a blogtalkradio dialogue (as I recall the source, anyhow) moderated by Dr. Phyllis Chesler and Marcia Pappas of NYS NOW. Is he the leader of the free world, or at least part of it? Then what’s that obeisance about? Would he kneel to the Pope to be politically correct, kiss the ring and insult all those boys and girls abused by priests, and the concept upon which this nation was founded, Bill of Rights Number I?
I myself am VERY disturbed at how domestic violence killings are starting to take on a vigilante nature, as if in retaliation to a woman leaving a family, or exposing a sin, how DARE she? As a mature woman and mother who has been dumped by the roadside by a combination of my own family and my ex-batterer, apparently for — again, exposing family something or other — I am thinking about:
- How
- Why
- Who ARE these people?
- What IS this world?
How many OTHER myths have I believed about life, my country, my family, the legal system, etc.? I will tell you one I have let go of: “The American Dream.” I have switched this my dream from anything material, and am changing it to a character issue, a personal one with myself.
I am calling upon the combination of my God (NOT the one that is a respecter of persons, or genders, or legalistically profiling and whimsical in judgment, that I have seen in certain places), and my courage, and putting my intellect a good bit lower, respectively, than it used to be. Plus, from within, my emotions of concern and compassion for others, and whatever picture I can imagine. Indignation about injustice only goes so far, and as the injustice basically never stops, another motivation must be found.
I think part of the trouble around here is that people pretend to be neutral and detached (a high value) when they aren’t anything of the sort. They can incite to violence, ride roughshod over families, due process, and civil rights, as easily as any other nation or culture, but claim this is based on “evidence-based practices.” In one place on this post, I included a Rwandan woman — the issue was not on men versus women, but the same principles: hate talk towards a certain group of people (Tutsis) and how quickly it ignited.
We have become an incredibly morally bankrupt place (as well as fiscally — and they are related), while drowning in certain materials and products. However, the solution to this is not to be found in the institutions, but rather in the people who are aware that these institutions are not going to replace human basic functions of: produce, protect, educate, alleviate, CREate (when it comes to arts, ideas, concepts, etc.), that which we have procreated. If you’re new to this blog, you’ll notice that when I have a strong emotional reaction to a certain thing (or idea), I pile on labels, like sauce on a hamburger, or whipped cream on a milkshake, or, . . . . or. . . .
I was referring to the churches, some of which I left voluntarily, and one of which I got thrown out of last month for being female, having understanding of a Biblical passage, and speaking up (even with permission). How dare I think I knew something!
See:
“Family Values” Pundits not so upstanding themselves.
This is a new site to me: REAL CLEAR POLITICS. This dates to June 2009
I simply posted the whole article. Any italics are my emphasis, some (not all) of the other style changes are mine, too:
Did Obama Say Enough About Women’s Rights?
Posted by Cathy Young | Email This | Permalink | Email Author
As I said in my previous post, I had a largely positive reaction to Obama’s Cairo speech. However, I agree with David Frum’s criticsm of Obama’s comments about women’s rights — which should have been a key part of an “outreach to Muslims” speech. In contrast to Obama’s strong affirmation of the principles of democracy, his discussion of women’s issues and Islam was too general, too weak, and afflicted with excessive even-handedness.
{{with which “even handedness, as I have beLABORED in previous posts, the Whitehouse.gov agenda on families is not even remotely afflicted. It flat out ignores the fact, practically, that mothers exist. Period.}}
Here is the passage in its entirety: (OBAMA):
“The sixth issue that I want to address is women’s rights
“I know there is debate about this issue. {{“debate”?!?}} I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous.
Now let me be clear: issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.
{{EXCUUUUUSE me? Is this or is this not a dodge, or an understatement? Was there a political or safety reason for this understatement at this particular conference?
http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/211/are-honor-killings-simply-domestic-violence
I have posted an excerpt below. And photos. OK, now you may continue reading President Obama’s speech…}}}}
“In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, we have seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.
Our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons, and our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity – men and women – to reach their full potential. I do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice. That is why the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to support expanded literacy for girls, and to help young women pursue employment through micro-financing that helps people live their dreams.”
Frum takes issue, in particular, with Obama’s remarks about the head-covering issue: he points out that not only “some in the West,” but many women in the Muslim world regard the hijab as a symbol of female submission (not to God but to man), and that many women who “choose” to cover themselves (sometimes not only their hair but their face) do so because of coercion and intimidation either by family members or by radical Islamic militias. I do believe Obama was right to affirm a woman’s right to choose hijab; quite a few Muslim feminists regard it as a legitimate and positive form of religious expression, no different from the Jewish yarmulke, and quite a few moderately traditional Muslims are alienated by the categorical rejection of the hijab as oppressive. However, it would have been fitting to balance his statement with an assertion of a woman’s right to choose not to cover their hair — a right that, in some countries, they are denied not only by informal pressure and harassment, but by law and official policy.
As for the rest of this passage, it was nice of Obama to assert the importance of educational opportunities for girls and women, but that’s about as uncontroversial as it gets: who, except for the Taliban, disagrees? In all too many Muslim countries, the main problems facing women are far more severe: forced marriage, vastly unequal treatment when it comes to divorce and child custody, and socially sanctioned violence. How can one talk about women’s rights in the Muslim world and not mention honor killings? Or the horrific recent public flogging by a Taliban militia in Pakistan of a 17-year-old girl whose apparent offense was to have stepped outside her house without a male relative escorting her? Or cases in which Islamic courts have sentenced rape victims to death for fornication or adultery when the rape could not be proved under a stringent standard requiring two male witnesses? (While we’re at it, how about the fact that in Islamic courts, the word of a female witness is officially given half the weight of a man’s?) What about female genital mutilation? Against the backdrop of these genuine horrors, literacy programs and micro-financing for young women’s employment look like a rather feeble response. How about first ensuring that the girl who participates in a literacy program doesn’t get brutalized for showing a strand of hair in public?
In this context, Obama’s comment that “the struggle for women’s equality” is also a problem in America is also, to say the least, unhelpful. Yes, there are still gender disparities in the U.S., though I think many of them are due to, as Obama put it, women not making the same choices as men. But to mention what sexism still remains in American society in the same breath as the violent misogyny and patriarchal oppression still pervasive in much of the Muslim world today is a truly misguided attempts at even-handedness. It’s a bit like saying that of course it’s a bad thing that of course it’s a bad thing that Joe locks his wife in the closet, beats her senseless, forbids her to talk to any other man and monitors every penny she spends, but hey, Bill spends only half the time his wife does on housework and child care and treats his own career as more important than his wife’s, so if he voices disapproval of Joe he’d better mention his own failings too.
Yes, of course it’s not only in Muslim countries that women face severe oppression. (The issue of women being elected to lead in deeply patriarchal cultures is a separate, and fascinating, one, but I don’t think it’s a good measure of the overall status of women in society.) And I know there is a vigorous debate about whether Islam is inherently more female-unfriendly than other major religions and whether an Islamic feminsm is possible. Nonetheless, the fact remains that in recent decades we have seen a rollback of women’s rights in many societies — sometimes a drastic rollback — due to the influence of Islamic extremism. Obama’s failure to mention this fact was extremely disappointing. Talk about a missed opportunity. In my previous post, I said that Obama’s comments on women’s rights deserved no more than a B-. Analyzing them now, I’m lowering the grade to a gentleman’s C.
I give it an “F.” See below:
PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE: I PASTE ENOUGH TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO GET OVER THERE AND READ IT!
Dr. Phyllis Chesler:
Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence? (title is URL)
by Phyllis Chesler
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2009
Families that kill for honor will threaten girls and women if they refuse to cover their hair, their faces, or their bodies or act as their family’s domestic servant; wear makeup or Western clothing; choose friends from another religion; date; seek to obtain an advanced education; refuse an arranged marriage; seek a divorce from a violent husband; marry against their parents’ wishes; or behave in ways that are considered too independent, which might mean anything from driving a car to spending time or living away from home or family. Fundamentalists of many religions may expect their women to meet some but not all of these expectations. But when women refuse to do so, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists are far more likely to shun rather than murder them. Muslims, however, do kill for honor, as do, to a lesser extent, Hindus and Sikhs.
{{Everything underlined here, was an issue in my Western, non-Muslim marriage. I snuck education. I was stalked, through my own family and individually for leaving to the point that I have had major fear to finalize this divorce, and have not; I experienced retaliation consistently of engaging in activities outside the home, specifically anything that related to my former profession. This retaliation could come in the form of interfering with me getting out the door, or sabotage — allowing me to start, but making it hard to complete, a simple season’s engagement; complaining about or withholding funding for something as elementary as a simple black skirt and shirt to perform in; display of weapons immediately after returning from a rehearsal, leaving the car with insufficient gas to get back from one, and other night-mare-inducing behavior. This extended also to times my daughters were engaged in music as well; UNBELIEVABLE. I have watched my piano be physically attacked, buried under virtual trash, and then I was mocked for not practicing it enough, which I barely could find time to do in a day. I left home once, with an infant, in another state, for a week. I was given extra tasks to complete before leaving, and I came back to a house that was dangerously trashed –NO dishes had been done, broken glass on the floor (and we had a baby), and a special plant/bush I’d given him had not been watered, and was dead. Food in pots was moldy; I was stunned. In subsequent (to marriage) public times, in court, he repeatedly talked about the condition of the house, as if I didn’t also work, or was solely responsible. I had an unbelievable time getting access to a car, which was resented.
Finally, when I was able to leave the family home for two weeks, for a music camp, with daughters, when I returned, I’d been thrown out of the bedroom, a lock installed, and in short, this was when I determined to leave. These TYPES of activities continued, to this day, post-separation. Every decision I made that entailed putting daughters in a music class, or lessons, was permitted reluctantly, but eventually stopped. Then public declarations were made that I was isolating and depriving them. I attended a VERY liberal Midwestern college, and as a young person, was not restricted or berated for anything regarding my gender. The place I met this man was not illiberal — it ordained women, we preached in teams, and sometimes lived together.
During this marriage, I began to doubt that I was indeed in America. I had never heard of any experience like this, or known anyone who had experienced a situation like this violence, and abuse. Speaking of it to the variety of people I did, indeed, come in front of year after year, few of them had words to describe this thing that was happening to me. To this day, my “liberal” relatives will not use the word “domestic violence” or “abuse” in front of me, practically, and appear to be furious that I have actually spoken in these terms and insisted that this is indeed what happened. The denial has taken it beyond the legal terms — there has been, within my family — a literal denial that any of the laws to protect people from domestic violence exist, apply, or have anything to do with our case, or my many difficulties. Experientially, it needs a name. Now, gradually, through blogging, networking, reading, talking — and I have not been through ANYthing like the women below here — I have come to understand that this is a serious moral / emotional / social crisis our country is in. There are powerful political factors that HAVE to say the words “domestic violence” with their mouths, because the cat is out of the bag, and the horse is out of the barn. BUT, they are diluting, reframing, derailing the conversation and attempting, in many and disturbing ways, to turn back the clock on this matter of women saying NO! You can NOT do this! and saying it through the courts.
Every woman has to determine how she is going to respond to this shunning, when women in our world survive, and are emotionally supported primarily through their connections with others. that is the value that is respected (often) with American women. We are in our communities, we have children OR, we have careers, or juggle both. For women of my age (middle, OK?) to have both lost children AND career, and contact with their family, but not be a radical feminist, is indeed interesting. We can come into the church perhaps as ministers, acolytes (so to speak), or servants supporting its infrastructure. I, for one, no longer care to support the infrastructure of anything so dysfunctional. I consider myself to be courageous and independent (in certain ways), but there comes a burnout level. I have PTSD, and when exposed to more “women, get thee behind me, Satan” talk in certain denominations (many of them), I simply have to speak up, then leave. I will not hang out there. At least I have a few options.
To survive abuse, sometimes, one has to become two people: a public one and a private one. This includes sometimes with one’s spouse. At some level, my soul was not going to show itself any more, for another verbal beating for mere existence. Instead, I took the verbal tirades for being, supposedly, apathetic, wimpy, not caring and passive. Well, being anything else got me physically assaulted, or some other form of escalation, sometimes involving property destruction, or attack on pets. Children were in the home. I just couldn’t keep that up, and guess what: No one was backing me up. No one was confronting this man, really. At the end of the day, I had to come home to sleep. He began accumulating guns, and large knives. I don’t use these, or know how to, and it wasn’t too long (although more than a year) after this that I realized — we had to separate. I cannot tell you the level of shame and embarrassment I had, with or without children, having to hide my mail, ask strangers for rides, or a few $$ to put in the ggas tank (if I had a car). One night, I got stranded late at night in a downtown urban area after my night job. I took a ride with what might have been a drug dealer to get to a gas station. My ex came and got me, but with the news that someone had run over the cat that day, my favorite one (I always found this suspicious timing). The concern for my personal safety was at zero level. I kept journals. My journals were targeted, and I had to remove them from the home for safekeeping. He went after, and befriended the people keeping them, I got them back.
NOW: Now, I cannot live that dual personality way, and will not. When I go into a church and am expected to adopt a certain demeanor — I won’t. It’s like violence to the soul. I am one person: I will tell someone (in my family) if I am upset with them, and why.
The Court System:
The Family Court system in this country has become a charade. It rewards short-term performance in front of evaluators, mediators, judges, and other people. No one really looks behind the scenes — there is no interest, time or resources to fully check facts. For the most part. This system rewards the batterer “snake” personality: Charming, manipulative, dissembling. Or, alternately, wounded and looking helpless. I have seen a (female) judge leap to aid my ex, to the extent of testifying for him, as if he could not speak. I have watched him interrupt an attorney and derail the direct question, and get away with this. When I go to court, I am primarily PTSD, although I try pretty hard. All such a person needs to do is get through the next appearance with some person in authority, get their way, and afterwards, do whatever they want.
There are too many similarities between the hypocrisies and coverups of fundamentalist religion, and what I see in these courts. It is going to take women, feminist women, to address it. The other factor is, in this court, children are involved. We are not always 100% on board with the radical feminist regimes. I cannot tell you how many women in my situation, leaving batterers, losing their kids to stand by helplessly as their kids are showing symptoms of abuse, including child sexual abuse, are themselves religious. Many of them, their husbands or partners specifically targeted them in these circles — because the environment is male-domination-friendly.
When I say in my posts, that churches are NOT havens for women leaving violence, or necessarily shelters for them, I am absolutely in earnest. i hope, in my way, to be able to speak to this and do something about the shameful failure to support — or even SPEAK about — the laws against violence towards women, and children — in these venues. They are in their own ether, with their own agenda, and their own intents. I do not believe this is the genuine religion of, in my case, the man Jesus Christ as I read about him in scripture. I read nothing about his abusive or dismissive treatment of women; in fact it is the opposite. I think what we have now is a charade of that. For the most part. I don’t think most people have the guts to do what he did, but some do.
(WOW — where did THAT come from? Well, I’ll post. I may erase some of it another day…..)
Amina Said (L), 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, were shot dead by their father Yaser at their home in Irving, Texas, in January 2008. Said was upset by his daughters’ “Western ways” and was assisted in the killing by his wife, the girls’ mother. The victims of honor killings are largely teenage daughters or young women. Unlike ordinary domestic violence, honor killings often involve multiple family members as perpetrators.
Let’s Get Honest comments:
In “ordinary domestic violence” family members could be either hostages, victims, OR enablers. The truth is, it takes enablers for a PATTERN of domestic violence to thrive and grow. There is denial, there is incompetence, there is scapegoating, there is helpless ignorance in what to do. Many people in my culture have very strong emotions, but in certain classes and circles, this is not “socially acceptable.” So they suppress them behind circuitous speech, evasive answers, or simply no answers. When I got, out, I had some strong emotions (anger) as I began to stop hating myself (which was safer) and be angry. My anger was noticed – his violence, and the danger this represented — was not. I only recently simply decided to forgive, and do this entirely detached from any reason to, other than a decision, and a desire to be free from anger, and reactionary mode, which is typically either anger, or depression, when the insults, aggressions, etc. continue. That’s how I am choosing to handle it at this point.
I am posting quite a bit here about Islamic violence towards women. However, I am doing so with an understanding that forms of Protestantism (mainstream and nonmainstream) Christianity can still kill, destroy, and maim — physically and emotionally. I am here to warn out country not to ignore this hate talk from governmental circles towards women. In the lingo of domestic violence, denying it is a form of it (a.k.a. crazymaking). Below, is a passage from “Infidel” about “baari.” If I am able, I will find the passage from a Focus on the Family publication that sounds uncomfortably similar. And I will say, the “shunning” and patronizing (social, psychological) takes a different form, but still exists, when a Christian woman throws out an abusive husband and then shows up in church unapologetic.
And expecting to be treated with respect. Or worse, looking for an opportunity to actually speak or teach the Bible (this was why I got thrown out of the last place, and I was entirely too submissive in that as well). I finally came to the conclusion that it was safer outside those buildings.
Another alarming trend, vigilante-style behavior — AND TALK — around the issues of the family courts. Continuing on the topic of Honor Killings, which was “skirted” nicely in the Cairo speech, above….
The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 5,000 women are killed each year for dishonoring their families. This may be an underestimate. Aamir Latif, a correspondent for the Islamist website Islam Online who writes frequently on the issue, reported that in 2007 in the Punjab province of Pakistan alone, there were 1,261 honor murders. The Aurat Foundation, a Pakistani nongovernmental organization focusing on women’s empowerment, found that the rate of honor killings was on track to be in the hundreds in 2008.
There are very few studies of honor killing, however, as the motivation for such killings is cleansing alleged dishonor and the families do not wish to bring further attention to their shame, so do not cooperate with researchers. Often, they deny honor crimes completely and say the victim simply went missing or committed suicide. Nevertheless, honor crimes are increasingly visible in the media. Police, politicians, and feminist activists in Europe and in some Muslim countries are beginning to treat them as a serious social problem…
(SO WHY ISN”T OUR PRESIDENT?)
PLEASE ALSO, READ THESE TWO BOOKS. OK, THREE. I DID. I COULDN’T PUT THEM DOWN, IN FACT. AND I FELT I WAS READING ABOUT MY OWN FAMILY. I LIVE IN THE WEST. I LIVE IN THE USA. I DIDN’T EXPERIENCE, PHYSICALLY, AT ALL THE SAME AS THESE WOMEN. WHY DID IT FEEL FAMILIAR?
I FEEL AS THOUGH OUR FAMILY HAS BECOME LIKE A POLYGAMOUS CULT, AND WE ARE A SMALL, NUCLEAR, PROFESSIONALLY INVOLVED FAMILY, ABOUT 3RD GENERATION IN THE COUNTRY. NO ONE HAS BEEN JAILED. WHY DID THE BEHAVIOR SOUND SO FAMILIAR, AND WHAT’S GOING ON? I BELIEVE THAT IT IS THE EMOTIONAL, SPIRITUAL CONTENT OF THE BEHAVIOR WHICH IS THE SAME, FROM CULTURE TO CULTURE, EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY. HATE IS STILL HATE.
This book, and woman, are so well-known, I don’t think there is too much to be added. However, if not, READ.
WIKIPEDIA: (evidently not fully current)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (
pronunciation (help·info); Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali; born Ayaan Hirsi Magan 13 November 1969 in Somalia)[1]is a Dutch feminist, writer, and politician. She is the estranged daughter of the Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh‘s movieSubmission led to death threats. Since van Gogh’s assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004, she has lived in seclusion under the protection of Dutch authorities.
When she was eight, her family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet.
She is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, working from an unknown location in the Netherlands.[2][3] In 2005, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.[4] She has also received several awards for her work, including Norway’s Human Rights Service’s Bellwether of the Year Award, the Danish Freedom Prize, the Swedish Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship.[5]
HERE IS A LINK TO A 2007 Interview (NY Mag Review of Books). “The Infidel Speaks,” by Boris Kachka, Feb. 4, 2007
SHE SAYS SOME EXTRAORDINARILY RELEVANT THINGS.
I THINK IT EXTRAORDINARLY REMARKABLE THAT MY PRESIDENT DIDN’T MENTION MUCH ABOUT THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN, OR ANY OF THESE EXTRAORDINARY ONES, WHEN VISITING A MUSLIM COUNTRY. NOTE (AS TO “CAIRO SPEECH”), NONIE DARWISH, BELOW, FLED EGYPT FOR THE USA, AND CONVERTED TO CHRISTIANITY. HER YOUTUBE AND A PARTIAL INTERVIEW IS BELOW (SO LABELED: THIS IS THE SOMALIAN SWEDISH AMERICAN WOMAN HERE:
To her admirers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a maverick, bravely defying the Netherlands’ political correctness to address Europe’s growing cultural rifts. To detractors, she’s a charismatic bomb-thrower with as little regard for her adopted nation’s safety as for her own. Both sides would have to admit that the former Somali-Dutch politician is a master of self-reinvention. After a rough childhood (circumcision, daily beatings) in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, she escaped to Holland from a forced marriage, eventually joined the Dutch Parliament as a Muslim criticizing her own culture, and made a provocative film with Theo van Gogh that got him killed and sent her into hiding.
This is why I think that, just perhaps, President Obama might have been a little remiss to simply not address this issue in a Muslim nation. Nonie Darwish’s father was killed in jihad, and she left Egypt for the US. Now here is an American leader back in Egypt, speaking on this topic, and nothing substantial?
When a rival threatened to revoke her citizenship, the resulting furor toppled the governing coalition. But Ali just moved on, resigning and moving to Washington, D.C., where she now works for the American Enterprise Institute. It’s all retold in her eloquent new memoir, Infidel. Stopping by Soho House recently, she spoke with New York about life and politics in her latest adopted land.
You’ve been here for six months. How do you like the U.S.?
That is the question they all ask! I love it. The most comforting thing is the anonymity. I’m not allowed to talk about security—to tell you who in this room is security and who is not—but the pressure cooker of Holland is over. I am now just one individual in the melting pot.
You’re at a conservative think tank—perhaps an odd place for a harsh critic of religion in political life.
I consider myself nonpartisan, but I’m a liberal—not in the American sense, because Americans seem to refer to communists as liberals. What we see in Europe, because of the welfare state, is government pretending to provide all sorts of services they shouldn’t be providing.
Let’s Get Honest comment: My point EXACTLY, in many of these posts!
But what do you make of Christian conservatives in your ranks?
No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.
But you’re with them on the whole “clash of civilizations” thing?
When I was in Holland, the idea was, all cultures are equal and all are to be preserved. My idea was, no, all humans are equal but not all cultures are equal. In the culture of my parents, we never seemed to be able to succeed in such basic issues as getting food, interacting and living in peace with each other, or adapting to our environment, and the West, they’ve succeeded in all those. I’d been taught Western culture’s only bad. Maybe that’s good for your self-esteem, but it wasn’t taking us anywhere.
This woman comes from WHERE? And she understands the Declaration of Independence (principles) better than we do? It’s not the CULTURE, it’s the HUMANS:
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
THAT IS THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENTS. NOT DISHING OUT HAPPINESS AND HEALTH, BUT SECURING THOSE RIGHTS!
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
LOCALLY SPEAKING, SOME WOMEN NEED TO DISBAND THEIR FAMILY UNIT, TO SECURE THEIR SAFETY. WHO THE HELL IS THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO UNDERMINE THAT DECISION BY GOVERNMENTAL DECREE, AS HAS BEEN DONE IN THE FATHERHOOD RESOLUTIONS, GRANTS, INITIATIVES, AND TASK FORCES ?? ???
THE MAIN QUESTION IN THESE MATTERS IS WHETHER OR NOT WOMEN ARE INCLUDED IN THE INCLUSIVE NOUN “MEN” NOW, WOMEN HAD TO FIGHT FOR THIS, BUT IN 1920, AFTER SLAVES, WE MANAGED TO GET THE RIGHT TO VOTE. THIS WOMAN CAME FROM A RELIGION, THE NAME OF WHICH MEANT, “SUBMIT.” THE NAME OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, PER DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FROM GREAT BRITAIN, ABOVE, IS IN ESSENCE, PERMIT.
NOW AS TO FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES, I’D LIKE TO CITE THE PRIMARY CHRISTIAN VERSE USED TO JUSTIFY WIFE-BEATING:
You’ve dismissed accusations that you’re lashing out because of childhood traumas. So why write a memoir graphically detailing the abuse you and your siblings suffered?
It became important to say, “Okay, you guys keep accusing me of using my past. Let me tell you my story, and my story shows that I do not blame the death of my sister on Islam. I do not blame female genital mutilation on Islam.” My whole awakening was triggered by the eleventh of September, and it did not affect only me, it affected a lot of people.
Do you regret certain things you said about Muhammad—like that he was a pervert and a tyrant?
I don’t regret that. I’m still convinced that for Muslims to integrate fully into modern society, we cannot avoid discussing the prophet. We didn’t only deal with communism militarily, but we said it is a bad idea. The works of Karl Marx were discussed.
Maybe academia would have been a better—and less dangerous—venue.
Politics is not a good thing for me. But I wanted to bring out the issue of Muslim treatment of women in Holland, and I could only accomplish that in Parliament. If I had been a professor, it would just have disappeared in a cabinet.
“the Territory that is now Somalia was divided between the British and the Italians, who occupied the country as colonizers, splitting it in two. In 1960 the colonizers left, leaving behind a brand-new, independent state. A unified Somalia was born.”
“If in the process of baari you feel grief, humiliation, and everlasting exploitation you hide it. If you long for love and comfort you pray in silence to Allah to make your husband more bearable
AND:
“They call me infidel”. Ex-Muslim Christian Nonie Speaks out
This was of interest to me because the author had experienced a regime change within her home country, and then come to America and experienced a change of religion. So she spoke of the qualitative differences.
(11/20/2006)
Egyptian-born Nonie Darwish is “too controversial” to speak at Brown University, where her invitation to speak was just taken back. The title of her new book about says it all Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror . Good luck with that one. Here, where we’ve been attacked by jihadists, we don’t like to hear about the enemy we face.
(THIS IS AN INTERVIEW. EXCERPTS, HERE:)
LOPEZ: Are the majority of Muslim women oppressed? What can be done for them?
DARWISH: The majority of Muslim women are oppressed and that is due to Islamic sharia law which severely discriminates against women. Even the most educated and powerful Muslim women are faced with a legal system that is very discriminatory against women. Muslim women start the marital relationship from a weaker position. The Muslim marriage contract itself is unfair to women because Muslim men can add three more wives if he wishes. That changes the dynamic of husband/wife relationship even if a Muslim man does not exercise this right. Polygamy has a devastating impact on families. There are chronic social ills and tragedies stemming from this single right.
The court system is designed to oppress women, without a doubt.
{{Commentary: I read her book. She talks about how polygamy (one man, many women) pollutes relationships not just between the man and the woman, but also between women: backbiting, whispering, intrigue. I remembered my own case, which has many women involved in protecting a single man, vigorously defending his behavior, which was criminal, as though it were honorable, and I were the criminal for speaking up. I could not put this book down, asking WHY? does this sound like my family? I think these are spiritual issues, and that while the West does NOT endorse polygamy, within the court systems, at least, many of these dynamics are at play — first wives, second wives, etc. They are used against each other, undermining ALL women. }}
LOPEZ: How prevalent is “honor killing”?
DARWISH: According to Islamic law sex outside marriage is prohibited and the penalty for that is often death. The woman is always to blame because she is regarded as the source of the seduction. Muslim men’s honor is dependent on their women’s sexual purity. It does not matter how honorable the character of the Muslim man; but if his female relatives commit any sexual taboos, Muslim society will dishonor him. Arab culture is based on pride and shame** and a Muslim man cannot survive with this kind of shame unless he kills the source of that shame which is the female relative who have had sex outside of marriage. It is not known how common this crime of honor killing happens since it is often goes unreported and the police often looks the other way, but I believe it is common in certain parts of the Muslim world if the girl is discovered to be no longer a virgin or pregnant. That is why most girls in the Middle East remain virgins till marriage and there are very few births out of wedlock in the Middle East.
{{**I am concerned about the culture of “manhood” in the west being based on the same things. It is not a good basis. I also believe that, despite the level of indoctrination being nothing of the like, this same BASIS of education in the U.S. exists — and that is not a good basis for human behavior. Rather, how much better, to respect accomplishment in a variety of life situations. But school is NOT a variety of life situations, it is ONE of life’s many situations. To teach people to be puffed up, or feel inferior, based on their grade performances (although it is good to study and learn, and be able to have those skills), is simply wrong. How much better to be, rather engaged in the process of learning, and let that be the intrinsic reward. We will have better people.
I believe (opening up a bit here) that what happeend to me in music was, I was allowed to be more expressive, and less analytical, also less about, producing a grade. I didn’t value grades — already had them. They did nothing for me socially and weren’t hard enough to earn. They di dnot increase my sense of self-worth at all, as an adolescent. I learned to be ashamed about things that had no basis in shame, including my (good) grades, and so forth. The act of going to and from a classroom is not exactly a major accomplishment in life. The ability to help others learn to do something, or to engage as a human being; to build something, to design something, to perform something. But to fill in the correct multiple choice answers on a test sheet according to data you were fed in a textbook? That’s nothing; it’s for the convenience of the school comparing you to everyone else. . . . .. I remember failing on purpose, just to see what it felt like. I still graduated at the top of my (public high school class). The skills needed in college were entirely different. Thank God, there were pianos and there was singing, which led to different types of social interactions.
I believe that what I noticed about this book was when she spoke about the intense hatred, rivalry and bitter suspicious, ongoing, between women in particular. I have been dealing with this for the many years since I left my ex-husband, after the difficulties while dealing personally with him in the home. It really is wearing to the soul, and saddening. I am still seeking and believing for some of these family issues to resolve, but I feel sad when I see that, for the sake of eradicating my world view and values, my children were, literally, uprooted from contact with me, as if I might contaminate them somehow, with self-confidence, and the courage to be different. The courage to expect a woman to have equal legal rights to a man, in America, our country. So far, “NO DEAL”!!}}}}
LOPEZ: What’s it like to be a journalist in Egypt? Worse than life under the Patriot Act?
DARWISH: I was a journalist in Egypt in the early seventies when I worked at the Middle East News Agency in Cairo, Egypt. I was an editor, translator, and censor. As a censor I decided what was to be allowed for publication and what was not allowed. Egyptian media outlets at the time were controlled more or less by the government. Journalists were not really journalists in the Western sense of looking to expose government corruption and internal problems; they were more concerned in blaming the outside world. Military information was totally off limits in reporting. I once said to a fellow journalist that I met a Jew in one of my trips and that that was the first time I met a Jew. The colleague warned me that Arab journalists who communicate with Jews in foreign countries come back to Egypt in a box. Very few Arab journalists were even aware of the true role of media in a society. As to Western life under the Patriot Act, I think it the opposite Arab government controlled Media. In the West it has often become Media controlled government where freedom of the Press (having too much of a good thing) often comes before other important things in Western society, such as for example national security. Sometimes Western media has no tolerance for any restrictions and that can help America’s enemies.
LOPEZ: What made you leave Egypt?
DARWISH: I always regarded America as the land of hope, equality, and opportunity and that was my motivation. I also wanted to leave the Middle East with its problems, its jihad, its pride, anger, and anti-Semitism and above all the constant state of war with Israel.
I CAUTION, the United States of America, I CAUTION them to monitor the “us/them” mentality in every area of life. I CAUTIOn them to keep a lit on this vigilante return to Fatherhood, and the farming out of any conscience, guidance, and education of their young to anyone such as those in those in the Executive Branch of Government, who are presently engaged in establishing, on one hand a national religion (through a variety of means) and on the other hand, a totalitarian system in which choice is the heresy. Opting out of government involvement in the basic processes of life is a heresy.
There are aspects in which the fatherhood movement — as practiced, reminds me of the KKK. It is the same type of hate speech.
I am going to talk about another, very uncomfortable genocide I have read in some detail about (it just came up, and I continued reading, OK? It’s what I DO!) Rwanda. This is of interest to me because some churches protected, and some betrayed. Here is a personal, amazing story I ran across. Again, it is told by a woman:
“LEFT TO TELL“
In 1994, Rwandan native Ilibagiza was 22 years old and home from college to spend Easter with her devout Catholic family when the death of Rwanda’s Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of nearly one million ethnic Tutsis. She survived by hiding in a Hutu pastor’s tiny bathroom with seven other starving women for 91 cramped, terrifying days. This searing firsthand account of Ilibagiza’s experience cuts two ways: her description of the evil that was perpetrated, including the brutal murders of her family members, is soul-numbingly devastating, yet the story of her unquenchable faith and connection to God throughout the ordeal uplifts and inspires. This book is a precious addition to the literature that tries to make sense of humankind’s seemingly bottomless depravity and counterbalancing hope in an all-powerful, loving God.”
-Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review, March 2006
We all ask ourselves what we would do if faced with the kind of terror and loss that Immaculée Ilibagiza faced during the genocide in her country. Would we allow fear and desperation to fill us with hatred or despair? And should we survive, would our spirit be poisoned, or would we be able to rise from the ashes still encouraged to fulfill our purpose in life, still able to give and receive love? In the tradition of Viktor Frankl and Anne Frank, Immaculée is living proof that human beings can not only withstand evil, but can also find courage in crisis, and faith in the most hopeless of situations. She gives us the strength to find wisdom and grace during our own challenging times.”
-Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, and author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
“Left to Tell is for anyone who is weary of the predictable “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” trance most of the world suffers from. Immaculée Ilibagiza breaks that spell by bravely quelling the storm within, and contacting a force so powerful that it allows her to calm the storm “without,” and more important, to forgive the “unforgivable.” Her story is an inspiration to anyone who is at odds with a brother, a nation, or themselves.”
-Judith Garten, teacher and counselor of The 50/50Work© and a child of the WWII Holocaust
(As far as I got on this post July 2, 2009
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A Toxic Mixture – Survival Instinct diluted by Submission to Custody Orders (UK/Australia)
Cassandra Hasonovic…convinced she was going to die at the hands of her husband.
WHAT FATHERS’ RIGHTS PEOPLE DON’T TELL ABOUT WHY “MOTHER-HEADED HOUSEHOLDS” CAN BE SUCH A RISKY BUSINESS. . .
AND IT’S NOT THE MOTHERS….
I pause from mocking the “Fatherhood” resolutions of the US Congress to demonstrate that while they are laughable in premises, these resolutions are no laughing matter; to demonstrate again that men in positions of power worshipping abstract theories/myths/idols (or their images of themselves as a class) can put a woman face down dead and bloody on a slab of concrete, and just did. Again.
Another myth is that deadly consequences like this will cause deter the same men in power (I’m talking governmental representatives) from initiating, more, similar, and more costly mythology at a governmental level from continuing along the same path, gaining momentum and funding as they go:
NFI asked some** of our nation’s elected leaders about their views on the future of fatherhood in public policy.
(**more specificaly, The National Fatherhood Instititute (ca. 1994) chose to interview select policy makers who just happened also to be members of the “National Fatherhood Initiative’s Senate Task Force on Responsible Fatherhood” (origins at least pre-1998) what they thought of Fatherhood. Calling this “policymakers” is both true — they are PUSHing this policy through — and deceptive, as though it was representative of the entire Congress, prior to being pushed by these folks on this initiative. At least I HOPE there are some in Congress still that can see that this is costing women’s lives, and children’s in the long run….) Perhaps these fathers are upstanding in their own marriages and have a family life to be envied (although it could hardly be called a representative lifestyle, being a Congressperson).
What about the carte blanche, the clear endorsement such proclamations are giving men at the bottom of the economic spectrum, or of the behavioral spectrum, who may already have a chip on their shoulders and be looking for an excuse to dominate another woman?
We already have religions that do this. There are already honor killings, beheadings, in our country (USA). There are already family wipeouts in this country. There are horrific practices upon women in certain countries, still — stonings, genital circumcison, retaliation for attending school, rapes as a form of warfare, or when leaving a refugee camp to seek firewood. I am sorry to say this, but do we REALLY need a Congress of primarily (but not only) white men to say, with other (primarily) men of other color, and a woman or two, that it’s time to go back and reclaim your biological property, eradicate single motherhood that happened because a woman chose to leave abuse, or, you failed to use a condom or proper protection?
I would love to see a survey of every Congressperson, and see which marriage they are on, and how faithful they have been to their wives or, as it may be, husbands. If women, I would like to see how their grown children are behaving in THEIR marriages. When they divorce, do they pay child support? Do they engage in bankrupting and badmouthing a former partner?
To me, this is nothing less than Congress choosing to violate the First Amendment, in the U.S. It is the establishment of a state religion. How it relates to other continents and cultures? Similar doctrines, similar family law theories and practice.
Here is what some policymakers** are saying:
“The American family is the foundation of our society, and we must do all we can to help fathers do the right thing for their children. Today, too many men leave mothers to bear the brunt of being both mom and dad**, forcing them to face the challenges of raising a child and providing for the family on their own. I know President Obama shares my commitment to helping fathers become the best dads they can be; we worked together on these initiatives in the Senate. With the new administration on our side, we can make healthy families and responsible fatherhood a priority together.”
– Senator Evan Bayh*** (D-IN); co-chair of National Fatherhood Initiative’s Senate Task Force on Responsible Fatherhood
**Hypocrite!! The entire thrust of this movement (pun intended), as far as I can see in hindsight, was to prevent women from throwing abusive men (not ALL men) out on their asses for their abuse. The premise behind it, and the practices, and some of the groups, show the reality — allegations of domestic violence and child abuse are false, mostly, and highly exaggerated. Women do not have a right to leave with their children, and so must be re-programmed how to get along with fathers. The organizations funded, and subsidized (federally / state/ local) then go into prisons and other places where substantially suspect fathers may be found, and — in order to reduce the welfare tax load, and by reducing child support arrears in exchange for more contact with their kids, thereby burden the rest of society with the results. The NFI (this initiative) almost exactly coincides with the VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) and was heavily funded from the start.
Did I know this before working closely a few years with the local child support agency and finding out how “opaque” they truly were? No. Not til I started actually reading the programs, and comparing the programs with the rhetoric.
***Of note: Senator Bayh’s personal acquaintance with fatherhood includes having a father who was a U.S. Senator
From the time he was about 8 through majority, his Dad was a Senator.
Evan Bayh graduated with honors in business, economics and public policy from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business in 1978, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi, and received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Virginia in 1981. After clerking for a federal court judge and entering private law practice in Indianapolis, he was elected Indiana’s Secretary of State in 1986.
Bayh was elected Governor of Indiana in 1988 and re-elected in 1992 with the highest percentage of the vote in a statewide election in modern Indiana history.
While this stellar college performance and work history is commendable, I do not think it provides an experiential understanding of the situations that lower-income brackets face in their families. I think that a little failure would have perhaps been helpful (Lincoln had some, right?) along the way, perhaps.
As Such, What THESE Policy Makers are Saying. . .
. . . is kind of like the Foxes quoting other Foxes (from the Fox Initiative) on how “difficult’ the Hens must find life without a resident Fox in the house. I am not referring to all men — I personally like men, and am heterosexual, and don’t think they all think like this. At least, I know at least one or two who do not, and hope to find more, as they are good company.
FINANCIALLY SUPPORTING A FAMILY IS ONE OF THE LEAST WORRIES TO SOME SINGLE MOTHERS…
Here’s the summary, and the story is below:
Despite History and Threats of Further Domestic Violence, British Wife Who Fled to Australia Seeking Safety is Ordered to Return Children to England for Custody Determination
(NOTE: This is why I like Jack Straton’s article on Custody Rights to Men Who Batter).
- Husband is convicted of sexually assaulting Wife.
- Wife is terrified that Husband will kill her.
- Husband allegedly threatens to dismember her.
- Wife flees to Australia with their two Children.
- But the Australian courts rule that England has child custody jurisdiction under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.
- Wife returns to England with Children.
- Police are summoned to intervene in domestic clashes several times.
- Police give Wife a “panic alarm”. {{SHE’s ALREADY Panicked & Alarmed? How about Pepper Spray? A self-defense course? A “right to carry?” (I guess UK doesn’t do that). Or a KNIFE , and training in how to use it?– he killed her with a knife…}}{{So much for “panic alarms.” Oh, she was just exaggerating, the police will protect her. TELL ME — has practice changed since THIS murder?}}
- About a year after Wife’s return, Husband allegedly drags her from a car and stabs her to death … in front of her own mother and their Children.
- Just a few hours after she begged British police for protection.
- While she was in the midst of trying to flee from Husband again.
- Husband is convicted of murder.
- He will serve at least eighteen years in confinement.
- (I add: Her sons will serve a lifetime, with this memory, plus their grandmother, plus all acquaintances.)
WHATEVER PRINCIPLES AND PREMISES LED TO THESE COURT DECISIONS — FOR WHOSE GOOD?
THEY WERE Speculation. That’s a Risky Business, and I feel that the indicators that this is straight mythology, at some level. This type of decision is driven by “fatherhood” as an ideal, and premises that a man without his children is a man without an identity, as is a woman telling the truth — this is a dangerous situation. A man’s rights, even if he’s already been proven criminal, are more important than a woman’s rights — to self-defense by fleeing. A mother’s words are less valid than a father’s. Women as a class are to obey. Men as a class, if forced to subject themselves to the same laws, are prone to killing for the humiliation, and yet still, the NEXT set of women (with kids) are also told, they must obey or go to jail.
In the last post (U.S. Congress Resolution of 1999, a National Fathers Return Day) it was said that “mother-headed-households” fare worse, as a class. Whether or not the data was true, THIS is partly why, and was not reported. Because they are taking heat already for being single. Perhaps a second husband (Women, would YOU remarry quickly after her experience? Men, would YOU marry a woman with kids who was in the process of fleeing her first one? Unless this answer is YES, and some man is brave enough to step in the gap (and being armed, probably), that is going to be a mother-headed household. Put this in your pipe and smoke it when you read the NEXT proclamation I post, US House of Reps, saying the same thing, and voting unanimously as to its truth. Yeah, well, some truths are created, others are self-evident without that extra self-propagating “creation” of a risky, dangerous situation, that of being a single mother when the climate is globally cooling towards permission of this state of affairs. And in ONE country from which some of the laws in the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave.
That’s ridiculous. I am so at a loss for words, I would like to quote some scripture here, but I’m talking about Family Law, if you will bear with me:
(Bible: Eccles. 3, ERV)
This, from the same guy that said, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity…, and the same one who, one time, when judging between two women who argued over one baby, after one had just been rolled over and smothered to death, was able to discern by a simple test – and his test, though with a sword, has some resemblances to the co-parenting, 50/50 talk of today. The woman who did NOT want her kid chopped in half (this time, physically) was the true one. Nowadays, this dude (who went down the tube, eventually, the record states) ain’t around, or anyone with close to the amount of discernment shown below:
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; {{like a dangerous marriage…}}
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down{{ibid}}, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7. a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
{{This woman saw fit to “rend” her marriage. She was not permitted to. Why??}}
8 a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
Human sacrifice has ALWAYS been the trademark of religion. Some faiths would say, a false religion. True adherents of any religion are typically willing to kill others, not just themselves, for its sake.
It is right to hate placing onesself and one’s offspring (and others) in the path of danger. That’s a “time to hate.” Not people, but the situation. Sacrificing others may come easily, but sacrificing one’s own offspring is NOT a natural act. Forcing someone to do this is to do violence against her integrity, and one of the primary functions of “MOTHERHOOD” in the name of “FATHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!” – — yes they do, but this one, in particular, should not have. You will say, but what about due process?
What about due haste when life is at risk?
Young Mother Fled to Sydney to Save Her Life. UK forces her back, where she is stabbed to death in front of her two boys, and mother, by the man she fled.
Paola Totaro Herald Correspondent in London
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
May 2, 2009
CASSANDRA HASANOVIC was convinced she was going to die at the hands of her husband but her pleas for help – in Australia and Britain – fell on deaf ears.
“He said he was going to chop me up in little pieces and post me piece by piece to my family,” she told police more than a year before her death.
The nightmare tale of the mother, 24, who was dragged out of a car and stabbed to death by her husband in front of her mother and two young sons in July, neared its climax in a British court yesterday.
Mrs Hasanovic died hours after begging British police to drive her to a safe house: “I live in fear for my safety. I am so scared of him.”
{{THERE IS A MORAL TO THIS STORY, IN ASKING POLICE FOR PROTECTION….}}
Her story was recounted this week during the trial of Hajrudin Hasanovic, 33, who was last night found guilty of murder and sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in jail.
The jury learned how he was to have been deported to his native Serbia after losing custody of his children, following his conviction for sexually assaulting his wife.
They heard a damning story of a woman whose fears were ignored by authorities in two hemispheres for more than 12 months.
The five-year marriage ended in May 2007 after the sexual assault and Mrs Hasanovic fled to Australia, where she had relatives. She lived in the safety of Sydney’s western suburbs in the fervent hope of seeking custody of her sons.
But Lewes Crown Court, in West Sussex, heard that Australian authorities insisted she return to Britain, arguing the case had to be pursued there.
Philippa McAtasney, QC, who opened the case for the prosecution, told the court that she returned to Britain at the cost of her life.
In the months that followed her return, police were called to several violent confrontations between the couple, and officers equipped the young mother with a panic alarm.
{{Why didn’t they arrest and incarcerate the attacker?? ??? ???? She was already panicked and had already sounded the alarm, by fleeing the continent — but was not heard…..}}
Mrs Hasanovic’s mother, Sharon De Souza, broke down as she described the terror inside the car on July 29, when her son-in-law appeared from nowhere and lunged at the car as she prepared to drive her daughter and grandsons to a refuge.
{{WHEN WILL WE — WORLDWIDE – – STOP FOCUSING ON REFORMING BATTERERS (WHICH DOES NOT HAVE A TRACK RECORD OF SUCCESS — AND TEACH WOMEN TO DEFEND THEMSELVES, FOR A DETERRENT? IT TAKES A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF COWARDICE TO ATTACK AN UNARMED WOMEN, WITH KIDS NEARBY. PERHAPS THESE COWARDS HOW PICK ON THEIR WIVES, IN FRONT OF THEIR SONS AND DAUGHTERS, CAN BE DETERRED WHEN THEY REALIZE, THAT THEY ARE NOT GOING TO GET AWAY WITH EVEN THE 2ND SUCH ASSAULT. THERE IS NOTHING UN-FEMININE, REALLY, ABOUT SELF-DEFENSE. WE HAVE TO TEACH WOMEN THIS. NOT GANG-STYLE, BUT INDIVIDUALLY, TEACHING US TO DEFEND OUR PERSONAL BOUNDARIES, PHYSICALLY IF NECESSARY.}}
In the panic, the car’s central locking was de-activated, allowing Hasanovic to reach into the back seat, where his wife was sitting between the boys.
“I just remember trying to start the car and the alarm went off and I could not get the car started … I could see a figure coming towards me in the shade …” Mrs De Souza said.
“I looked up again and he was staring towards me. … I just thought: ‘Oh, my God.”‘
She then saw Hasanovic drag her daughter from the car, leaving her face down on the pavement.
“She was lying on the ground. Her eyes were open and she was not moving at all.
“I didn’t realise she was dead. I said: ‘Come on, hold on, you’re going to be OK.’ I could see the blood [but] I could not take it in and I remember hearing the boys screaming.”
“Cassie was devastated when under the Hague convention she was ordered to return the boys to England,” Mrs De Souza said.
“This brutal, cruel and senseless act has torn our lives apart”.
AND — IT WAS NEEDLESS.
I hope, pray, blog, and ask people who are in “intact” marriages (not marked by violence, or even bitter divorce) to wake up and participate, not in indignation that women are indignant, or fleeing, but in studying WHAT your governments are doing (worldwide) and the NGOs that are running the place. Thank you. Take time off from barbecuing, or soccer teams for a month, or a season. I’m talking to what remains of “middle class” people, who perhaps are employed and housed, and panicked about losing work or housing. How does that compare with women like this one, above? Your governments, at least I can speak for mine, ARE wasting money and time in policies that kill.
IN HER PURSUIT OF LIFE (LET ALONE, LIBERTY AND PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS), THIS WOMAN FLED TO AUSTRALIA, LISTENING TO THE OBVIOUS, AND HER INSTINCTS. BEING A MOTHER, AND HAVING HAD CHILDREN (a.k.a. property), SHE WAS SPIT OUT FROM AUSTRALIA BACK TO UK, AND THERE MURDERED. IN FRONT OF HER SONS, AND HER MOTHER, WHILE FLEEING.
More Sardonic Commentary
Meanwhile, in family courts around the world, women (and some men) are told that expressing outrage at indignation and crime is itself a crime, and should be punished by paying for “parenting classes” until they (as adults) realize that the police, the judge, the psychologist, the evaluator, the Guardian at Litem, the Child Protective Services worker, the District Attorney, the Mediators, the educators, and the government know more ab out their own lives, and what’s best for them, than they themselves do.
This is called the Artificial Womb.
(GOOD GRIEF — I just Googled that term, and found this:
Why Not Artificial Wombs?
In 1924, the British scientist {{PROBABLY MALE!!}} J. B. S. Haldane coined the term “ectogenesis” to describe how human pregnancy would one day give way to artificial wombs. “It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenic child,” Haldane wrote, imagining how an earnest college student of the future would describe the phenomenon. “Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.”
I mean this METAPHORICALLY, and I guess now have another post….THIS one is about how worshipping fatherhood has cost real mothers their lives. I had not realized (yet) how long ago it entered into men’s imagination to eliminate pregnancy and childbirth, which I suppose interrupts for nine months some of their other wished-for biological functions, that is in men not mature enough to understand what the whole wonder, relationship, and process is actually about. I predict, that if this becomes successful — that motherhood as a relationship reality is eradicated, AND as a biological one — that the entirety of the human race will become so theoretically smart, and practially stupid, that we (so to speak — count me out!) will destroy ALL of each other, sooner, rather than later. Which of course, some of the human race is currently engaged in, and at least two world religions I am aware of predict. That’s probably less “myth” than an accurate reading of human nature, which this “fatherhood” stuff is not. It’s an “ism” not a reality. The REALITY is that men and women vary in behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and levels of responsibility to which they have risen.
BACK TO THIS POST:
Good “parenting” teaches one’s children’ how to recognize danger (and when to flee it), that it’s OK to express indignation and anger in order to protect personal boundaries (i.e., send a warning message to whoever is violating them), and if necessary after that, fight back.
Parenting classes, as I understand them, exist to prevent fathers and mothers from doing this, and to create a numbed down (or, bipolar) set of behaviors — one for the teachers, and one when the teachers are not watching. This is a recipe for destruction.
Men around the world are whining, publically and in on-line groups, and promoting studies, that women are just as violent and dangerous as they are. Well, if that WERE so, it appears to me that nonviolent self-preservation techniques (like FLIGHT) aren’t working, so what shall we then do?
Where are all the men killed by angry ex-wives? They aren’t there because our cultures (exception: TV media, popular films), and primary institutions coach women to be passive and submissive — or they will be punished. We are told to obey rules, and we do.
Perhaps it would be better if it was understood that it IS dangerous to confront a woman physically. Perhaps this might be a deterrent. If men are going to reject, as partners, women who stand up to them, then let them propagate with the passive ones, and perhaps — just perhaps, some of the non-passive surviving women may be a role model, should this get to the point of violence.
The last time I had personal contact with a woman who lost a child to a man she’d divorced who had already been convicted of molesting her other child, was only yesterday. This is distressing. As is typical, she has to pay for supervised visitation to see the pre-adolescent son that was removed from her custody for reporting child abuse.
It’s also an unfair choice to any woman –become a criminal and fugitive, or risk your life,
and your children’s lives and sense of sanity and safety in this world, til they mature.
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In the Best Interests of Suffering the Little Children – to survive Childhood (alive)…
(From “WAtoday.com.au”)
Suffer the little children
- Jen Jewel Brown
- May 2, 2009
IT WAS 3am on Anzac Day when Dionne Fehring woke in fear. She was in her mother and stepfather’s Tallebudgera house on the Gold Coast, the house she’d fled to after her marriage turned irrevocably violent. “I felt that there was something wrong. Just had that natural mother’s instinct,” she says now.
There’s a quiet dignity holding the tremor in Fehring’s voice these days.
“I just had a feeling from the moment that I woke up that something wasn’t right. Everyone around me was very excited about the kids coming,” she says.
“There was something inside me that would not let me get my hopes up. I had a feeling that he wouldn’t make it that easy. But I never thought that he’d actually kill them … I thought he might kill me, but never them.”
Fehring, whose surname was Dalton back in 2004, was right to be afraid. At 3am precisely, her two children, 17-month-old daughter Jessie and baby Patrick, 12 weeks, were being murdered by their father, Jayson Dalton.
“They know when it happened,” says Fehring, “because when the police broke in, they broke in to find the kids lying dead on the bed, and he’s actually put down the time that he had killed them and written it above their heads.
He had suffocated them with plastic bags. Then he killed himself the same way.
Moving to Seymour in country Victoria, Fehring has mercifully had two more young children she rejoices in. She now works as a patron with the Gold Coast Domestic Violence Prevention Centre.
She sees herself as a survivor rather than a victim. Yet a growing sense of frustration and bafflement has led her to speak out publicly for the first time since 2004.
“In five years, I have seen no changes in the way we deal with the deaths of women and children who come through the Family Court,” she says. “We continue to lose these beautiful little children. It rocks me to the core. I have waves of sadness, then anger, that the deaths of my children were in vain.”
The story of the Dalton family is just one of many domestic tragedies that have played out in Australia over recent years.
According to Australian Institute of Criminology research, an average of 25 children were killed by their parents each year between July 1989 and June 2002. Beyond this worst-case scenario is a hidden epidemic of child harm that the welfare system struggles to control.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that there were 317,526 reports of suspected child abuse and neglect made to state and territory authorities in 2007-08, continuing a trend of increased notifications — up more than 250 per cent on a decade ago.
Children at risk of such harm are likely to end up being processed by a family law system that critics, including Fehring, believe is not well-designed to protect them.
In 2006, the Family Law Act was substantially amended to reflect a greater emphasis on shared parental responsibility. One of the changes required the court to look at two primary considerations when deciding what is in the child’s best interests. The first is the desire for children to have a meaningful relationship with both parents; the second the need to protect them.
But some experts believe that in cases of family violence, the principles conflict with one another.
Sarah Vessali, principal lawyer at the Women’s Legal Service Victoria for almost eight years and now in private practice, deals daily with family law matters. “There is a contradiction between the two fundamental principles — they cannot work together where there is family violence,” she says.
THE Dalton marriage had bloomed gently at first from an internet romance. “He had moments when he was loving and tender,” recalls Fehring. But a punch that cracked their car windscreen also produced the first cracks in the marriage.
Dalton became verbally abusive. He insisted his wife go back to work three days after giving birth to Jessie, their firstborn. Then the beatings began.
In the 2½ years of their marriage, Dalton threw a microwave at his heavily pregnant wife and toddler, shattered French doors and bashed Fehring repeatedly. Multiple assaults were on police record. In fact, police were so concerned for her safety, they applied for (and were granted) a domestic violence order on her behalf, as she was too frightened to take one out herself.
By March 10, 2004, the marriage was in a state of collapse. Dalton, so much bigger than his wife, told her: “Tonight’s the night. It’s on. It’s going to happen tonight.”
Fehring was left in a state of intense fear. As she drove to her mother’s with the kids, Dalton gave chase. He rang her mobile 76 times in that 90-minute drive.
When he hit her mother on arrival, he broke his latest domestic violence order for the second time. Arrested and jailed overnight, and released at midday the next day, Dalton was in a savage mental state.
Fehring began to panic. She had given birth to Patrick (who, although much loved, was conceived, she says, when Dalton raped her), only about six weeks earlier. She didn’t last the five-hour drive with her mother and the kids to a relative’s home. Exhausted and at breaking point, she was hospitalised in the acute mental health unit at Toowoomba Hospital for 10 days. That was Dalton’s chance.
On March 17, 2004, in a 14-minute hearing, the Brisbane Family Court gave interim custody of the infant Patrick and his sister Jessie to Jayson Dalton, former One Nation candidate and long-term batterer.
Fehring’s solicitor, Ros Byrne, had less than 24 hours warning of Dalton’s bid for custody. She told the judge: “There are domestic violence issues.” That was it.
Fehring, ill, could not be there. “I have no idea why they gave him custody,” she says. “And I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. They were in no danger, they’d been with mum, she was taking care of them with my sister.
“My solicitor knew I was petrified. She told the court there were domestic violence issues and yet the children were handed over to a violent man.”
In the weeks that followed, Dalton’s dad helped his son care for the children. By April 23, Fehring was well enough to go back to court and be awarded custody, with Jayson to have the children every second weekend. On Anzac Day, Dalton was supposed to hand the children back.
Asked to turn her mind back to that Anzac Day afternoon, and the mad dash she made from the Gold Coast when Dalton did not arrive at the Southport police station with the children as arranged, Fehring clears her throat. Although she didn’t know it then, her mother had already found Dalton’s emailed suicide note.
“My mobile had gone dead and so no one could call and tell us what had happened, and by the time we got up there, just to the rise of where the actual house was at the bottom of the hill, um, we could see all the flashing lights, fire brigade and the ambulance and newsmen and everything else, and I just raced across the road,” she says.
“The police stopped me from going up the stairs into the house and I just said to them, ‘Cover me, I don’t want anyone to see me’, and I just collapsed in a heap. My stepfather nearly had a breakdown. He tried to climb the stairs and they pulled him back.”
She continues after a deep sigh. “We didn’t get to say goodbye to my babies until early the next morning. I had to go to the morgue and identify them. Their little bodies covered with a sheet.
“I just want something changed so that we can protect women and children so that these cases don’t continue to happen. No mother should ever be put through that experience.”
Child abuse expert emeritus professor Freda Briggs, of the education, arts and social sciences division of the University of South Australia, has firm views about changes needed to family law.
“The level of ignorance by judges and (Family Court) staff about child development, domestic violence and sexual abuse is inexcusable,” she says.
“Judges ignore DV (domestic violence) because (a) some psychologists tell them that men who bash their wives don’t necessarily bash their children and (b) they don’t seem to know that witnessing violence is as damaging to children as being a victim of it. Education is so badly needed.”
Sarah Vessali agrees that change is necessary. She suggests that Australia look to the New Zealand model, where the prima facie stance is that where allegations of abuse are raised, contact is disallowed until they are disproved.
In Australia, the legal system demands that the accusing parents prove such allegations, which can be difficult.
“If (the allegations) cannot satisfactorily be proven to the court … then (the accuser) runs the risk of having the court order costs against them,” Vessali says.
A petition calling for change has gathered close to 3000 signatures from affected families and professionals, women and men. One anonymous signatory summed up the concerns of many who work in the system: “As a community worker providing support to women and children escaping domestic violence, we have significant contact with the Family Court and access orders.
“It has been our organisational experience that the family orders often place the children at risk of emotional, if not physical, abuse.
“It is of upmost priority, for the children involved, to have a closer look at issues of domestic violence when deciding on residency issues.”
In Fehring’s view, the system is going backwards not forwards. “Why do women and children continue to lose their lives?” she asks. “What I want is a more in-depth look into the Family Court. We need to get to the root of a problem and not just make a snap decision based on two minutes worth of information.
“I want us as a society to be able to see this openly.” The media, she says, should not be prevented from reporting important cases. “If we are not made aware of these problems, then we blindly go about our day totally unaware of what is going on behind closed doors.
“The women who might be sitting at home contemplating leaving a domestic violence situation may get the strength to leave her relationship. We need to become proactive before any more of these problems occur and we lose more of our precious children.”
As part of a campaign by concerned Australians to improve the way the Family Court system deals with cases such as Fehring’s, national rallies, run by the Safer Family Law Campaign, are planned for this morning.
At the Mayday! rallies, affected parents wearing red scarves and masks to hide their identities (family law curtails free speech) will speak alongside child rights representatives, academics, lawyers and members of various groups.
Clotheslines strung with children’s red clothes will be raised at rallies in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.
Jen Jewel Brown is a Melbourne writer and Victorian co-ordinator of the Mayday! Safer Family Law Campaign rally, which will be held in Carlton Gardens, Rathdowne Street, 11am-12.15pm
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British Voice on International Problem: Family Courts
Guilty until proved innocent: the grotesque reality of family courts
Will we be able to report if a mother kills herself through the grief of loss?
THERE IS SOMETHING I wanted to write about today. But I cannot. I cannot even tell you that I cannot tell you, because to do so might be to imply what it was I wanted to write about. And that might lead you to infer that I was referring to a situation that I should not refer to. Get it? No?
I am beginning to understand why so few journalists write about cases in the family courts. The lawyers are patiently diminishing my file of potential cases week by week. But at least I am learning about the armoury of secrecy that social services can deploy which prevents scrutiny of the removal of children from their parents.
John Sweeney, an investigative reporter and presenter on the BBC’s Real Story, describes reporting on the family courts as being as difficult as reporting from Zimbabwe. Of the seven child abuse cases he has covered in the criminal courts over the past few years, all have ended in the quashing of convictions. Some of the defendants — Angela Cannings and Sally Clark — have become household names. But of the five cases he has covered in the family courts, all have ended in the parents losing their children for ever. You will probably never know the names of those people. Their names must be changed and their faces blocked out, to “protect” the children. It is hard to expose miscarriages of justice when the stories are drained of human content.
What I have found extraordinary is how often highly able lawyers are uncertain about what we can and cannot write. Despite the issuing of a model order last year by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, then head of the Family Division, the court orders that limit press coverage are still often so badly drafted as to be completely unclear. Sometimes the order that is drawn up by the court bears no relation to the draft that the press was sent in advance of the hearing. Sometimes we are notified of the order too late to make representations against it. It costs money to fight these orders. Local papers in particular cannot afford to consult lawyers all the time. The result is self-censorship: one errs on the side of caution. We end up conspiring to silence families.
The irony is that the injunctions are becoming more draconian just as a door is opening in Whitehall. Harriet Harman, the Minister for Constitutional Affairs, has announced that she will consult this year on opening up the family courts to greater scrutiny. This is a positive step. But make no mistake: the same old authorities are gearing up to argue that openness is inappropriate where children are involved.
Even if that particular battle is won, there will still be miscarriages of justice. For the Government’s consultation will not deal with some fundamental unfairnesses at the heart of the system. The first is the threshold for conviction. In a criminal court, you are innocent until proved guilty, and you can only be convicted if your guilt is beyond reasonable doubt.
A family court, because it cannot imprison you — only condemn you to serve a different kind of life sentence by taking away your child — “convicts” on a balance of probabilities. You cannot plead not guilty. In fact you are often penalised for not showing “remorse”. The assumption of guilt starts with the first referral to social services and continues into the courtroom, where few judges allow parents to call experts in their defence. New medical research is slowly demolishing the textbooks on child abuse: including various new and innocent explanations for certain types of fracture that are currently thought by social workers to be diagnostic of abuse. But this new thinking is rarely permitted into the family courtroom.
Wrongs are compounded by the irreversible nature of the judgments. It is generally accepted that once a child has been adopted, the parents cannot see that child again even if they have managed to prove their innocence. They cannot even refer in public to that child by name. Yet this is utterly wicked. Yes, it will be desperately tricky to reunite innocent parents with children who have been adopted by other loving families. But it is a challenge that society must rise to. It is just not good enough to use the manifest difficulties as an excuse for not even trying. Lorraine Harris, who was cleared after serving a jail sentence for shaking her baby to death, when it was proved that he had a blood disorder, has little hope of ever seeing her other child again. We only know of her because her case went through the criminal court. How can this be? How can we pile wrong upon wrong?
The more I study this area, the more unanswered questions appear. Will we be able to report if a mother kills herself through the grief of loss? Or will they say that this, too, would not be in the interests of the child? Will we be able to report if an adopted child continues to suffer from precisely the complaints that were originally taken to be evidence of abuse? If the family courts are opened up, will there be any redress for parents who protest their innocence, who were convicted in secret? A little more light, please, into the dark corners.
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Obamaland: Domestic Violence Awareness pre- and post-election
SUBJECT MEMO:
Obama on Domestic Violence, in “Domestic Violence Awareness Month” (Oct. 08)
OCTOBER 2, 2008 2:18AM
“http://open.salon.com/blog/kellylark/2008/10/01/obama_on_domestic_violence
(1) About My (FamilyCourtMatters) Blog, Topic-Switching.
I see it as “Alternating Threads of Thought.” There IS a tapestry involved, imperfect and news-sensitive though it is.
Readers will find that I may skip from topic to topic among my posts. One day, it may be recent news of family annihilations (in the context of divorce and custody). Another, it may be my reaction to administrative non-reaction to this. A third day, it may be a bit of history on the courts, or the next day, I post an article from the 1990s. Yesterday, I tacked on a database (that has been lurking link-side for a long time here), about the US Federal Government, where your $$ went, and how to find out.
(On the $$, I am also working up a separate site . . . . sarcastically entitled “Administering Families, Serving Humanity.” (“http://hhs-acf-ocse-et-al.blogspot.com/“). So far, it’s not yet populated with a post.
Well, possibly that comes from having been a musician, and part of this time, a conductor. Expect different dynamics, melodies, and energy levels. It’s not just about a single tune (“Father’s Rights. Mother’s Rights. Best Interests of Children. Feminism is anti-God. God is anti-woman. Domestic Violence. Child Abuse, or “false allegations” thereof. Parental Alienation vs. Post-divorce pedophiliac behavior. Parental KIDNAPPING. Due Process Lost. Law and (dis)order. in the Courts. Forensic Psychology vs. fact-finding when it comes to child abuse (or for that matter, IPV). “Healthy Marriage” promotion vs. a single citizen’s right to protect herself/himself and her or his children. (Boy, i bet THAT order of genders caught your attention!) … Sob stories, Statistics, suicides, femicides, homicides, familycides, or – – – – is it REALLY all just about the money? Or is it social engineering from on high…))
Clamoring melodies trying to drown each other out, true. But on this blog (although I’m sure you detect to what tune my theme is generally pitched) the idea is to examine many threads, and pick up on the energy level, dynamics, and the cumulative expression. IF the cumulative expression is diminishment of CIVIL rights and due process, we have a problem, folks! If you come to this conclusion, then I have plenty of links for you to do some homework, or search terms to think about to validate / invalidate your conclusions ideas.
IF justice is being bought and sold at the federal mandate (or initiative) level, and the bottom end of the food chain, those with the most to lose in the matter of injustice, then we have a moral / spiritual / serious constitutional issue (which I think we do).
OR, is it just about the heirarchy of studiers (and funding for the studies) vs. studied (the population to be tested, randomly sampled, and have the techniques re-adjusted to achieve a desired result — a GOVERNMENT desired result that was not subject to popular vote or poll) then we have a problem. And that “we” is all of us but those who do not need a country to protect their assets, their families, or their livelihoods.
So Subject Switching here is to be expected. Pick your melody and follow it — or, just float along, feel the tilt and roll of the boat. If you have leisure for the “float along” blog-read, I presume you are not IN the system, because IN the system many of us (without personal connections, or personal resources, or a professional guide — or a professional guide TO the professional guides, who prey on novices) are water-skiers with one ski and a frayed rope, we need to pay close attention to the wake (of the motorboat) and find ways to maintain our stamina on the fly. As such, we will be skiing faster and farther afield, and more dangerously so, than those in the motorboat. If this is you, you might enjoy the thrill of it, or, having had enough, try to let go, slowly sink, and hope shore is within swimming distance. Or, that the boat circling back to see where you were, lets you on board, and doesn’t force more of the same.
After all, a trip through the family law (and child support, psycho-jargon) system, or through the wide-cast trawling nets that reel squiggling, flapping, or stunned catch from the bottom of the ocean (or food chain, as it were), is going to change one’s major relationships: With children, spouse, employment, possibly former social acquaintances, concepts of “liberty and justice for all” and a few more items.
Therefore, it’s my blog, and it’s broad in scope. If you are overwhelmed, welcome to it. It succeeded in communicating — because that’s how families are. If you as a bystander don’t LIKE supporting families (societies) trashed by this, then please come back later and chew off some more data and digest it, or chew it (but don’t inhale — former President Clinton says he didn’t, neither should you. Take time out, but DO come back.) And don’t spit anything dark and nasty at me, either, please! Spittoons ARE available in comments, which I moderate.
Or visit some of the illustrious buttons I’ll be adding later today, and get another take on these items.
Speaking of visitors, this blog is getting viewers from many countries, including a few whose names I don’t even recognize. Please make yourselves known in a comment or two — I get a little nervous when India, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia show up shortly after I’ve posted something with the word “honor killing” in it, or something about a brave 12 year old that said, give me the law, not your version of it — to her parents, when it came to marrying too early. Then again, maybe it’s someone else taking heart, which would be wonderful. I do wonder what West Finland, Sweden, and Scotland are doing here, and Washington, D.C., I’m citing your data and commenting on it, so “deal with it,” OK? Los Angeles, if you’re the Courthouse, ditto!
(2) Today’s topic, and how I got to it:
Intro:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or, how many “awareness” days can you pile into one little month, APRIL, when at least in the U-S-A, many are most sensitively aware to the I-R-S? I believe April was: Sexual Assault Awareness month, Child Abuse Awareness Month, and in a few states, governors were persuaded to tack on “Parental Alienation Awareness DAY.” After all, one needs to even the score every now and then, which PA is intended to do, and in some arenas, has more than. The thing to become aware of as to “PAS,” however, is its author, its origins, its prophets & priests, and the varying (and they do vary — radically) responses of various areas of professional expertise (and grants/salaries) Pro or Con.
Well, I can now scope out the “He Said / She Said // WE (the experts) say” sites, fairly quickly, They tend to have more limited vocabularies, and the themes are fairly simple to follow. This gets boring, and sometimes I like to check one of the regular news an commentary, and just search on a hot term: “domestic violence” or (any of the above). Say, “truthout,” or CS Monitor, or Washington Post, or, today, Salon.com caught my eye.
In between other interests which kind of make up for, I suppose the years when the general tenor of the marital conversation was half a Bible version on gender roles (if you’ve been there, you know which one I mean), or reproof for not living up to my 9 /10ths of the imaginary marriage vows (as opposed to the one I said out loud, before witnesses), or reminding the holder of the 1/10th that if he was the boss and I was the hired hand, where was my pay?, and if working conditions didn’t improve, someone just might be short a hired (oops, “conscripted” hand) for the assigned tasks. Or, recovering from the somewhat predictable response to such protests (see, eventual DV restraining order actually was granted, based on declaration, and in the company of a support organization which had been helping me survive emotionally, learning a few legal rights on the way, until this event) — part of my compensation is an extra prolific range of reading, on-line and off. And, I talk to lots of people about their situation. I am a personal data net. It helps me navigate…and is entertaining at times, too.
So, I searched “Open Salon” on “Domestic Violence” (Parental alienation didn’t yield a single relevant result, which also tells me that this is a specialized vocabulary to this (Alice in Wonder)land, and, that (as in mirrors) normal words read forwards, but only make sense if you understand they are interpreted backwards..
And here it is:
(3) PRE-ELECTION PRIORITY:
“Obama on Domestic Violence” (link):
OCTOBER 2, 2008 2:18AM
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
The one time when all people are supposed to remember this problem, and perhaps think about it. In my group, it is the month to get preachers to preach about the unacceptability of domestic violence. A lot won’t though, because it “encourages” divorce.
I know it is a difficult topic. It is a difficult thing to live through and then admit that you lived through it. It is extremely difficult to deal with on a regular basis in trying to help. It’s a soul-sucking, terrible, situation to deal with these women and their children trying to escape this violence. But it is so much worse to BE them, of course.
But it is always, always, a lesson in the great courage of women. The women who escape these situations with nothing but the clothes on their back are awe-inspiring – but they don’t know that. They are simply terrified women doing whatever they need to do to protect themselves, and more often, their children.
Ms. Kelly Lark says:
October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so, I give you Obama’s statement today,
so we all know he has not forgotten us, and to hail Joe Biden for the VAWA act once more.
{{“Hail”is too reminiscent of “Heil, H_ _ _ _ _” and I tend to reserve mine for now.. How about, “thank” or “express appreciation”? We are in a republic (ostensibly) not an imperial regime. At least on the books. Let’s wait a little on the “Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes,” or Palm Sunday, as it were.}}
“Today, I join all Americans in observing Domestic Violence Awareness Month. At a time when one in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, it’s more important than ever that we dedicate ourselves to working on behalf of the thousands of women who suffer in silence. {{We WHO? Some have been all along…}}{{I resent the characterization of “suffering in silence.” Rather, the silence is deafening to those of us who actually do reach out, and report. That silence after reporting is ALSO heard by our abusers, and may result in silence the NEXT time. So it’s often a matter of tuning the community’s ears – – not just to reporting, but to tthe laws, the edifices in place to help (and their shortcomings and conflicts of interest), and to the broader definition of DV than broken bones and blood. And to its effect on children. Leave it to a man to say we suffer in silence as a whole, although it’s clear many do…}}
Too often, victims of domestic violence don’t know where to turn, or have no one to turn to. And too often, a victim could be someone you love. That’s why, as a State Senator, I led the fight in Illinois to pass one of the strongest employment protection laws in the nation, ensuring that victims of domestic violence could seek shelter or treatment without losing their jobs. {{Shelter/Treatment? how about Justice/Law enforcement prosecution Help? I don’t want to underestimate this, but I personally wasn’t showing up with broken bones, but still lost work through trauma, harassments, and direct orders. Shelter is a first step only and these shelters have their own issues, too.}} That’s why I introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to provide $25 million a year to domestic violence prevention and victim support efforts. That’s why I co-sponsored and helped reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. And today, I am so proud to have Senator Joe Biden, the man who wrote that groundbreaking legislation that gave so many women a second chance at life, as my running mate in this campaign. {{Well, I am thankful for that legislation too. Now, are you aware of the groundswell of retaliation against it, or not? }}
{{$25 million sounds like a huge amount. Spread throughout the country, and compared to funding already in place to WEAKEN the effects of VAWA (let alone a system that tends to do this, probably not accidentally) it has a different ring. More, below Thank God for it. BUT, I have a question. When I went looking — HARD — for pro bono help to support my 2nd application for a restraining order, or my FIRST contempt of the multiple thousands of $$ child support arrears, I found nothing effective. Where was that part of the $25million. HOW’S COME every time I faced my ex in Family Court (and someone coached him to get the case there, too), I see indications that he was getting financial support for legal help, and expert coaching on how to railroad my civil rights? HOW’S COME when the ABA Commission on DV (or toolkit, you can look it up) advises clearly, along with Family Violence Prevention Fund (or “endabuse.org”)’s “toolkit to end domestic violence –which very fine toolkit, one now has to hunt for on their site) — when that highlights the IMPORTANCE of enforcing child support orders after DV, instead I found an agency intent on NOT enforcing it til custody was switched from me to the batterer, for the first time since we separated? HOW’S COME when I went to a mediator, he did abide by the rules, and categorically ignored domestic violence, which was an issue all 3 times? HOW’S COME there is practically no accountability (a “complaint form,” after one’s life was just upended) for quality control in this mediation — yet I see the whole system is adamant about mediation as THE formula, whereas organizations that do research say, it is NOT workable in cases where domestic violence exists? So, the system makes a token nod — and in a way that eradicates due process (right to answer the charges one is accused of in open forum) by “separate — but unequal — meetings with a court-appointed mediator. HOW’S COME that mediator “recommends,” but this should not happen in true mediation? And many, many more “How’s Come’s?” come to my brain. Especially as I began to review Federal budgets, emanating from the White House, some of which you will see below, shortly.
HOW’s COME? with all the effort ~ specifically coming up on a decade’s worth ~ ~ I put into getting free from abuse, with my eyes on alert, my mouth open, and my rudder set straight, it so far has failed, 10 years post-restraining order Are we only doing triage and then throwing the flapping women up on the shore? Or, are organizations focused on their own}}
- “As President, I’ll make these efforts a national priority. {{OUT OF HOW MANY HIGHER RANKING NATIONAL PRIORIOTIES< SOME OF THE CONTRADICTORY TO THIS ONE??}} This month, and every month, we must fight to bring domestic violence out of the darkness of isolation ** and into the light of justice, especially for minority and immigrant women, and women in every community where it goes unreported far too often. We’ll stop treating this as just a woman’s issue, {{WE WHO? CLAUDINE DOMBROWSKI, KAREN ANDERSON AND OTHERS HAVE ALREADY BROUGHT IT TO THE INTERNATIONAL / UN LEVEL, FAILING TO FIND HELP IN THE U.S. ON IT? WE ARE ALREADY CALLING IT A CIVIL RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE.}} and start recognizing that when a woman is attacked, that abuse scars not only the victim, but [“also” is grammatically correct] her loved ones, sending currents of violence that ripple across our society.
- {{On this one, the word “scars,” though effective is weakened. It is already in the headlines, unchecked, it can and often does not just scar, but also KILL the victim and/or her loved ones.
- Re: “loved ones” — Future First Lady Obama, Michelle, help us here. You should understand. “loved ones” includes KIDS. Why no mention here of the overlap between domestic violence, and traumatized kids. OR, of DV and child abuse? It’s not exactly rocket science on this, at this point, 2008! I find “loved ones” too vague. I love my KIDS. I separated from their father, who was abusive. He saw them, but he lost his privilege to LIVE with us. In this, I, their mother, sought to make a point of what is and is not acceptable treatment of young ladies. Or older ones.}}
- We need all hands on deck to address this – [1] neighbors willing to report suspected crimes,{2] families willing to help loved ones seek treatment, {{{Batterers’ Programs being proved efffective somewhere that I’m unaware of yet?}} and {3} community leaders {{DOES OR DOES NOT THIS INCLUDE “COMMUNITIES OF FAITH?? INCLUDING SOME OF THOSE ON YOUR ADVISORY BOARD??}} willing to candidly discuss this issue in public and break the stigma that stops so many women from coming forward.
- {{Sir, with respect, all hands LOCALLY are already taking the brunt of this — nonprofits are overstressed, police officers responsding to DV calls sometimes lose their lives, too. A woman (this is VAWA, hence the gender) traumatized, in shock, or in the hospital leaves a blank — an expensive one — in someone’s life; either her kids, or her businesses’ (suppose she’s a teacher? Or in a place in front of many people? Or a pastor? Or a lawyer? Or a DV advocated herself? Or a woman caring for an elderly parent? Many of us get attacked for being too “uppity” in our professions, and if we have managed to somehow overcome that, this is a professional disaster, which becomes a financial disaster all too soon” So, WHICH “WE” DO YOU MEAN HERE? HOW ABOUT POLICYMAKERS?}}
FINALLY, IN 2008, PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA SAID, PER THIS OPEN SALON BLOG:
“Together, we’ll make it clear that no woman ever struggles alone.” (I hope so, I’m reserving applause, though). I just reviewed the “We’s” versus the “I’s” (Pres. elect Obama). I heard ONLY one “I,” only one promise. And that was in the opening statement. “AS PRESIDENT, I”LL MAKE THESE EFFORTS A NATIONAL PRIORITY.”
{{HOW?? Tell us NOW what you — not all of us — plan to do. After all, you want the vote, right? What’s your commitment, in DETAIL.}}. . . As it played out, I have looked already — this same remarkable “lack of detail” is in the White House Agenda. I have already posted on it, and one of my top links to the above right is a 4-page summary of just how much of a “priority” DV is in the big pictture. It is LAST on the agenda, and mentioned in appropriate token vagueness:
“Department of Health and Human Services” (this is a link)
The subtitle (page header) reads “NEW ERA OF RESPONSIBILITY”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the Federal Government’s principal
agency for protecting the health of all Americans
and for providing essential human services {{LIKE<, STAYING ALIVE??}}
This (FY2010) Budget provides $768 billion in support of HHS’
mission that will bring down costs and expand coverage
The reserve is funded half by new revenue and half by savings proposals that promote efficiency
and accountability, align incentives toward quality, and encourage shared responsibility (etc. etc.)
Let’s compare $25 Million (whether this be 2009 or 2010, the above promise is an indicator): If your high school math is in place, $25,000,000 / $768,000,000 = $25 / $768,000 = or 0.00325% (alternately, 0.0000325). National priority. Now, I know that the USDOJ administers VAWA, but I am unsure whether its funding actually comes from HHS. (I will find out, though!)ANOTHER “QUICK LOOK” WAY IS TO SEE WHERE DOES THIS VAWA COME UNDER THE DEPT. HHS FY 2010 DESCRIPTION. FOR EXAMPLE: DOES IT MAKE “FUNDAMENTAL HIGHLIGHTS?” Look and see (the answer is No).
Does it as such rate its own heading (no). It shows up LAST, not bolded, in 4 pages of elaborate agenda with details of amount of funding: The heading on alternate pages reads “NEW ERA OF RESPONSIBILITY” and addressing violence against women, or intimate partner violence (which overlaps with child abuse, can lead to homelessness and death, and does, etc., and has been tagged as potential cause of substance abuse and other troubles under http://www.acestudy.org (Adverse Childhood Experiences — see my link to right) — this does not make the “CHANGE.gov”‘s administrations honor roll, even.
Domestic Violence comes under “Other Presidential Initiatives” like this:
Provides Support for Other Presidential
initiatives.
The Budget includes funding to reduce domestic violence and enhance emergency
care systems It also expands the treatment ca-
pacity of drug courts including services to protect
methamphetamine’s youngest victims Substance
addiction is a preventable and treatable chronic
condition and this initiative helps address the
most urgent needs The Budget also provides re-
sources to reduce health disparities, which the
President has identified as an important goal of
his Administration
The sum total level of description, herein, are the words “reduce domestic violence.” There is plenty more detail in almost any of the other 17 plans. Each merits its own paragraph. REDUCING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COMES IN #18.5 of 18.
Hardly a “priority,” eh? ???
Let’s check back at whitehouse.gov — maybe they did better for 2009: (I have also already posted on this):
FAMILY:
Ten days after taking office, the President established a White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, led by Vice President Biden. The Task Force is focused on raising the living standards of middle-class, working families across America.
The President’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided needed support to families enduring difficult times.
ALREADY I see I’m not on the map. We were a middle class (lower) working family plagued by (my husband’s) domestic violence, which has resulted in him, basically dropping off the map economically since separation (FYI, part of the economic abuse, ongoing) and me being forced out of it back onto welfare. So out of the gitgo, many families, being in this situation, are not on the map economically as to being rescued. HOWEVER, let’s look. Under the “FAMILY” is this statement above, that this AMERICAN RECOVERY & REINVESTMENT ACT is to help “families enduring difficult times.”
Domestic violence is long-term difficult times, until it is stopped, or the perpetrator is separated from his victim, and held accountable. However, a problem arises (among them, jails are full). ANother problem is the alternate white house agenda of putting fathers (ALL fathers, apparently) back in their kids lives. I am wondering whether a female-designed program might just have accounted for the concept that under the all-inclusive category of “WOMEN” (in VAWA) are many MOTHERS. We are approximately half the population, or 51% I heard? Most of the other half came from some of us. If the 1 in 4 abuse figure (25% of the 51%) is appropriate, then I think this is a significant enough percentage to merit a mention under “family” in our white house agenda.
Under “Families” are 7 bullets, none of which refers to violence within the families.
Under helping Working Families, it’s not mentioned either.
Under STRENGTHEN FAMILIES, do battered Moms (or women) (or children) make a mention?
Strengthen Families
President Obama was raised by a single parent and knows the difficulties that young people face when their fathers are absent. {{ DESPITE MY RAILING ON THESE SITES< I FEEL HE TURNED OUT ALL RIGHT. DON”T YOU? HE BECAME PRESIDENT. I VOTED FOR HIM IN PART HOPING HE MIGHT ALSO UNDERSTAND THE SINGLE MOM TAKE ON LIFE.}}
He is committed to responsible fatherhood, (1) by supporting fathers who stand by their families and encouraging young men to work towards good jobs in promising career pathways. The President has also proposed an historic investment in providing home visits to low-income, first-time parents by trained professionals. (2) The President and First Lady are also committed to ensuring that children have nutritious meals to eat at home and at school, so that they grow up healthy and strong.
[The bold below was a technical error and will be corrected later]…
A commitment to stopping domestic violence, which is primarily targeted at women when it comes to fatalities, would most certainly help ensure that the children at least get to grow up, period!!
(1) “responsible fatherhood” is a code word for the uninformed, and boy is IT well funded. By “encouraging young MEN to work towards good jobs in promising career pathways” I would like to note, WHAT ABOUT THE WOMEN?? It’s already abundantly clear it is desirable that the Moms put their kids in earlier and earlier Head Start. The purpose of this is that we go to work. So why do young MEN get our President’s and his wife’s special encouragement, while the young women, some of who are giving birth, don’t even get a mention when it comes to “promising career pathways.” What is expected? Does he want us at home with our kids (but not homeschooling, which is anti-patriotic, I heard), or in the workforce? Does he want to perpetuate the WAGE gap while attempting to narrow the health care gap? What’ gives?
And, I would also like to ask, where is the respect here for some of the older women, who have raised children somehow with or without the benefit of VAWA, and are working also? If we happen to be divorced and NOT playing 2nd string Mom to some children that were Healthily replaced into Marriages that the Federal Government approves of, what are we expected to to do? Take up the slack in the VAWA funding as encouraged to do in the Oct. 08 speech above?
Now, while I see under “Women” this is mentioned, I just wish to point out that when discussing “families” it takes a woman to make one.
“Prevent Violence Against Women
Violence against women and girls remains a global epidemic. The Violence Against Women Act, originally authored by Vice President Biden, plays a key role in helping communities and law enforcement combat domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. At home and abroad, President Obama will work to promote policies that seek to eradicate violence against women.”
On subsequent posts, I will describe some of the funding for policies that tend to do the exact opposite. When it comes to $$ versus words, a $$ is worth a thousand words, and paints a clearer picture.
Other links on VAWA, not necessarily up to date:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA) is a United States federal law. It was passed as Title IV, sec. 40001-40703 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 HR 3355 and signed as Public Law 103-322 by President Bill Clinton on September 13, 1994. It provided $1.6 billion to enhance investigation and prosecution of the violent crime perpetrated against women, increased pre-trial detention of the accused, imposed automatic and mandatory restitution on those convicted, and allowed civil redress in cases prosecutors chose to leave unprosecuted.
VAWA was drafted by Senator Joe Biden’s office with support from a number of advocacy organizations including Legal Momentum and The National Organization for Women, which described the bill as “the greatest breakthrough in civil rights for women in nearly two decades.”
VAWA was reauthorized by Congress in 2000, and again in December 2005. The bill was signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 5, 2006.
Criticisms of VAWA legislation
Various persons and groups, including Marc H. Rudov, Glenn Sacks, Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting (RADAR), and African-Americans for VAWA Reform (AAVR), have voiced concerns that VAWA violates due process, equal protection, and other civil rights. {{ALL OF WHICH DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ITSELF DOES….}} None of these groups oppose laws protecting victims of domestic violence. They oppose laws that discriminate exclusively against specific social groups and deny these groups equal protections.
NOTE: Click on “Rudov” (a name I’m less familiar with) for a sampling of the thinking behind opposition to VAWA
PICTURE ME IN THE AUDIENCE, EAGERLY RAISING MY HAND, AS IN A CLASSROOM, JUMPING UP & DOWN FOR ATTENTION.. .. “Sir, Sir? SIR?? I have a question”
Given that many “women” are “mothers,” and the Bush and Clinton administrations are avidly promoting “Healthy Marriages” (meaning, 2-parent households preferred, all others, go to the back of the line, when it comes to custody) “Promoting Responsible Fatherhood,” how are you going to reconcile the domestic violence restraining orders, obtained through the VAWA fundings, with the inevitable trip through the family law system, where another paradigm reigns?
How are you going to reconcile “Promoting Responsible Fatherhood” {{=child support waivers (lowered obligations) in exchange for increased access (to children that may have witnessed Dad beating Mom to the point the law had to intervene)}} with the above claim. As I am sure you know, those movements “rule” in the family law system, and are vastly outfunded compared to this $25million, though we do appreciate it?
Would it not be simpler to de-fang the the policies that are specificall directed AGAINST VAWA and AGAINST the right of a woman to NOT remarry after leaving an abuser, without losing the children that she removed from that volatile environment?
Or, I have another idea. If the “communities of faith” continue (as they have) to operate as a law unto themselves (as they do) in the matter of domestic violence, being as clergy at least, many of them mandated reporters of DV & child abuse, how’s about you remove the tax-exempt status unless they PUBLICALLY post the laws stating that domestic violence, spiritual or moral problem that it is too, IS in this country a felony or misdemeanor crime??
Prevent Violence Against Women
Violence against women and girls remains a global epidemic. The Violence Against Women Act, originally authored by Vice President Biden, plays a key role in helping communities and law enforcement combat domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. At home and abroad, President Obama will work to promote policies that seek to eradicate violence against women.
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PAS posts: Pro, Con, & Corollaries
This post will be updated later let’s hope.
This week several states, stupidly, are having “Parental Alienation Awareness Day.”
So I pause from tracking the funding of the “Fatherhood Initiative” and violations of due process in order to attain a government mandate to stop singlehood, I suppose (or is it motherhood?), to address this “Parental Alienation Awareness Day,” and question the thinking behind assigning single days, or months, of awareness to this and then to that, nationally (or, internationally). No wonder medicating for ADD & ADHD is big business: The innocent observer trying nobly to make sense of it all will find his – OR her — brain darting too and fro, or asked to throw dollars at one problem/passion, ignoring the rest, then wonders where all those dollars went.
For a(nother) great example of bureaucratic dollar-throwing, see:
“Sexual predator settles locally”
No, that is NOT a joke, unfortunately. Meanwhile, at one local charity: “Demand up, Donations Down, 5 items only.”
The purpose of having an “awareness” of something is not a fleeting glance, but an incorporation of that awareness into one’s values, principles, and purposes. Or, dismissing it.
“PAA” Day: I am utterly opposed to this terminology — because of its origins, and how “PAS” is used to divert the public conversation from much, much, more hard topics to face — and these have ugly names, but not nearly as ugly as ignoring them is to the people suffering them. These topics are as ugly as (but not unrelated to) “Domestic Violence Awareness Month,” which (good planning on the part of PAS folk?) was about six months apart from this new “day.” As this term is primarily (though not only) directed against custodial Mothers (in order to help switch custody, or gain more access to children), how silly that one month later, we have “Mother’s Day.” Yet, nationally the problem supposedly is “fatherlessness” — referring to a state of children, rather than actions taken previously by their parents (Huh?). So, are you giddy yet? No wonder the year starts out with the month of January, after the god “Janus,” looking two ways.
Today I choose to post links to these ugly-content, hard-to-stomach topics, and to (again) talk about them. The $30K/month link above I found from “lostinlimaohio” which blog somehow came up when I was tracking down why a judge placed a gag order on the Huckaby/Cantu case. In that case, also a judge has (inexplicably) recused himself, and I heard that the DA had issued charges before he had either the coroner’s report OR reports or recordings from the 5-hour long interrogation leading to Ms. Huckaby’s arrest, without bail. 8-year-old Young Miss Cantu is physically GONE, she herself no longer has a future, but 28-year-old Ms. Huckaby is on trial for her life, without bail, and after sensational, high-profile, nationwide (at least) media coverage because of the horror of the accusation & crime (especially for a Sunday school teacher, female). Anomalies caught my eye that I started (reluctantly — I’m busy!) following this. Because it’s about confidence in the prosecutorial process, and due process, and more. If you want my input on that so far (and I may be wrong), post and I’ll reply. Then they gagged it!
One upside of pursuing these topics is you run across other information and insights; and if life is not about insight so that we can live reasonably upright and effective lives, what is it about?
Anyhow, I had no major persistent troubles with the seamy side of life (even after being mugged twice, without physical harm, and despite living in some dangerous urban areas), this side of life arose through and as a direct consequence of who I married, and who have had to deal with since attempting to separate. Since the seamy side of life bit me pretty hard in the butt (and people associated with me, and related to), it bears addressing. One of the most valuable lessons I learned is that some of the less seamy “characters” don’t look it on the outside. If anything, they are in positions of policymaking, and good at dominating conversations, and people.
Meanwhile Mr. or Ms. lostinlimaohio appears to think like me. And (I believe) posted under the title “Wouldn’t Prison Be Cheaper?” an article on the $30,000 state support of this middle-aged man:
Rasmuson’s first conviction for child molestation came in 1981 when a Santa Barbara [CA] court found him guilty of raping an 11-year-old boy. He was sentenced to state prison and conditionally released in 1985. [Four years only?? see:
25 yrs for a cat, 8 for a little girlIn 1987, Rasmuson was arrested again, this time for the kidnapping and sexual assault of a 3-year-old child, who was reportedly later found naked and abandoned in the Los Angeles foothills.
In other words, I think a little screw-up happened judicially, somewhere, or were the prisons just too crowded? As usual, when government screws up, everyone pays, not just emotionally, and family-wide, but also through the nose, which is why the NEXT quote, I put in red, which this state (and nation) currently is, deeply.
According to his neighbors, Rasmuson is living in a mobile home on the fenced acreage while repairs are being made to the house he’s renting on the land. Though the 47-year-old is employed, Rasmuson is still paying the state back for previous care and financial support, meaning taxpayers are also footing the $4,500 monthly rent on the $1.5 million property. In addition, according to the state’s Department of Mental Health, there’s an $800 daily expense for the court-ordered security detail assigned to protect him—for his safety and that of his neighbors. The current set-up is costing taxpayers close to $30,000 a month from the state’s general funds.
Rasmuson won his freedom in 2007 on an appeal, after the courts initially denied his release from Atascadero State Hospital. Under the terms of release set forth in “Jessica’s Law,” Rasmuson is required be monitored by Global Positioning Satellite at all times and must live more than 2,000 feet away from a school or park where children congregate.
Do you know how abundantly I could (have) provided on that salary for my children, and me, and with $ to spare, had not local entities (who will be repeatedly named, on this blog — at least by function) not chosen, outside of my hearing or input, or even awareness, chosen to interfere with my livelihood with their (communal) It takes a Village to Remove [excuse me, ‘Raise’] a Child “help”? The last time I was in range of this salary, my kids disappeared, overnight, despite my attempts to avert that virtually predictable event.
Anyhow, many times, other people have said the thing better already.
I too, have my limits on what I can stomach in a day. I am already missing my daughters (as every day) and simultaneously grieving the lost time, opportunities for all of us (professional, academic personal), but I think perhaps most of all, that when I went for help to the justice, law enforcement, and nonprofits of my geographic area, and the situation became worse. ACTUALLY, in seeking to renew a restraining order, a relative? or? a spinoff employee/patron of the Promoting Responsible Fatherhood movement? helped my ex bounce it into family court, a more friendly venue to batterers, where he could better convince a judge of how much he “loved” his children, now (let’s not talk about the prior violence, OK?). Not only analyzing this past (done, long ago), but doing so looking for how to (THIS time round) handle the present is a full-time occupation, just about. One balances purpose, energy available, emotional health, statistical probabilities of succeeding in changing status qui (that’s plural, probably not in the correct cast, for you non-Latin folk), etc.
There are also other issues I follow and things I do in life, many of them. Like many of the people sponsoring blogs on these issues, in our own lives, the issues are not in “closed” mode, but the problems are ongoing and on-traumatizing also. This can affect quality of blogging — I know in particular that my copyediting is sub-par, and that the appearance of this blog is less than professional (nevertheless, it is getting some international traffic, I note). Some days, it’s better to defer to others who have already written, well, on the topic.
Today, also, another group, Legal Momentum, discusses 15th Anniv. of VAWA…
I am delighted to announce that Legal Momentum, the nation’s oldest legal defense and education fund dedicated to advancing the rights of women and girls, will honor United States Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on April 22 with its Legal Momentum Hero Award at a symposium marking the fifteenth anniversary of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), initiated and championed by then-Senator Joseph Biden. The historic Act was the first comprehensive federal legislative package designed to end violence against women and put the issue on the national agenda….
The event will take place at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, April 22, 9:15 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. The complete list of speakers is posted on our Web site at: http://www.legalmomentum.org/news-room/press-releases/legal-momentum-to-honor-vice.html
LIVE WEBCAST WILL BE AVAILABLE
Although seats are not available at this sold-out event, it will be broadcast live via the Web by Georgetown Law Center at this url: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/
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http://www.randijames.com/2009/04/pas-is-real-targeting-noncustodial.html
Randi James responds to a comment on her site called “PAS is real” and suggesting that we (mothers groups, fathers groups) on stopping this. This is a teaser, the link above has more URLS than the post here I put this exchange in GREEN, for Go Take a Look!, but have not indented. Therefore, all the (contiguous) green below is all quote:
Robert Gartner has left a new comment on your post “Mothers’ Movements“:
Your blog does an injustice to the non custodial women you mention. Everyone knows that family courts do not get it right all the time. Even those on death row, some of them, are innocent.
PAS is real. If your groups could get past that we might have a way to work together.
Posted by Robert Gartner to Randi James at Apr 22, 2009 12:33:00 PM
Unfortunately for you and your ilk, I know that “PAS is Real” is a catch phrase you use to target unsuspecting noncustodial mothers and men who have been primary caretakers. I also personally know that you lurk around women’s boards, especial single mothers and abused women, in order to recruit them into your camp. It is an unfair, divisive tactic that fathers supremacists have been using increasingly.
It’s not that they really believe you…they need something to hold on to…something that seems to make sense. Mothers and innocent fathers do not understand the depth of the origination of the term parental alienation syndrome, a history that should not be forgotten or obscured.
Mothers are often the target of abusive husbands/fathers in relationships where the children have been taught to hate the mother, often taking the abuser’s side because of the perception of power that he has. This is trauma bonding through the use of maternal deprivation:
Maternal Deprivation, or Motherlessness, is occurring with alarming frequency due to the unethical treatment of women and children in family court. Maternal Deprivation is inflicting abuse by severing the mother-child bond. It is a form of abuse that men inflict on both the mother and children, especially men who claim they are “parentally alienated” from their children when there are complaints of abusive treatment by the father.
Maternal Deprivation occurs when men seek to keep their children from being raised by their mothers who are the children’s natural caretakers. Some men murder the mothers of their own children. Others seek to sever the maternal bonds by making false allegations of fictitious psychological syndromes in a deliberate effort to change custody and/or keep the child from having contact with their mother when there are legal proceedings.
Anyone reading old enough to remember the experiment carried out on young monkeys, who were forced to choose between a warm fuzzy (fake) mother and a wire metal, milk-dispensing mother. Guess which one they chose? In the earliest years, kids need to be held and hugged (and later on, too!). I wonder what kind of personnel the new Zero to Five is going to attract to the expanded preschool industry, and who is going to monitor them (and at whose expense)….
“PAS” doesn’t want to talk about cases like this:
Egregious case, but I provide it because a response to the post links to quotes from Richard Gardner, PAS-front-man (until he committed suicide, now adherents continue to carry the NAMBLA etc. torch in many venues):
”I hope he suffers,” said the woman, who has not been identified because she is a sexual abuse victim. “I want him to die in there in jail because that’s what he did to me. He confined me,” the 29-year old daughter said whose assault started when she was just 6 years old.
She said her 48-year-old father, a martial arts instructor, threatened to kill her if she told anyone and kept her a prisoner at home, monitoring her movements using surveillance cameras and delivering fierce beatings during paranoid rages.
As her father was led away in handcuffs, the woman wept quietly and embraced her younger brother, who she said was also a victim of beatings by their father, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.
DNA tests confirmed the daughter’s account, proving that Thibes was both the father and grandfather of her three children. All girls, they are 4, 7 and 11.
. . .
Her father, she said, grew fearful that her brother had told police about abuse at the home and fled to Las Vegas in 2003, taking her and her children. They lived in a motel, where, she said, Thibes told others that she was his girlfriend.
In April 2005, he stabbed her twice in the chest with a 10-inch kitchen knife, police records show. In interviews with police, he described her at various times as his wife, girlfriend or daughter.
The woman said she told hospital workers about the abuse once her father had been arrested and she knew her children were safe in custody.
A comment to THAT post links to a history on Richard Gardner, some of his less “choice” quotes.
CAUTION: some readers, especially survivors of sexual abuse, may find Gardner’s remarks deeply disturbing. Indeed, we all should. {{I chose not to post them. Even the subtitles are offensive. However, they remain as the background and underpinning of “Parental Alienation Awareness Day” and in its tawdry history. Now, when children (PAS in reverse?) are returned to the abuser, and then no longer bond with the protective parent (generally, not always, the mother), the feeling sure feels like “alienated” from this (case in point) perspective. However, there exist other terms already to address these actions and symptoms of such actions: kidnapping, brainwashing, Stockholm syndrome, others.
I think a difficulty arises in labeling something with which one has no personal acquaintance, or accepting this label (insert applicable epithet from other generations or ethnic, religious groups) wholesale. We cannot farm out our THINKING to the experts for long!
Quotes By Richard Gardner, the Father of “Parental Alienation Syndrome”
Battered Moms Lose Children To Abusers Blog does not agree with the pervertedly twisted philosophies ofRichard Gardner. The following information was posted at Stop Family Violence and is posted here to demonstrate that the philosophies of this man, such as “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS) are all integrally related to his pro-pedophilia beliefs and misogyny. The whole idea of the theory is to recast disclosures of abuse as “hysterics” by women and children. But even worse, this sick man’s ideas on punishing children by forcing them to remain with their abusers while depriving them of their protectors needs to be denounced by everyone in the world who cares about the safety and well-being of children. For more info on Richard Gardner, see Cincinatti PAS.
So if you support Parental Alienation Syndrome theories, you agree with the theories of a pedophile supporter.
April 20, 2009 — batteredmomslosecustody
Richard A. Gardner, M.D., is the creator of the creator and main proponent for the bogus Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) theory. Prior to his suicide, Gardner was an unpaid part-time clinical professor of child psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University . He made his money mainly as a forensic expert. PAS was developed by Dr Richard Gardner in 1985 based on his personal observation, not on scientific study, and on his work as an expert witness often on behalf of fathers accused of molesting their children. Gardner ’s theory of PAS has had a profoundly detrimental effect on how the court systems in our country handle allegations of child sexual abuse, especially during divorce. Because Gardner ’s PAS theory is based on his clinical observations–not scientific data–it must be understood in the context of his extreme views concerning women, pedophilia and child sexual abuse. We provide Gardner’s views so that people can understand the radical, perverse thinking of the so-called “expert” who invented the bogus theory of PAS that has done so much damage.
NOTE: Stop Family Violence does not agree with the views espoused by Gardner – we find them disgusting, offensive, and most importantly, they are not correct. Gardner’s views are based in his own perverse thinking, not in anything scientists know, not in anything our laws condone, and not in anything our culture believes. To be clear – pedophilia is not natural, children do not enjoy, ask for or consent to sexual abuse, and mothers are not to blame if fathers commit such heinous acts against their children.
CAUTION: some readers, especially survivors of sexual abuse, may find Gardner’s remarks deeply disturbing. Indeed, we all should.
Read, and Think About This before you sign another PAS petition.
THEN go to AFCC.net and look at the conference brochures, notice the similarity of terms, and consider:
Would you want your family’s future in the hands of these people?
If not, then stay married, take more abuse, do something . because on the way out, with children, they are going to be. Also, do a serious criminal background check before partnering up, and talk to former partners. Consider, they MIGHT be telling the truth.
. . . And by the way, domestic violence is a clear precursor, sometimes to homelessness (if not death) (or, if not, extended undermployment, and documented health problems.
Finally, the “lostinlimaohio” blog I discovered today, as I was so disturbed by a recent “gag order” on the Cantu / Huckaby case recently, where an 8 year old was discovered in a suitcase at the bottom of an irrigation pond, and a 28-year-old woman/mother is facing the death penalty or life in prison because of special circumstances. Several details in this case flagged my attention as not passing muster. Either my mind can’t conceive of the situation, or my instincts were right. Either way, the case is now gagged.
I don’t know anything more about this blog than that I think the writing is good, it covers many aspects.
It appears to have more of a criminal focus than some of these others, but as the issues that routinely pass through family court halls many times ARE criminal in nature, but handled as psychological and relationship problems (and shunted off for mind-therapy on how to get along with that violent person you just threw out of your house, legally, because, long ago, or not so long about, one of you impregnated the other, and the female partner did not abort).
I may need to separate the funding aspects of this blog into another one, but ALL these issues are related, of course.
Have a happy day… Be “aware” of what you are asked to become aware of. Pay attention to vocabulary, and who invented some of the jargon.
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When she “Shows and Tells” — take it seriously. It takes courage.
We tell young people to speak up about abuse.
This one did.”
Our global village — it seems to me that approximately one a week, at least nationwide, is occurring. The police WILL respond, and will sometimes prevent or minimize the fall-out, but more likely (they are only human, they are not omnipresent) they will count and identify the bodies, and speak to reporters, and neighbors. This is too late for those speaking up. This can be true when it comes to domestic violence also.
Before you read this post — if you read fast, if you skim well, and if you could commit to read THREE (3) pages of single-spaced, narrative, print, you will understand more: Do NOT pass go. Click on the centered title “Brave Children Speak Up” Read the first page “intro”, to the bottom, hit “next” or “continued,” then the next page to the bottom, click on “next” and then the 3rd page, to the bottom (individual stories).
Brave Children Speak Up
Alanna’s story is well-known — she finally fled from Northern California to Southern (Los Angeles) and was able to get help.
How I Process (present tense) My Experience (past)
I did not experience abuse as a child. Mine didn’t start til I was almost 40 years old. Yet I will affirm — you are not the same afterwards — your understanding of the world is not the same either, and never will be. You can function, but you sprout antenna, learn to “deal,” test your systems of meaning (all, for the most part, remain suspect), and are much, much, MUCH more alert to the various signals and possible interpretations of almost every one. This is rough on people you wish to maintain friendships, let alone a romantic connection, with. I know that I “tested.’ When my friend passed the test, didn’t blow up, didn’t run away, it frightened me more. I lost so many job situations that (for a period), I began to self-sabotage work rather than experience the forced-out situation again. (Economic control is a primary means of control). I felt like I was another species for a while, and finally accepted that, in some respects, I was. And I was NOT sexually abused as a child. . . . Or beaten. . . . Or deprived.
Negotiating what for others is often an Average situation:
[Leaving home. Coming back home. Possibly reporting what happened at home — to be continued. . . ]
One dilemma still up for grabs is a difficult one. I have faith, but I do not trust churches. This affects support systems and for sure sociability. But, I will affirm — there ARE people (both genders) who target these areas, and this IS one area a vulnerable (to being dominated to excess) women can be found. They also take in divorced and needy women, at times, hence, a charming unscrupulous man will find ample fields there.
One has to constantly renegotiate meaning in life. I have come to believe this is an asset. Intuition comes in handy in many fields (particularly artistic ones or ones that deal with group dynamics).
When abuse happens mid-way, or later in life, it is difficult to know what goals to set, in exiting it. It is also VERY difficult to exit it, as by middle age, so many professions, communities, and connections have come. More schooling is not always the answer. What about relationships?
I cannot imagine being a child who has betrayed by an adult.
Mine were (I will testify and do). But I cannot imagine it still, how to callous onesself and just go deal with it.
Again:
Brave Children Speak Up
I cannot think too hard on this one today. I refuse to abuse substances to turn my mind away. Each day’s internal parasympathetic (?) wiring stands alone, how much it can handle, but because I know what it’s like to have people “unable to stomach” my truths, I try to process and stomach others’ I read about. Can you handle this one? Perhaps you can. Children in the situation HAVE to.
I would like to say: It’s not the gun, but the attitude in the person carrying the gun. If it was not a gun, it could be a knife, an ax, or as happened recently a sword.
It’s also another, more communal problem called “denial.”
February 25, 2009
14 year old Priscilla Amador did not want to have sex or interact sexually with a man 40 years her senior. Especially her father. About 8 years of this was too much. Finally she worked up courage to tell: The Miami Herald, 2-27-09Police respond to “shots fired” and find family dead in murder-suicide
Editor’s note: This tragic incident is one of several like it that have surfaced recently. Although the exact details are not yet known, the mass violence it reflects needs to be noted.
. . . “It’s important to remember that one of the most dangerous persons an officer can face is someone who feels they’ve got nothing to live for and nothing to lose. There are a growing number of those people and that’s a very real threat to officer safety and survival. Now, more than ever, officers need to be highly trained, highly focused and thoroughly prepared to deal with the threats and challenges of doing their jobs in a time of crisis.”
Stay alert, be trained—even if it means taking steps to seek your own training—and remember that even “regular people” who would otherwise seem harmless and unlikely to pose a deadly threat, like the man in this incident, may in fact be extremely dangerous.
— Scott Buhrmaster, PoliceOne Managing Editor
RE: “ someone who feels they’ve got nothing to live for “
My recommended reading: Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
There are choices, even in a concentration camp.
Another link that is not always explored, but should be, is the pharmaceutical connection. I speak as someone whose father in law was on medication (and committed suicide). Not smart to tinker too much with this chemistry. My policy is, don’t! Your body was designed smart: handle with care.
By Matt Sedensky
Associated PressMIAMI — A 53-year-old man fatally shot his wife and two daughters Wednesday before turning the gun on himself, and a 16-year-old son who survived the attack managed to call 911 as he escaped uninjured from the Miami home, authorities said. . . .
Sarit Betancourt, a 44-year-old school bus driver who lives near the family, said the father is a Cuban immigrant who gave piano lessons at a guitar shop and at his home. Betancourt’s two sons, ages 9 and 10, had been taking piano lessons from him once a week since 2006.
“He was a marvelous person and a tremendous professor,” she said. “People would enter the house, and you just breathed peace.”
[WELL, not for a little girl….]
PLEASE READ THE LINK (above) & THINK.
It cost her -- and her sister -- and her mother - their lives. I speculate that HE could not stand the shame or public exposure -- that task had been assigned (by him) for HER to carry. I'll say, assuming the charges were valid. One way to cut short THAT conversation, well, see headlines. "Be Prepared!" How? I don't know, but I know I must find out. So should you. I cannot editorialize much today. I am processing this one... I have teens. I also know that the issue is NOT primarily sex. It's about character, values, and entitlements. I do not think we should be suspecting all our neighbors of this (though clearly it's underreported). Perhaps we should all make sure that our kids have at least ONE other NON-family member they can confide in, and who know them. And we should all be informed of the overlap between wife abuse and child abuse. And that our young women are to value, and be able to hold, boundaries. Unfortunately, these boundaries are daily violated in so many contexts (including schools), that I'm at some loss to, as I posted elsewhere, safety a "place." I think that self-sufficiency has to be a THING you carry with you. As I said, today, there are limits to what can be processed. But I will not drop the topic. Are you, reader, aware that in Family Courts across the nation, custody of children, when contested, it being given to batterers in retaliation for reporting abuse of one form or another. If you don't believe me, believe the children who reported, and lived to tell:Related Articles:
Six die in L.A. family murder-suicide
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Irreconciliable differences?
Decades after mediation became the model in divorce, and was pushed worldwide (starting in Calif., especially in the 1980s), it still has a sour taste…
Hey — Can we talk about consequences of this doctrine, yet??? This is the U.K., only last fall (Sept. 2008). I was googling another incident, and:
Kate Hilpern, in “The Guardian” asks:
Ending it all
This week’s killing of two little girls by their father, who then killed himself, is the latest in a shocking tally of so-called ‘family wipe-outs’. What drives men, often described as devoted to their children, to carry out such crimes? And can we stop them? Kate Hilpern reports
Every six to eight weeks (and lately, more frequently) a man or a woman – usually a man – kills their partner or their children and then themselves. Most of these cases are never reported. David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, explains that, somewhere along the line, our perception of murder has become warped and “murder-suicides” don’t quite fit prevailing news values. “Most people have a view of murder – which is very much constructed by the media – as stranger-perpetrated and requiring police to try to catch those perpetrators. In fact, the clear-up [rate] for murder [is currently around] 88% and that’s because you don’t have to be a Cracker to work out who’s done it. When it comes to children, the most likely person to kill them is their parent, just as when it comes to adults, the most likely person is their partner.”
No, this wasn’t in my world view growing up, either. . . Yours??? Theirs??
This article intelligently addresses several of the primary issues, such as what these were NOT (temporary insanity). It WAS predictable, and probably avoidable. It WAS about power and revenge. Frequently, the woman was ignored. Precursors besides clear threats, and a history of battering the woman, include often depression, and recent or long-term unemployment or unemployment. And/or stalking. Clear refusal to obey orders. I personally KNOW these things (all of them), and it scares the bejeebers out of me.
What has frightened me, if possible, much, much more, is that with each return to a family court judge, there is no alarm, fright, concern, or apparent belief of the warning signs. Instead, there is this kind of “stupor,” as in, where’s the blood? When was the last time you were taken to the emergency room. Was there an actual threat to kill?
No, not this time. The point was made clear years ago, and has continued to be made clear through enforcement of minor requests as orders (or else), or taking my daughters when I attempted to set a line in the sand — or collect child support arrears.
To be taken with an ex-spouse in front of a court that refuses to believe (or review the file), and have a mutual knowing that this is not going to be taken seriously — and then to go and read the laws that say, it IS to be taken seriously — that is a very, very, frightening experience, my friends. It interferes with daily life often enough. How low can one lie? Is it possible to lie below the radar of such intense stubborn refusal to comply (with court orders), such flagrant challenging of them rubber stamped publically — but not for women.
“In other cases of murder suicide – which, despite the recent spate, have remained constant in terms of numbers for several decades – there is a very clear history of domestic violence. In other cases of murder suicide – which, despite the recent spate, have remained constant in terms of numbers for several decades – there is a very clear history of domestic violence. “
“Julia Pemberton’s ex-husband repeatedly warned her that he would kill her. It wasn’t that she didn’t take notice, as she told friends, family and police. Family court judges were aware of the terror. Her final 16-minute 999 call made headlines in 2004 when it was read out at the inquest into her and her 17-year-old son William’s murders, committed by her husband, who also killed himself.”
====
I note that the address URL for this article read “/children.mentalhealth”
Here’s a wonderful excerpt from the AFCC website talking about how the “old” terminology of criminal law was just so inappropriate, outmoded, as it were, for family law. After all, it’s a “family,” right?
(This is from the AFCC link to the right, the history page):
“The 1980s: The Mediation Explosion”
“The Children’s Bureau of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare awarded AFCC a research grant to study the effects of mediation on custody and visitation disputes in courts in Connecticut, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
Interest in court-connected reconciliation counseling was diminishing, and joint custody, mediation, domestic violence and stepfamilies were becoming central issues. The legislation boom had begun, and it was moving in a strong wave from California across the United States. Mandatory mediation and joint custody were hot topics.AFCC’s Mediation Committee hosted three national symposia on mediation standards between 1982 and 1984. Representatives of more than thirty organizations participated in developing the first set of Model Standards of Practice for Family and Divorce Mediation. By the late 1980s, mediation of custody and visitation disputes was mandatory in jurisdictions in more than 33 states.”
I have experienced mediation 3 times. It was a farce each time. It also was a violation of due process, and immediately upended the family dynamics — and households. I am utterly opposed to its use in DV, and the family courts are utterly adamant about it up here. WHY, one wonders. Streamlines the process, no messy “reviewing” of the court record, or the history of DV that perhaps led to the breakup to start with.
Perhaps there should be an automatic safety rule, as Dads feel so disempowered, and need to act quickly to restore the balance — a cooling off period of at least 3 months, perhaps. Perhaps. I don’t know, but mediation will not work when the power balance includes physical violence and intimidation. Depending on how one defines “works.” A 32 year old man, here (above) was sure he’d win. When he didn’t, he found another way to “win.” We need another paradigm.
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Opening Salvo
Why it matters…even if you’re not inside the doors. . . .
You are probably living with, next to, or in association with someone who has. You may be sleeping with one — or with someone raised by one. You may be blissfully unaware of WHAT that guy who cut your car off in traffic this morning was upset about, and why he’s wound so tight you might get hurt if you honk back. If you teach, your classrooms are going to be affected –either by getting some resources deleted from them, or from having a different quality of children in them.
One person going into this system is going to be traumatized. Another will be probably robbed. A third will be shocked. A fourth will be rewarded. A fifth will be back for more behavioral modification.
A sixth will be forced back to negotiate with the abusive partner she (OK, now you can argue: “or he”) was attempting to separate from — and will be lectured, after having worked up courage to do this — not to upset the children by showing anger, or conflict, because in this YOU-topia supposedly conflict never happens — or at LEAST never between parents.
- This belief, along with belief in Santa Claus, according to the same logic, is going to set your children on a good path for life.
A seventh will be hired to report on your demeanor after having just found out, you won’t be seeing your kids this weekend — or month – – or as it turned out in my case — next month either.
An eighth will be in an associated office saying, that wasn’t her department.
A ninth will be hired by taxpayers to enforce court orders dispensed from the bench — and possibly not do so if those orders were issued to protect a woman.
I am a woman, and I speak for myself, and add a qualifier, “possibly.” In my case, the statistical odds seemed a little stacked, as my prior concept of the word “law enforcement” was the common English usage. Not so any more. Which brings me to the ninth:
The ninth person going through those doors will have learned that the majority of the English language is entirely context-specific, kind of like a Mac. Until you “get” this — that the words are not spoken or written in these parts for their meaning, but for their EFFECT. As such, you will quickly learn the buzz words (whether by having them sting your situation, or I hope not, by using them yourself to sting someone else).
As such, the ninth person is going to be alienated from sense of self, reality, and that the world operates according to certain principles.
Of course the real cure for that is simply to know that you fell down a rabbit hole. And you will not emerge intact. It’s a virtual religious experience — transformative.
Which, of course, was the purpose. Every good oligarchy needs a Family Court, lest the rabbits stop breeding, hopping, getting snared, and nibbling the same low-cut grass jobs (or going underground) in the same geographic areas, generation after generation of market niches and material for the next set of pharmaceuticals or animal behavioralists. The bait is money, custody, and social respectability.
After all, if they all went “Watership Down,” who would serve? Without enough servants, landscapers, nannies, fast-food retail workers, and the multitude of unseen people that make the infrastructure “go,” how would all the certified specialists come up with the theories, and where would THEY self-propagate?
What would they do down on the non-ethereal grass, floors, garages, at the foodbanks, or for that matter shelters, prisons, and so forth — with the rest of us?
Label? Write a report? And then stand alongside “Street Sheet,” charge a $1.00 and see if that will buy dinner?
Wikipedia: “Street_Sheet”
What it Is
STREET SHEET is a monthly tabloid written primarily by homeless and formerly homeless people that provides its readers with a perspective on homelessness that mainstream media simply cannot match. It provides a unique opportunity to its vendors as well: a dignified alternative to panhandling. The STREET SHEET (cover price $1) is given free to qualified poor and homeless San Franciscans, who get to retain 100% of the proceeds from their sales. Last year, the paper celebrated its 15th anniversary, making it the oldest continuously published street newspaper in the world.
Contact information:
STREET SHEET Vendor orientations take place
Fridays 10 A.M. @ 468 Turk Street
Phone: (415) 346 3740 ext. 304
Or tell the truth like The Beat Within?
.
Other Literature from BCD (“Behind Closed Doors”):
[Co-Pieces, found today]
It made me realize that a person who makes threats of death, can’t be taken lightly. It also left me with a low tolerance and a lack of respect for individuals who choose to treat their significant others in such a violent fashion.
The abusive language and exaltation of violence in most gangsta rap music are the reality of our present day society. Most of us are intelligently mature enough to realize that by not talking about something won’t cause it to go away.
Back in the day when I was going to school, getting really good grades not getting in fights or getting in trouble of some kind. I used to be a honor roll student.
we make mistakes listening to our thoughts
we make mistakes from things we’re taught
we might change if we get caught
we fell in love with fake dreams we bought
He grabbed her arm, turned her around, slapped her so hard her long hair went flying as if she were a doll. I was pretending I didn’t know what was going on and the loud sound of the slap make me flinch and put the video game on pause
Like a blind man who’s walking in a state of darkness, the same for the poor man in the ghetto who’s taking his anger out on his fellow comrade.
Beware of these politicians who pander to the public by legislation which they purport is “tough on crime,” but which in reality erodes civil liberties.
[end quote]
This is true in all our boxes: Womb to Tomb, sometimes only the first one ain’t a box and interacts with a real, living, pulsing human being.
Boxes along the way; Play pens (sometime), apartments, schools, courts, police stations, prisons, office cubicles, nursing homes, mental institutions, and finally that last long literally underground box. For the lucky ones.
Then there are the air-conditioned, Danish & coffee-serving, large conference halls where the certified ex-spurts (experts) talk to each other about what to do about those not invited to the talks.
Hurt doesn’t dissipate — it goes somewhere. It changes things.
Let’s talk. Family Court matters, it’s agonna hurt someone. Otherwise they’d “settle out of court.” What does all that pain really gain? And for whom??
~ ~ ~
Sometimes, you don’t even have to be near a court, there are trawlers [1] [2] out for the vulnerable, the needy, the hapless, and those who forgot their South Bronx Common sense — and WHAM! No access to your son, your daughter — for not leaving an abusive situation, or even poverty, the “right” way, or staying, I suppose, within your socially allotted caste (by working hard/smart/ and occasionally receiving a service from the government . . .
[1] Merriam-Webster Definition:
-
: to catch fish with a large net (called a trawl)
-
: to search through (something) in order to find someone or something
[2] from On-line Etymology Dictionary, we can see the root meaning is from “to drag.” The net seeking a catch is dragged through an area where fish are expected, I supposed including the bottom:
- trawl (v.)
1560s, from Dutch tragelen, from Middle Dutch traghelen “to drag,” from traghel “dragnet,” probably from Latin tragula “dragnet.” Related: Trawled; trawling.
Some groups, I believe the phrase was being circulated, “trawling for trauma” — some groups are trawling for traumatized mothers, in particular, and net (‘ensnare’) them on-line and through personal communications into a coordinated framework which lays the cause of “custody of children going to batterers” on “judges just don’t understand,” i.e., lack of domestic violence experts on-hand in the family court system. Along with this belief system is the corollary that FIXING it would be to “enhance” the family court system through additional training of judges, lawyers, custody evaluators (and just about anyone else), that is to say, for certain professionals to have opportunity to become consultants to government officials.
This is from “Poor Magazine.” They’re experts on being poor, not from the School of What To Do WIth Poverty but from the experiential angle. Notice the Honesty, the details.
“One low-income mother’s story..
~ ~ ~This story speaks to me: I was going through, thinking there was justice inside the halls of justice, and that some mature adult would see through these clear lies about my children, myself, and so forth. . . . . . ~ ~ ~
Virginia Velez/Special to PNN
Tuesday, March 25, 2003;
Before welfare de-form, I did all the right things to get out of poverty as a single mom. Luckily, I only have one child, a very rebellious, independent child. Anyway, I went to college when he was eight. It was the 80’s and I worked part-time in the very university I was attending 22 hours a week so I could get health benefits for my child and I. It was a while before the financial aid folks noticed, then they forced me to give up my nice job on campus to take work-study for much less pay and no medical benefits, or I would lose my grants. Luckily, another single mom told me I could get AFDC, at least for Medicaid and food stamps, and I did. I did so well in that Washington state university that I got a fellowship to go to the most elite school in California.. . .
So far so good.
Then . . . .
“…Dummy me called them to ask for a social worker or someone to help me get my son home and work things out. Yup, obviously Stanford had affected my good-South-Bronx-ghetto-child sense.. . .
She’d paid her dues, she asked for help for a situation…
“The police, CPS, social workers, all did absolutely nothing. . . that never before had anything been held against me in my caring for my child, alone, for 13 years. They did not care I was sad and depressed from finances, and from having to be around the most selfish, ego-centric, richest and most messed up people in the world, while I worked my butt off in my studies and part-time work. “
“…Never, ever ask for help from any agency. It’s completely pitiful for the moms and kids, but there is absolutely no institution you can trust for any help raising or just keeping your child. “
Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History 
Mixed Sentiments — from a different battlefield — on the Passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, who valiantly fought: Brain Cancer, for Not Leaving Children Behind, and for Caring for the nation’s Health.
with 2 comments
AUGUST 26, 2009
I rarely sleep, and as the TV flashed with news of this lion of a personality, and carrier of the family name, it coincided unfortunately with the third year since I lost my daughters to felony child-stealing, in retaliation for reporting, in seeking asylum from domestic violence.
I struggle with respecting this event, with discomfort about our nations hyper-respect of public figures. Senator Ted apparently was a womanizer as well as struggled with alcohol, and eventually married a woman 22 years his junior; do his many public accomplishments compensate, is this just the way of “famous men” that change society?
He lost two brothers to assassination, assassinations that affected our country.
I am currently reviewing the work of a young woman, local, that lost a sister and a brother to murder, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably also wrong color. She too is near the end of her dynasty — both parents gone. Her mother took the loss of two children hard, and also was fighting cancer. Her older sister was seen talking to some people in a van. She was found later, hog-tied, stabbed many times, raped many times, and thrown out like trash in a dumpster. Her SISTER. Her brother was stabbed in the heart for confronting someone trailing other women. Why do I run across people like this? I don’t know, except I don’t live in a castle or gated community, and I find people’s stories interesting. I have been cut out of my own daughters’ stories by a top-heavy, supposedly well-intentioned system that knew that two bright girls were not going to escape its radar or grasp, and that mother must therefore disappear.
Unlike me, she figured out FAST that a system was not going to protect her own two sons, and found a trusted friend to become guardian, so at least she can see them. Like others, for a fee. Like me, she wants some version of the truth to survive for her children.
We are allowed to give birth, but too often, not to also speak.
How famous is Senator Ted, then, and how much more important his story, and his contributions? Should I mourn him more than others? And yet it’s clear he worked hard, campaigned hard, pushed initiatives through, and changed our society. How can I handle this today, when I shouldn’t be blogging but doing something more self-preserving. Do I share the national regret and awe?
Quite honestly, no, but I mean no harm in saying so.
How long can I afford to pause and commemorate?
Probably shouldn’t have today, but i did.
it is easy and common to pick heroes and praise them, and transfer parts of our identity to heroes who gave their lives in service, and forget the non-heroes, some of whom I commemorate below.
I am not sure where Senator Ted falls in this mix. I think the metaphor of this book has come to the rescue. It seems both to symbolize the federalism and the poverty, and the reporting of it that go together in the topic “FAMOUS.”
“Let us Now Praise Famous Men“
My father had a love, and some ear, for poetry, and always claimed he could hear the rhythm of the Lord’s Prayer (or possibly it was the 23rd psalm) in Agee’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915.” Ever the critic (and unable to carry a tune himself) he tried to talk me out of both music, and Christianity (unsuccessful in both cases), and we had something of a truce. I do not have, emotionally or socially, a family at this point; I have made my own in life, and as to the one with whom I share DNA, it’s the two daughters only (now gone) and the deceased Dad, and my memories of him will have to do. . . .
So perhaps the Agee reference, the federalism, and my wish to point out, that deep poverty and distress still exist, sometimes still caused by either the basic human lusts, or the governmental god-like posturing, will make up for my mixed sense of duty in perhaps failure to “note” with enough awe, the passing of another member of the Kennedy dynasty, regardless of on how wide a screen and with how broad a stroke for how long, he painted his visions of what the United States should be. For one, as a woman, a mother, and a Christian, I do not share his multiple visions on how to help the poor and educate America. I do not think this is the original American vision, a totalitarian welfare state, an inverted pyramid building the 21st century equivalent of pyramids of social structure. I think this “nation/religion” is the way of Egypt, milennia ago. No, I do not. But still, Let us Now Praise Famous Men.
One of the follies of humanity is poor choice of who to praise and with whom to associate — famous preempts worthy.
lthough Agee’s and Evans’ work was never published as the intended magazine article, their work has endured in the form in which it finally emerged, a lengthy, highly original book. Agee’s text is part ethnography, part cultural anthropological study, and part novelistic, poetic narrative set in the shacks and fields of Alabama. Evans’ black-and-white photographs, starkly real but also matching the grand poetry of the text, are included as a portfolio, without comment, in the book.
Although at its heart a story of the three families, the Gudgers, Woods, and Ricketts (pseudonyms for the Burroughs, Tengles and Fields) the book is also a meditation on reporting and intrusion, on observing and interfering with subjects, sufficient to occupy any student of anthropology, journalism, or, for that matter, revolution.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY 1962-2009
August 26, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Reflections:
Who old enough does not remember? the assassinations, the plane crash, and now we have newsbroadcasts, and a nation commemorating the legacy of this Senator from Massachusetts. It is healing to commemorate, with respect, men who have changed the face of the nation. Last night, I watched on TV, Charlie Rose seeking to know this man through former friends and writers, and also speaking with the Senator also. As I saw the shock of white hair, the broad, broad charismatic smile, and listened to Senator Kennedy promote Education and Health Care, his two major federal programs and passions, I had a hard time. I heard the Senator talk about how America cannot be left behind in globalization and MUST give EVERY child the capacity to succeed in a global economy.
I thought, where are the memorials for the people who were not born into Kennedy family, but still died?
Viet Nam Memorial
By thee have I run through a troop and leapt over a wall
Psalm 18:
1 I will love thee, O LORD, my strength.
2 The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.
3 I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies.
4 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid.
5 The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.
6 In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears.
. . . .
With the merciful thou wilt shew thyself merciful; with an upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright;
26 With the pure thou wilt shew thyself pure; and with the froward thou wilt shew thyself froward.
27 For thou wilt save the afflicted people; but wilt bring down high looks.
28 For thou wilt light my candle: the LORD my God will enlighten my darkness.
29 For by thee I have run through a troop; and by my God have I leaped over a wall.
30 As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the LORD is tried: he is a buckler to all those that trust in him.
31 For who is God save the LORD? or who is a rock save our God?
32 It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect.
33 He maketh my feet like hinds’ feet, and setteth me upon my high places.
34 He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.
35 Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.
36 Thou hast enlarged my steps under me, that my feet did not slip
WHO MOURNS THESE?
Deborah Ross (51) and Ersie Charles Everette (58)
2009 Tried to break up, Shot to death at work, in a Tollbooth, and her male friend in a parking lot, ambushed
Cross said the shootings appeared to stem from a domestic dispute as Burris and Deborah Ross, 51, a California Department of Transportation toll booth collector, had recently broken up.
“He clearly had no regard for human life, so we wanted to apprehend him as soon as possible,” Cross said. “We had authorities all throughout Northern California trying to find this guy.”
Burris apparently opened fire with a shotgun shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday, killing Ross and Ersie Charles Everette, 58, of San Leandro, Calif., who was sitting in his truck in the toll plaza parking lot.
Ross and Burris had shared a house in Richmond, and neighbors said the two had been having financial problems. Richmond Police were called to the house on Saturday, police spokeswoman Sgt. Bisa French said Wednesday. It is unknown what the nature of the call was as no report was taken, French said.
Although their relationship had just ended, Burris was aware of Everette, who drove Ross to work Tuesday, Cross said.
“Somehow, he knew the guy was there at her job, there’s a connection between the two victims, but what that relationship is, we don’t know at this time,” Cross said.
Everette, known as “Chuck” by those who knew him, was a longtime, well-respected bus driver for Golden Gate Transit who had received numerous accolades, spokeswoman Mary Currie said Wednesday.
“He was a likable guy, a good guy,” Currie said. “Passengers liked him. His co-workers liked him.”
Tuesday’s shootings occurred at the bridge over the northern portion of San Francisco Bay that connects well-to-do Marin County with Richmond and other East Bay suburbs. Witnesses said a man used the butt of a shotgun to shatter the window of the No. 3 toll booth, then fired at least three times inside, stunning rush-hour commuters in the westbound lanes before fleeing in the van owned by Western Eagle Shuttle of San Rafael, Calif.
Officers found Ross’ body inside the booth, while Everette was discovered slumped over in a white pickup truck in a nearby parking lot.
> > >
2009/2008 Torres, Catalina (44) & Eustacio (41), Sgt. Paul Starzyk
Brother, Sister, both domestic violence workers, both murdered by an “ex”
According to the San Francisco chronicle, on the evening of July 19th, Eustacio Torres was shot by his ex-girlfriend at a converted garage that Torres was renovating. Torres and his girlfriend, Bernadette Agustin, met about five years ago when Torres was renovating her house. They became partners in that business for a few years. The market started to tumble downhill, and their buildings went into foreclosure causing them to lose money. This caused tension between the couple. After some time, their relationship started to become difficult for both of them. Torres realized that Agustin was dangerous; however he never got a restraining order against her. On the evening on July 19th Agustin went to meet Torres at the garage. Prior to this incident she bought a pistol. She brought shot him with it.
About a year ago Eustacio Torres’ sister, Catalina Torres, a volunteer for a battered women’s group, was shot and killed inside of her Martinez apartment while trying to protect one of her customers in a beauty salon.
Her customer’s husband, Felix Sandoval, entered the beauty salon raged at his wife who had a restraining order against him. Catalina and her customer jetted out of the beauty salon. Sandoval couldn’t find his wife so he followed Torres to her apartment and shot her in the head, simply because she was affiliated with the incident. He then shot at the door and hit Sgt. Paul Starzyk. He still busted in and shot and killed Sandoval.
Since these two murders are a year apart and both victims come from the same family, the Torres family is suffering deeply from these two tragedies.
It is sad, yet ironic how both tragedies happened in the way that they did. They were related and both incidents happened a year apart. Considering the fact that Eustacio, Catalina’s brother had to help bury her, it is sad that he got killed also. They both worked together in a domestic violence group together. Now the Torres family has lost two of their family members to similar incidents.
MARTINEZ — Last September, Catalina Torres’ family struggled to find answers about why she died at the hands of an estranged in-law who also killed a Martinez police sergeant.
> > >
Less than a year later, they find themselves again trying to find clarity after the slaying late last month of her brother, Eustacio Torres, by an estranged girlfriend in San Diego.
According to San Diego police, the bodies of Eustacio Torres, 41, and Bernadette Agustin, 52, were discovered by his nephew — Catalina Torres’ son — in the early-morning hours of July 20 at his home on in the Paradise Hills area. Investigators believe that Agustin shot Eustacio Torres and herself.
Eustacio Torres’ death follows the slaying of his sister Sept. 6, 2008, by Felix Sandoval. Sandoval burst into a Martinez beauty salon looking for his wife. She was not there, and he confronted her cousin, Catalina Torres, at a nearby apartment. While she shielded one of the home’s residents, Sandoval shot and killed her.
Sandoval then shot at police approaching the apartment, mortally wounding Sgt. Paul Starzyk. But Starzyk’s final act was to kill Sandoval, saving the others in the apartment.
Sandoval was in the midst of a divorce from his wife, who had filed a restraining order against him, and Catalina Torres had been supporting her separation from him. In San Diego, Eustacio Torres was severing ties with Agustin. Although the Torres family has experienced two devastating losses, Noe Torres, youngest of the six siblings, said they do not feel like victims.
A memorial fund has been established in Eustacio Torres’ name. Donations can be made at any Wells Fargo Bank branch to the account number 2629533015.
Since these two murders are a year apart and both victims come from the same family, the Torres family is suffering deeply from these two tragedies.
It is sad, yet ironic how both tragedies happened in the way that they did. They were related and both incidents happened a year apart. Considering the fact that Eustacio, Catalina’s brother had to help bury her, it is sad that he got killed also. They both worked together in a domestic violence group together. Now the Torres family has lost two of their family members to similar incidents.
2008 account “Details emerge in Martinez triple shooting:
Catalina Torres survived domestic abuse and became a strong advocate for a nonprofit group that helps victims of domestic violence.
“She was a battered woman who became an advocate,” said Maria Preciado, Torres’ close friend. “She took negative experiences and turned them into positive things.”
In a tragic turn of events, the 44-year-old STAND Against Domestic Violence volunteer lost her life Saturday, an innocent bystander in a deadly domestic disturbance involving her cousin’s estranged husband.
Officers were called to the salon about 11:35 a.m. Saturday on reports of a domestic disturbance. Sandoval broke the salon’s front window with his hand and entered holding a gun, police said. According to witnesses, he was looking for his estranged wife, salon owner Margarita Sandoval.
Martinez police Chief Tom Simonetti said Felix Sandoval, who was waving the gun around, never fired a shot in the salon, but confronted his teenage daughter in the parking lot behind the salon and told her he was going to kill his wife and his other children. Sandoval ran to an upstairs apartment on the opposite side of the parking lot where Torres, an unidentified woman and three of Sandoval’s children were, the chief said.
Elnora Caldwell, 46
She asked for protection
SEPTEMBER 2008, This beautiful woman Tried to Leave, Died, Stabbed, on side of the road
Contra Costa sheriff building death penalty argument in wife stabbing
Investigators said Monday that they are trying to build a death penalty case against an Oakland man who allegedly stabbed his estranged wife near the Caldecott Tunnel and pushed her out of his pickup in front of stunned motorists. Robert Woods, a 47-year-old former maintenance worker for the city of Oakland, was arrested on suspicion of murdering Elnora Caldwell, 46. Caldwellobtained a restraining order against Woods earlier this year, saying she was afraid of him. She was stabbed to death Saturday night and pushed from the pickup on a stretch of Fish Ranch Road that passes over the east end of the Caldecott Tunnel. ..Caldwell’s family members believe she was kidnapped Saturday from her Oakland home, perhaps by someone other than Woods.
Police and witnesses said Woods went to Caldwell’s Oakland apartment and washed up, then turned himself in to an Oakland police officer in the area. More than a dozen motorists stopped to help Caldwell. Some gave her chest compressions and others jotted down the license plate number of the GMC pickup. Alameda County Superior Court records show that Caldwell applied for a domestic violence restraining order against Woods on April 29, and that the order was to be active until 2013.
Caldwell wrote in her application for the restraining order that Woods had shoved her after showing up unannounced at the Nordstrom department store in San Francisco where she worked and accusing her of infidelity. In 2007, she wrote, Woods pulled her hair during an argument in his truck, forcing her to flee and take a taxi home.
In a third incident, Caldwell said, her husband broke a glass sliding door at her apartment.
“It has to stop,” Caldwell wrote of alleged verbal and physical abuse.
Court records show that Woods was fired from his job as a maintenance worker for the city of Oakland last year for allegedly doing drugs and threatening to kill co-workers.
? ? ?
Domestic Violence Murder/Suicides – Here’s a summary:
Nina Reiser (31), mother of 2. No asylum in America
2006, Russian-born Oby/Gyn tries to divorce Hans Reiser (WIKIPEDIA) but disappears on exchange of children
Hans Reiser Admits to Murdering Nina Reiser, Pleads to Reduced …
Anastasia Melnitchenko, 22, unmarried, No asylum in America
2005 Tried to break up, stalked; a clearly preventable homicide — her body found in car trunk
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
The El Sobrante man charged with murdering a woman he had repeatedly terrorized attended a two-hour counseling session for domestic violence offenders just days before the slaying, authorities said Tuesday.
McAlpin was on probation stemming from eight felony convictions in two separate cases for stalking, threatening and attacking Melnitchenko on several occasions from 2001 to 2004. Part of his sentence in the most recent case was that he attend a yearlong domestic violence prevention program.
THE BEST WAY TO “PREVENT” VIOLENCE IS TO SEND A CLEAR MESSAGE TO GIVE NO QUARTER TO PERPERTRATORS. MCALPIN WAS A COCKY OVERENTITLED YOUNG MAN WITH NO RESPECT FOR THE WOMAN, OR THE LAW — AND FROM THE STORY, IT’S CLEAR WHY HE HAD NO REASON TO RESPECT THE LAW, TOO. I DNR BUT I SUSPECT HE WAS WHITE. I DON’T THINK THIS POOR WOMAN EVER EVEN LIVED WITH HIM. THEY DATED BRIEFLY. SHE DIED. THE STORY OF HER DEATH INTERSECTS WITH THE STORY OF A JUDGE WITH A MISSION; I MAY TELL IT ANOTHER TIME. THIS EVENT INTERSECTS WITH MY ATTEMPTS TO GET HELP IN 2005, THE SAME YEAR. I REMEMBER TRYING TO TELL MY FAMILY THAT THIS STALKING, THESE INDICATORS, SPELLED TROUBLE! MY PROBLEM WAS WHO I TOLD, WHO I SOUGHT HELP FROM, AS WAS ANASTASIA’S.
Taking matters into their own hand; two brothers kill widow & her relatives:
Winta Mehari, 28; her brother Yonas Mehari, 17;
and their mother, 50-year-old Regbe Bahrengasi
Widow and HER relatives killed in revenge, seeking money, by deceased husband’s relatives. 2 year old involved.
2006 – No Asylum for Eritrean Family from revenge, greed,
extortion? in the Golden State
Planned to exterminate family during Thanksgiving Dinner?
I REMEMBER THIS ONE. I WAS DRIVING TO EAT DINNER, TAKEN CHARITABLY IN, NOT WITH MY DAUGHTERS, BECAUSE THEY’D ALREADY BEEN TAKEN, COMPLICIT WITH MY OWN FAMILY AND AROUND MONEY ISSUES ALSO. I RAN INTO POLICE CARS & TV CAMERAS BLOCKING THE WAY.
Was this misogyny? Was this something like an honor killing? What WAS this? A young man, apparently a good one, was killed, victim to two men seeking revenge on his mother. His crime? Being a brother, apparently!
SUMMARY:
Sometimes there is no refuge from family violence — members take the law into their own hands; oftentimes greed is a factor, as in many cases above. McAlpin appears to have just been a man with a mission intersecting with a system with a different mission. She got cross in the cross-fire of attempts to reform a man after: kidnapping, stalking, assault, and threats to kill.
How IMPORTANT is it that the United States set the standard that misogyny is “anathema” it’s unacceptable?
I fear that Senator Ted, Presidents Bush, Clinton, and now Obama, have failed to do this. Moreover, women’s groups also, subject to the same human emotions, claw and fight each other sometimes to the top, seeking scarce prestige, or abundant federal funds. This is also a spinoff of misogyny. We who watch such things don’t see such huge, huge divides among the men’s groups. We have now an older Republican white President, a young and charming (and philandering) white President, and an even younger and MORE charming African-American President, all united in fixing the crises of fatherlessness, and making sure that mothers don’t actually get to (safely) fulfil their motherhood unless a man is present, and it’s CLEAR we do not have have equal protection or rights under law, despite the claims to the contrary. If so, where are all the dead men on the side of the road simply for leaving? Where are the women blowing away a few family generations to take the law into their own hands? They just aren’t there!
I should be more respectful, and I will take another day to be so, of the passing of a major political figure this week, Senator Ted Kennedy.
I wish I did not have a troubling memory of his womanizing, of the two programs he promoted the mOST (education/health) which have negatively affected my family the MOST. I wish that the date of his passing did not coincide with the date my kids were stolen, yet remain within (at last sighting) driving distance, but inaccessible to me, because I simply took a stand against misogyny and violence.
I took a stand for telling the truth in court, and not mincing words. Perhaps I am very disrespectful.
I wish I were not thinking of how he endorsed our current President, for whom I too voted, not being fully aware of his stance on the ubiquitous and impoverishing, endangering to women “fatherhood” movement. It is never enough, never enough — always another initiative, another grant, through churches, through family members when they are themselves swept up and confronted by their failure to confront, and through family law system, and through an unbelievably condescending virtual caste system by the elite making it near impossible for less fortunate to escape the economic abuse that would enable them to escape threats of injury, death, having children abducted, either by the ex or through the courts or (case in point) both, and through violence to our civil rights within this nation.
They said Sen. Kennedy worked like a dog, and i believe it. Some of us do, too, on a single issue that doesn’t often go away. I never tried to raise his offspring, and I do not appreciate his or any other administration , or their programs, just because they have the platform, prating on about how to raise mine, married or single, through a burdensome system that doesn’t even impart decent values, let alone decent academics. And in 20 years of THIS battle, I’ve never had a hand laid on any of mine, anything that was mine, or on ME, from someone who openly said he or she hated me or wanted to hurt me.
It was always from the “helpers” and those “concerned.” Sure. . . .
But in re:
Kennedy’s Battle With Cancer Lost
U.S. has lost a great statesman, obviously. But before this, long before this, we have lost something else. We have lost self-respect as individuals, and transferred it to our leaders, HOPING in them. This is misplaced hope too often, and it’s unwise.
Jeremiah was a prophet who watched and spoke out against the deterioration of his nation: For this, he got left in a pit without water, and would’ve starved there, were he not later rescued. Later, Jesus Christ, also preaching “repent” got crucified.
Jeremiah 17
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
For the past 20 years, I have sought refuge in my home, from my home, from my family’s close resonance to the tune my ex-husband played. I have a logical mind, and mind seeks logic to piece a life together, even if the logic is to accept chaos. But I HAVE found a logic to the, what I will call, narcissistic, self-referential habit of federal domination of the markets — well MOST markets. Education, family design, health care, welfare, child-bearing practically, and reform.
The U.S. is succeeding at incarceration — we are the world’s LARGEST jailor — and failing at education. The reason we are failing at education is because we have trusted our leaders to design a system. Instead, they designed an ECONOMY to support themselves, and placed our children at its mercy. This was a transformational system of values sold as good, but not in practice good. It is possible to succeed very well in this educational system and be an utter failure as a person. It is also possible to fail in this system and be a business success. Or to fail all round.
I am 50-plus. At this age, I had to pick WHAT to dedicate what’s left of my life to; and it was a hard choice between Family Law system and Educational System. Both systems hurt my kids and my family, and are creating the tiered society, while claiming to provide the opposite. I have a relative with her own children run through a private school system that took offence that i too — in a different way — opted out of the local public schools. In truth, I believe that if our daughters succeeded without wealth at what she’d sacrificed to become wealthy and with wealth BUY, it would somehow show up her life plan. Our respective nieces might be competing for similar college slots – – I don’t know.
But I have watched close up, and then system-wide, forced failure and social exclusion for simply doing something about it. So have many fellow-blogger mothers (see right column).
Look at this graphic:
(it’s an old one) from “America, What Went Wrong“? An book that documents the destruction of the middle class.
An INDEPENDENT middle class, with time to think, and understanding basic business principles, will hold its government accountable. A DEPENDENT (upon professional jobs, many of them government-sanctioned or supplied), which my generation came from (but not my parents) will indeed do the dirty work and bidding of the top group, keeping the heirarchy in place.
From 1990 to 2009, I have been overexposed to impoverishment, and how it’s manufactured. I watched my husband do this, in order to keep himself on top, he was willing that the ship should go down. Nothing more mattered, and all discussions were moot (or off) that didn’t first establish this dominance. Neither I nor our children were actually to show up as people, or with needs, but as performers.
Now, according to the myths taught in public school (and elsewhere) about HOW government works (which dealing with in-home abuse didn’t really leave time for an official study of), it should be possible to leave the situation. No one should care HOW I leave it, so long as it’s done legally and without harm to our children. However once we showed up as a household, without a resident male, in waltzed the “experts,” ignoring the facts, the danger, the track record, and proudly proclaiming situations that didn’t exist as though they did.
Having some exposure to the Bible and its language, this was easy to detect as playing “god.” And naturally, I protested.
And so, the divide and conquer of the middle class, overeducated fools (lots of academia, insufficient truly hard times), scrabbling to assert their intellectual dominance and right to explain away that violence happened in their family, and they, too, failed to report.
In the long run, I chalk it up to basic human emotions of (1) pride (2) fear (3) greed (4) prejudice (THIs kind, “misogyny.”) Where logic fails, dominance by gender — or age (it keeps flipping around, the varieties of messages I get), only a few years — or marital status, or SOMETHING to preserve the us/them, Object/subject relationship which is not a human relationship. Because surely they didn’t misdiagnose a situation, the judges were wrong, I was wrong, the statistics were wrong, everyone else was wrong, and this intact family unit (sort of) was “right.” Or else. . . . . Social shunning was tried, and I didn’t repent, to the antes were upped, and my kids were stolen, and all contact cut off.
Perhaps it is because of working so hard on these issues, I have been watching politics from afar.
Perhaps it is because of these issues, I have a different “take” on the passing of a Senator that was compared last night to Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. The words “dynasty” may apply, but these are NOT words coherent with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Here’s a woman talking sense:
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
This is the theme of the National Fatherhood Initiative, there is a “crisis in fatherlessness.” I have watched these manufactured crises on a personal level and also a national level and have begun to get an understanding of some of the causes and sources, ONE of which is most definitely the educational system. Divide and conquer, and assume control of assets and assessments. That’s elementary. One very empowering activity, to young people, is the arts, and self-sufficiency. No problem. Delete the arts, if possible, and free time, and uninterrupted quantities of time for reflection, and also do not study (honestly) either history or the economic system, in particular not the history of any system one is currently in. Again, I saw this in my marriage, how the most basic amenities were threatening to my “intimate partner.” THE most threatening one apparently was access to a steady cash flow. If I got this by working, the reserves must be eliminated by his working less, or making the process of getting to/from work more burdensome and timesconsuming. Rooms got trashed or re-arranged while I was out, at class or working or with the kids. There was no stability. Once you get the pattern, it’s only a matter of breaking it. My writing (I was also journaling the abuse) threatened this person. I exported the journals. He exported his behind and friendship to the people into whose care I’d put them. I went and got them back. . . . . But it was too late. They had to be turned, I guess (?).
Here’s another one which speaks to it about “lockdown” of the fortress continents. Care must be taken to incorporate cheap labor:
Fortress continents
The US and Europe are both creating multi-tiered regional strongholds
There is so much in life to be considered, but in considering memorials, again, I keep coming back to scripture:
“Pray for kings and all that are in authority, that we may live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” (I Tim. 2:1).
“It is not good to have respect of persons.” (James).
You know what, with all due respect, it’s not. LIFE is about what you respect, and who you honor: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.”
There is not to be a tiered respect of people according to how MUCH of this world they’ve changed. We, ALL of us in the U.S., are to respect ourselves, and the founding principles of this country, which then allow us to respect at LEAST our neighbors.
“Love worketh no ill towards his neighbor.”
Sometimes it’s simply in what one does NOT do, that love.
So, below are my unforgiveable (??) thoughts, in respect that a Senator has died, on seeing the extensive television recognition of this man, and hearing about what he had been doing while I was across the country, trying to stay afloat and keep the pilot light lit in my own life, spiritually and physically.
And I have to go about what’s left of this day, seeking funds sufficient for today and build something to tomorrow.
I saw a charming, Robert-Redford smile, and I thought about Chappaquiddick,
about this man’s marriage to a woman 22 years his junior, a 38 year old divorced attorney single mother, and wondered things that were less respectful than appropriate. I thought about the CFDA pie chart I know, where his two most passionate areas: Education and Health — were THE largest and most impoverishing segments of the budget; and the effect of this incredible top-heavy Federal language transformation into a welfare state directing lives of the lowly.
It did not help when I learned that this person was a prime author of the “No Child Left Behind” act and a real pusher of Head Start. Trust the elite to prescribe for the poor every time. It is also quite unfortunate that his death this week commemorates about 3 years fo the “death” of my relationship with my own daughters, and primarily because I REFUSED to accept that poverty resulting from violence should result in becoming a surrogate womb for childless narcissistic relatives convinced that, having not experienced what my daughters and I did, or accepted court rulings already made, that they, TOO, “knew what was best” for three females leaving family violence. When I refused, I was punished by these people, and part of the punishment was declaring what I provided for our daughters, either was irrelevant and did not exist, and what they wished instead, was somehow superior.
The punishment included the gradual deletion of the arts, the dumbing down of my children, the deletion of jobs in my profession (in the arts) because of the need to fight family!, and eventually the criminal removal of children (minors) from my household in order to, ostensibly, “rescue” them somehow, by totally removing all contact with a law abiding, working, intelligent, informed and independent mother. I have had cause and many years to reflect on the benefits and fallbacks of my own, and my ex-spouses public educations amid dysfuncitonal families, mine in a different way from his, and the values that differ.
This gives a totally different perspective on “No Child Left Behind,” when one realizes that the children of those promoting this policies (if such exist) do not always attend public schools, and if they did, they are not in lower-income neighborhoods. To me, the mark of acceptability is, if it’s good enough for YOUR child, then I’ll listen.
I’ll finish with this well-written summary:
MichaelMoore.com Commemoration
August 26th, 2009 2:25 am
Ted Kennedy Dies of Brain Cancer at Age 77
With all due respect, we do not need any more royalty in this country. We need to set our sites on something invisible, something written, but something of principle, that unites us. Our leaders need to stick to that, and out of respect to OURSELVES ,we should demand that.
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Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up
August 27, 2009 at 1:49 PM
Posted in After She Speaks Up - Reporting Domestic Violence and/or Suicide Threats, compulsory schooling, Designer Families, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, History of Family Court, public education, When Police Are Shot, Where's Mom?
Tagged with Catalina Torres, Constitution, Deborah Ross (51), Declaration of Independence/Bill of Rights, died on the road, Elnora Caldwell (46), Ersie Charles Everette, Eustacio Torres, family annihilation, Hans & Nina Reiser, HHS-TAGGS grants database, Intimate partner violence, laid down their lives, Melitchnenko, Motherhood, murder-suicides, No Asylum in America, parental kidnapping, retaliation for reporting, Sen. Ted Kennedy 1962-2009, social commentary, Tollbooth murder, trauma, triple homicide, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work.., women's rights