NY Daily News: "Domestic violence victims must not be intimidated"

Submitted by Hunchback on Sun, 2010-02-28 18:19

This opinion piece in the NY Daily News, complete with the usual cliches and femstats, is just the type of nonsense we should attack in a timely manner. The author is CEO of Safe Horizon, which runs NYC's DV Hotline. Needless to say, no men need apply for help.

Any letters to the News should be no longer than 100 words (preferably 50) and not contain web addresses. As of now (2/28 @1:30pm EST), the comment section on the website is empty. Bon appetit. Excerpt:

'For those of us who have been reading the papers the last couple of days, there are a lot of questions about what actually happened with David Johnson, the aide to Gov. Paterson who has been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. There are questions about contact that state officials had with his ex-girlfriend, who had initiated court proceedings to obtain an order of protection against him.

Despite some very serious and disturbing allegations, we don't yet know exactly what happened.

Regardless, we can learn from the outlines of the story. Because the sad truth is that - whether the batterer is famous or not, politically powerful or not - far too many victims of domestic violence are intimidated by their batterers or their friends and relatives from obtaining the justice and services they need and deserve.'

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Comments

Ms. Zwang is 100% on the money in a general sense - DV victims should not be intimidated by The System. The part she is missing in this is of course that male DV victims are regularly intimidated -- but in other ways perhaps than by visits from state police officers (assuming that is indeed what happened here in this case). What male DV victims are intimidated by is the laughter and dismissiveness of people in The System from police officers (who arrest the victims when male instead of the perps, when female) to judges who laugh openly at any man who gets in front of them and dares to tell his side of things, to DV assistance groups (often publicly-funded) who can't even get into an intake interview because their deep voices automatically DQ them.

But while she talks about The System, Ms. Zwang fails to recognize that she is part of The System. Any man who has been a DV victim who reads this article is also having the general you-don't-matter kind of intimidation factor being reinforced merely by its presence in front of him.

It's one thing to be intimidated by the presence of a police officer who says in effect: "You better think twice 'little lady'," and indeed, such an act is an overt kind of intimidation. More insidious than an explicit in-your-face kind of intimidation perhaps is the more general one I have described wherein there is no one to turn to inside or even at times outside The System to get at least some kind of support.

An abused man is often largely on his own and The System reinforces this. He has only a few people he may or may not have ever met in person maybe to be of some aid at least in a moral sense, since as we know, the money, The System, and the public attention and moral support will go to a DV victim only if she is a she. If he is a he, he can go cram it.

BTW, yes indeed, there are no comments for the article. This is because the DN has not enabled them for it.

<snarkiness>Remember, when you suspect your story will not be well-received, you should always disable comments. It is this rule that has allowed the Times, the Globe, ABC News, and many other fine formerly-all-print publications to fare so well in their popularity here in the digital age.</snarkiness>

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2010-02-28 21:21