KIT GRUELLE: Well, I’m glad you asked that question, because a lot of people believe that domestic violence only happens to poor, uneducated women. In my case, my late husband had been—he had gone into Vietnam, gone to the Vietnam War as a marine, and so he was trained by the Marines to be aggressive, to hunt people down and kill them. And he told me repeatedly that if I ever tried to leave, that there wasn’t a place on the planet that I could go to get away from him. And so, the reality for battered women is they just learn to live with the violence, because, unfortunately, for a great number of women, when they do make that bold move, what I often refer to as a declaration of independence, and say, I can’t live like this anymore. The children can’t live like this anymore. We’ve got to go, then the abusers oftentimes hunt them down and kill them. And so, for us, as advocates, we see women have to make the choice of staying and living with the violence or leaving and running the risk of being killed. And we just believe that there should be a lot more options, and that’s what advocates work towards. The other thing is that we’re so desensitized to violence in the United States that oftentimes women have to be beaten badly enough before our criminal justice system responds, like, for example, in North Carolina we have a charge called misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon. So a North Carolina man can shoot or stab his wife or girlfriend, and unless it involves a serious injury or a life-threatening injury, it’s going to be charged at the misdemeanor level. And so, essentially what that is is that’s just the criminal justice system giving him a green light to just carry on.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 23:21:48 +0000
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