Trump’s comments highlight our failures on domestic violence
Defending his decision to deploy the National Guard in Washington, DC, President Trump noticed on Monday that domestic violence – “things that occur at home” – are called without a crime.
“If a man has a small fight with the wife, they say this is a crime,” continued. Without Trump, just a few days before his comments to the minimum domestic violence as “small battles”, Touraya Reed, the sister of the American Professional League player Naz Reed, was killed in cold blood by her boyfriend. The timing was almost strange – an illustrative drawing of what happens when violence was rejected at home.
This deadly American position has continued to indifferent to women and children for decades.
Touraya is only the latest face of domestic violence. Between May and August this year, dozens of deaths were reported in domestic violence throughout the country, most of them at the hands of offensive men killing their partners and/or their children. On many cases, the perpetrators were known to the police, to family courts and criminal courts, and repeated victims’ requests were not taken to obtain protection and assistance orders from the judicial system seriously.
Unlike Trump’s comments, most of these situations will not make headlines. But the few tell a chilling story for a system of constantly failing survivors, when they follow each specific step to seek help.
These deaths during the past few months are not isolated tragedies. They represent the predictive result of a society that treats domestic violence as a special issue instead of the public health crisis. Family courts routinely give the common nursery to parents accused of domestic violence about 70 percent of the time.
Police officers often deal with domestic violence invitations as an inconvenience instead of emergency situations. Judges reduce a trusted certificate about ill -treatment, with a focus instead on maintaining “friendly” friendly relationships that can be proven to be fatal. Even when these laws have the so -called criticism of domestic violence, they are not effectively implemented by judges.
Statistics are blatant. The intimate partner’s violence affects more than 12 million people annually. Every day in America, three women die at the hands of intimate partners. A woman is attacked by an intimate partner every nine seconds. One in four women will witness an intimate partner’s violence in their lives. Home violence is still a crisis in every society in this country, but our response to it is anemia.
Federal and state funding for domestic violence has been reduced again and again in recent years, leaving survivors anywhere they turn. On any specific day in the United States, more than 13,000 requests for victims’ services are not met due to lack of financing. Among those unparalleled requests, 54 percent for safe housing – the basic need for those who flee violence.
In my work that directs the litigation clinic for family violence at Albani College of Law, I see daily how our legal system betrays the victims. The most dangerous failure occurs in the family courts, where judges, who work under the assumption that children need both parents, and compels the survivors routinely to maintain contact with the aggressors through joint nursery arrangements.
This is not just a problem – it’s a killer. Since 2008, more than 900 children involved in the disputed nursery cases have been killed, most of them by parents who had offended their mothers in the past. The courts gave these killers exactly what they needed: reaching their victims.
Research confirms what defenders have long defined: the aggressors seek to custody at the rate of twice the rate of non-budget parents-not motivated by love, but as a way to preserve power and control. However, our family courts continue to work under the dangerous imagination that once parents are separated, the aggressors turn into healthy common tools.
Even when there are laws to protect survivors, enforcement remains insufficient. When the gun is in a house with home violence, the woman is likely to be killed. Nearly 25 million adults in the United States have suffered from abuse of firearms by an intimate partner. However, although federal laws prohibit the perpetrators of those who violate domestic violence to possess firearms, enforcement is largely left to the “honor system” depends on the aggressors on the delivery of their weapons voluntarily. The result can be predicted: Women get the protection that will be kept them safe, just to discover that it is a piece of paper against a loaded rifle.
Trump’s comments about domestic violence reveal a “small battle” more than hate women and his personal ignorance – it exposes our national failure to deal with the intimate partner violence with the seriousness it requires. But his administration speech is not the root cause of this crisis. The problem passes much deeper, included in institutions that have spent contracts to obtain this correctly and chose constantly not.
Real change requires more than condemning the presidential discourse. It requires enormous increases in federal funding for domestic violence services, especially emergency housing. Family Court judges must be granted compulsory and comprehensive training in forced control and the risks of common nursery in abuse cases. And stronger protocols to seize firearms when issuing protection orders can save lives.
This week coincides with the thirty -first anniversary of the law of violence against women, which aims to transform how America responds to gender -based violence. After more than three decades, there is more work to do. It is a long time ago to match our legislative promises with the institutions and institutional changes necessary to make them real.
Until we do so, Trump’s cruel rejection of domestic violence will continue to reflect not only indifference, but our deadly nation’s failure to protect women and children from the violence that kills them every day.
Del Margulin Sika is an assistant professor of law and director of litigation clinic for domestic violence at the Law College in Albani.
