Everyday is Domestic Violence Awareness Day: Not Just a Week in October

It is the large crime of multiple dimensions. Spousal abuse. Hundreds of millions of women trapped. Trapped not of their own doing, though every sort of flippant or fierce man, and some women, will turn blue on their room temperature IQ faces stating, drum roll:

how can a woman stay in that sort of relationship?
she could have left anytime
didn’t see the red flags before committing?
how can this go on for one, three, five, ten years . . . something is wrong with that woman
it takes TWO to tango . . .
women expect too much from men . . . yelling back and forth is not abuse
leave this up to the courts and cops . . . if they can’t charge a man with DV, then leave it alone
something is broken in this woman . . . she attracts that sort of relationship . . .

Oh, the stories go on and on. Even judges throughout this rot-gut land, blaming the victim, of course, in open court. Rape victims in their late teens, told they CAUSED the sexual assault by the way they dressed, where they went for drinks and for the drinks they drank.

Do the Gulag Google search — “judge blames girl for dress for rape”

Here ya go:

Judge accused of victim-blaming in comments on rape case…
Mar 10, 2017 — Campaigners say Lindsey Kushner QC’s sentencing remarks were ‘the kind of thing that deters women from reporting assaults’.
Here Are 9 Times Clothing Was Blamed for Sexual Assault – Mich
Apr 27, 2016 — A judge in 2006: “They made their intentions publicly known that they wanted to party.” · A police officer in 2011: “Women should avoid dressing …
Jury blames woman’s clothing in rape case – UPI …
Oct 5, 1989 — Broward County Circuit Judge Mark Speiser had the woman picked up by deputies after she failed to respond to subpoeanes for court appearances.
Manitoba judge criticized for saying victim’s clothing, attitude …
Feb 24, 2011 — A legal expert says a Manitoba judge’s comment during a rape sentencing that “sex was in the air” is a troubling legal throwback.
Peru judge throws out rape case as woman was wearing red …
Nov 4, 2020 — A Peruvian court has declared that a woman who wore red underwear to a party could not have been raped because the garment signalled she …
Judge Tosses Teen’s Sexual Assault Conviction, Drawing …
Jan 13, 2022 — Clinton’s conviction was “a clean and clear example of victim blaming.” By highlighting the girl’s clothing and chastising the hosts of the …
Canadian Judge Robin Camp to woman in rape case – CNN
Sep 13, 2016 — He blamed it on his “non-existent” knowledge of Canadian criminal law.
Rape victim ‘inviting,’ so no jail: Judge rules woman’s clothes …
It should be noted that the supposition that the judge is blaming the victim is … To say that a judge let a rapist off BECAUSE of the woman’s dress, …

Now, Google this — “domestic abuse blame the victim in USA”

The Psychology of Victim Blaming – The Atlantic
Oct 5, 2016 — After the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York banned a performer in the wake of several women accusing him of sexual assault and abuse, …
Why We Blame Victims for Domestic Violence
Aug 23, 2017 — At its core, says Elise Lopez, a researcher in sexual and domestic violence prevention and response at the University of Arizona, victim-blaming …
Rape Culture, Victim Blaming, And The Facts
What is Rape Culture? Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence is normalized and excused in the media and …
Victim blaming – Wikipedia
Secondary victimization of sexual and other assault victims — In efforts to discredit alleged sexual assault victims in court, a defense attorney may delve into an …

Helping Survivors Can Be as Simple as Changing the Way …Dec 9, 2020 — In relation to domestic violence, victim blaming places the responsibility for the abuse on the survivor instead of the abuser. Blaming domestic …

Victim Blaming: Why is it that some victims and survivors of violent crime get blamed for what has happened to them through no fault of their own? Crime victims are often …
4 Reasons Why Victims Blame Themselves For Domestic …Jul 20, 2020 — As an experienced Fort Lauderdale domestic violence attorney, Vanessa L. Prieto can help you take the steps needed to protect yourself.
Victim Blaming in Abuse and Relationships: In the arena of domestic violence, victim blaming is applied with a vengeance against survivors who stay with a primary aggressor beyond the first obviously …
Why does everyone blame the victim in domestic violence …
Abusers only abuse intimate partners behind closed doors. They are very charming and nice to the partner in front of others. Abusers are very manipulative and …
Gaslighting & Abuse – House Of Ruth:
Abuse may be physical, sexual, emotional, or financial. Learn the behaviors to be aware of. Domestic abuse comes in many forms. Understand emotional, verbal, physical & abuse signs.

Yes, there are a million graphics and reports and ways to frame this epidemic in the world:

But, when it comes to your door or your circle of life, you will deal with all manner of what happened and how to help a woman extract herself from the abuse. And, you will find that many communities do NOT have great domestic violence “resources,” and that shelters are few and far between. When a woman is single, has a big dog, and has no car, no bank account, no one in a new community where she and her spouse have ended up, the amount of emotional and psychic turmoil is magnified.

This one person just three days ago reached out via email to ask me for help. I barely knew her, having met her at a hardware store. And, also, I did briefly meet the woman and the construction guy at the house just up the way: amazing house, a dream, the ocean, and, well, I didn’t spend time with the woman and her husband, so the red flags or tremors of an abusive dude never hit me.

But, the email, then the phone call, then meeting the person away from the almost-completed-house, and then some plan of action. It turns out that the person is legally married, but she is working on a green card. She’s from the UK. She was in New Mexico, before the couple ended up here of all places, to build the dream home. They were working on a green card. They had flown out to NM, last Friday, and the dude, a massive alcoholic, started gulping down airline shots. A bender. And, then, the Albuquerque mother of this guy, well, she was beat down too, as a wife of this guy’s dad, who ended up flying bombers in the USA Air Force, and giving shots to the my friend’s husband and his younger brother when they were 9 and 7 respectively.

The Brit gets her Social Security card, but there are no photos of the married couple together. More than five years married, and he manipulated that. Five years now, and the house and land are in his name. One vehicle, that too in his name. He held all the money from a sale of a house from Santa Fe, which he took as cash up here. The green card is now precarious, an unknown, a probable “no.”

Now, the story really is of the woman, whose parents have heard the cry wolf story many times. Her friends, they too, although this woman, Vicky, has kept some friends in the dark about this guy’s consistent behavior. That’s typical — embarrassment, recrimination, fear, and shame.

We are talking about a 38-year-old woman. She speaks three languages. She had a restaurant in Spain. She’s traveled the world. But that fateful day in 2017, she tied the knot. And he has been a constant up and down freak show, emotionally abusive, and many times, physically abusive. She says she always thought she could fix him. This last time there was no hitting or punching. She has on her phone a video of him attempting to throw her out of the car with the dog. He says it all: “You own nothing. You are nothing without me signing over the Green Card paperwork. You are worthless and can’t do anything without me. I have all the cards. If you cross me, I’ll kill you.”

That, under the state of Oregon, is not an arrestable offense, and while it should be, don’t expect much in this rot-gut of a patriarchal killer society.

No vehicle, no savings, and thus, people like me had to fall into action, because, a, it takes a village/community to do something about this shit, and, b, the idea of a death or a beating on my watch is horrendous for a radical writer.

I found the place for her to stay, some 30 miles away, in the woods, with an amazing woman, aged 83, with her horses and dogs and chickens and trees and garden. The lady, Alice, told Vicky that she has a safe place for a few weeks. She also related how her second husband, a lawyer, fought for three years her attempt to divorce. There were two children involved, and this Alice’s original farm (as she calls it) was in this guy’s sights (he was a lawyer).

My sister is a social worker coordinator in Arizona. She came to the rescue since she also ran domestice violence shelters. She knows Arizona and New Mexico. She’s connected. She has helped this woman get some sort of stability. She’s talked to her, counseled her, and directed her to some resources once she hits NM.

This woman is now on the road, as the New Mexico mother-in-law is helping out with rental car and cash for gas. Flights to NM were prohibitive. Just for the big dog, $775 one way, and that’s without the costs of a final vaccination and the big kennel bitive. The rental car was a huge hassle since they do not take debit cards, and they want the owner of a credit card to be there, in person. The mother-in-law is in New Mexico, an RN in her sixties.

This mother-in-law is warning Vicky “to get away from my son forever.” This mother-in-law was abused by her sons’ father big time. The kids were beaten by the father. And, even after she divorced this fascist pilot, the guy’s second wife had enough of the raging and hitting and so she shot him square between the eyes. Later days for an abuser. A week later, that second wife turned the gun on herself.

“I have lost myself. I can’t believe this has gone on and on. I used to be independent, gutsy. Heck, I set up my own restaurant in Basque country. I did that for six years. That’s where I met him.”

Yes, this entire society — male, female, LGBTQA+, young, old — gets into victim blaming as a common reaction to any sort of violence or assault on women in a domestic relationship.

Victim-blaming attitudes marginalize the victim/survivor and make it harder to come forward and report the abuse. If the victim/survivor knows that you or society blames survivors for abuse, they will not feel safe or comfortable coming forward and talking to you.

Victim-blaming attitudes also reinforce the manipulative tactics that abusers use to control their partner; abusers tell survivors that it is their fault this is happening. Committing violence is always the choice of the person who is abusing. It is NOT the victim/survivor’s fault or responsibility to fix the violence that an abuser is committing against them. By engaging in victim-blaming attitudes, society allows abusive people to perpetrate relationship abuse or sexual assault while avoiding accountability for those actions.

Victim-blaming attitudes prevent society from acknowledging and changing toxic masculinity and rape culture.

In order to stop victim-blaming, it is helpful to understand why it occurs in the first place. One reason that people blame a victim/survivor is to distance themselves from an unpleasant occurrence. This gives a false sense that this could not happen to them. By labeling or accusing the victim/survivor, others can see the victim/survivor as different from themselves. People use the Just World theory, Invulnerability theory, and Assumptive World theory in an attempt to feel like they have control over situations where they do not have control. People reassure themselves by thinking, “Because I am not like the victim/survivor, because I do not do XYZ, this would never happen to me.” We need to help people understand that a survivor’s actions do not contribute to a perpetrator’s decision to commit relationship abuse and sexual violence. It is our responsibility as members of society to support survivors and hold abusers accountable. (source)

Again, we are not in any enlightened moment. It’s 2022, but story after story shows the courts, the cops, the citizens, the collective we blame victims. We blame women when they come forward to accuse the rich and famous. Just look at the women accusing Weinstein or Trump or Biden. This is how these guys and their male and female handlers work the system. Having a standing president, Clinton, coerce Monica for sex, well, how many have said — “She was 22 and knew perfectly well what she was doing.”

Think about all the feminists and apologists defending that Clinton. Imagine, as a school teacher, if I coerced a student in my college class to have oral sex with me for benefit of her grade or in Monica’s case, advancement. These millions of men are criminals, sure, but worse. I’ve been lucky to take a bat to the heads of several rapists, when I was a senior in High School, and a few times in my 20s. Not now, Cancel Me Joe McCarthy!

And then, all the affairs this guy had as governor. And his “fun” with the royals, legals, governmentals, rich creeps who went to Epstein’s pedophilia island. Imagine that, a society that lets this just pass. And, then the Genocidal Joe, and his lies and his accusers:

A NEW PIECE of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.

In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me. (source)

I only make these asides because, a, the society is sick. The media are sick. The people behind powerful figures are sick. But, even the dirt-poor or the deplorables or the mid-level folk, if men, accused of date rape, acquaintence rape, assault on a wife, beating a spouse, they are entitled on many levels since toxic masculinity is a face, and that we are in a rape culture. Forget about the Matt Taibbi types, or any of them, questioning the accusers of any number of thousands of powerful and in-the-news folk. They think the #MeToo movement is fake, on all accords.

Remember, here on these pages and elsewhere, I have written about my clients as a social services dude: homeless veterans and homeless folk. All my clients who were female were RAPED by their own soldiers, in this country, and some out of this country. Nah, not a rape culture, right?

It turns out that Vicky’s husband was a big shot at the University of New Mexico. Big shot in the fraternity. Big shot lording over women. Doing the old Ted Bundy soft shoe, but deep down hating women. He had many female friends — he’s tall, well built, a charmer, and, an amazingly open misogynist. Hates his mother. Uses the word “cunt” all the time, and bitch. Is he a product of a father with toxic military masculinity? A product of a military father who killed “the enemy” and bragged about it? A product of a death society enamored of military and macho and might? Is her 35-year-old husband worthless as a man? Full of sociopathic tendancies? Broken at a young age? Destroyed by booze? Determined to be all he can be as a sexist and shitty pig because he has no role models other than violent, piggish, misanthropes? The pigs and military, two of the highest rates of domestic violence of all sub-groups of baboon homo sapiens males. He is a product of that! TV, movies, sports, and toxic rape culture trapped in the DNA of men,

So, this person, Vicky, is out of here. She will have to withdraw from the toxicity. She’ll have to rewire her brain. Right now, she’s 800 miles away from the guy, but she had the shakes this morning, sweating, sick to her stomach. It’s the weight off of her soul, and it feels, well, discombobulating. Serotonin, dopamine, all the hormones in the fight or flight discharge. Cortisol loads. It’s an ugly reality that getting out of a toxic violent relationship is like getting off booze, coke, heroin. Or pills.

The body does rewire under strain and pressure and living in hell. It does create holes in mind processing. The body reacts to the hormones, the adrenal gland, all of that, including the gut and entire systems that keep a person from failing over with a heart attack at age 38.

Here, one of thousands of offending “judges”:

After the judge in her Wisconsin divorce case ruled that her ex-husband — a man who had sought treatment for anger and alcohol issues — would get legal custody of and equal time with their four children, Julie Valadez vowed to fight back.

But in every key ruling that followed, the Waukesha County Circuit Court judge overseeing her case, Michael J. Aprahamian, found Valadez’s concerns about her ex-husband not credible and her actions unacceptable. Aprahamian took away her ability to co-parent her children. He held her in contempt four times. And after Aprahamian ordered her arrest, she braced herself for jail.

Valadez, whose accusations of domestic abuse had led to her husband’s arrest, ran through a string of attorneys and represented herself at times. Eventually she found a Milwaukee civil rights attorney to represent her, along with a public defender, and enlisted the help of a Washington, D.C., legal service for domestic violence survivors. (source)

Yes, the court system — For Domestic Violence Survivors, Courts Can Be Another Abuse. They are living hells. There is no ethics in the law, and the rule of law, it is stacked against, well, fill in the blank_______________________________! The Court System Is Stacked Against Survivors Of Sexual Violence!

The systems for Vicky are stacked against her. She’s been married to this felon (he has two DUI’s and an assault from his drunkenness) who has managed to not get any couple photos taken. She is at his whim. She is about to be in another state to work on counseling. DV services. Getting support for herself and her dog. A shelter? Can this punk track her down? She will need help with a divorce. She deserves half of whatever this house is worth — $350,000. He’s managed to beat her, and there is a hospital report of broken ribs and concussion with the words “assaulted by husband” on the report. That was 1.5 years ago. She never filed charges.

The healing process will take time. Funny thing, the lady who owns the rent-a-car outfit in Corvallis is a survivor, too. Ten years, no kids, and she said she hit the bottle when she got out of that hellhole. She now owns her own business.

And so there we go. It takes more than a village. It takes proactive and empathetic people to help lead a way or pathway out of people’s hell’s. Most people I know will not get involved, but their sick minds are putting those UkiNazi blue and yellow stripes up on their Facebook. They’ll give a dollar of their Big Mac order for guns for more UkiNazi’s in Ukraine, but they say — “Man, don’t get involved with her. Domestic Violence. If he finds out who’s helping her, man, he’ll come after you.”

That is the jelly consistency of most Americans’ spines. Except for the lady at the rent-a-car place. And my friend Alice in the mountains with her goats and dogs and fruit trees. She even gave Vicky a $100 for the road. This Vicky, mind you, is a new friend to both of us. No one I knew except for a 45-minute conversation in that hardware store parking lot a month ago.

Now, she is connected to me, to my friend, Alice, to my sister, to that car rental lady, to many many more folk. That’s how you help a person. It’s a team effort. And while the guy deserves a bat to the head, I am 65, with a spouse who is not into that sort of justice (she is, but not for the consequences of me going to jail). I have no problem with that sort of justice, but again, missiles and cluster bombs and napalm for UkiNazi’s, but not a finger lifted for a fellow human right in their community.

Note: Names, demographic and biographic stuff changed to protect the heroes and the victim. But the story is absolutely true crime, right from this writer’s horse’s mouth. I just got a text from her on the road. She’s in LA now, listening to Steve Miller, and the dog’s head is sticking out the window, and Vicky is moving on, south, a million mental miles away from a very bad relationship that would have ended in, well, a broken neck, or her death.

More, here: Battered Woman Syndrome

The post Everyday is Domestic Violence Awareness Day: Not Just a Week in October first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

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