Change Oregon law and make attempted strangulation a felony instead of a misdemeanor.
- by: Hallie Malcom, Advocate for protecting families.
- recipient: Oregon Lawmakers
Strangulation is a Misdemeanor?!
Nine percent of strangling victims are women and strangulation is the method by which 75 percent of all women that are murdered die. Strangulation is the single biggest predicting factor of future homicidal behavior. It is attempted murder, and must be treated as such. To do otherwise is not only short sighted, but ends being far costlier in the long run.
The devastation of this bill is compounded by the fact that if the woman whom the man has strangled picks up a gun or knife to defend herself against her abuser, she is then charged with a felony with a mandatory minimum sentence of between seven to twenty-five years. The legislature did not think it too expensive to spend between $250,000 and $750,000 (more if she has children who end up in foster care-and this is not even counting the cost of prosecution, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars) to incarcerate the women who defend themselves and their children. A man who nearly kills her will frequently not spend a day in jail.
The policy of selective incarceration is currently in effect in Oregon and fifteen other states which do not have self-defense laws for battered women. Thirty-four states do. Oregon has a mandatory minimum sentence for crimes of violence, know here as Measure 11.
In Oregon, the Police banned the use of the carotid artery hold in 1985 after someone died in a police choke-hold. The police say: “In our organization, we consider it deadly physical force.” So, while the police themselves consider strangulation “deadly force,” men who perpetrate it against women in a domestic violence situation are not charged with commission of a deadly crime. Instead, women are left to face their attackers alone.
The Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal published an article in 2002 which noted that up to 80 percent of women sentenced under the measure 11 statute were victims of domestic violence who fought back at their abusers. The women typically resorted to drastic measures as a last resort, after law enforcement failed, and only when their lives had been threatened or their children were in danger.
This may also account for the low recidivism rate in Oregon. There is virtually a 0 percent recidivism rate among women who have finally killed an abuser to escape. Zero. Most states don’t incarcerate these women, and the fact that Oregon does skews the statistics. It doesn’t point to successful rehabilitation so much as it highlights the fact that these people don’t belong in prison in the first place.
Thomas Jefferson said “Self defense is the most fundamental right upon which the rest of the constitution rests.” Malcolm said “Self-defense isn’t violence, it’s intelligence.”
Recently there has been a lot of public debate about a teacher in Medford who carried a concealed weapon to school after her ex-husband, who had previously violated a restraining order, threatened to kill her. Many of the editorial comments centered on whether the teacher should leave her job to protect her students, “at least until the danger is over” (And when might that be? Over 1500 women and children are killed every year in circumstances similar to these.)
It was never even noted that the obvious solution was to imprison the man who threatened to kill his family, thereby putting the blame on the perpetrator, and not harming his victim with the loss of her job or living in constant fear for her safety. That would ensure her pupils’ safety as well. But men who batter are not made to shoulder responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Consequently, society tacitly tolerates battering and strangulation and terroristic threatening. Too frequently society shifts this burden to the women and children the batters terrorize.
The costs of NOT removing men who strangle their partners is ultimately far greater than the cost of enforcing a felony definition of strangling. There is always an emotional toll on the children forced to live in a concentration camp-mentality. Many of these children, suffer from severe PTSD, and statistically many will perpetuate the learned behaviors without serious intervention and counseling. Sometimes, the cost escalates weeks or months later, when the victim protects themselves with a weapon, after the State failed to protect them, and the state then pays to prosecute and incarcerate the (usually female) survivor. Calculate the cost of incarcerating someone for ten to twenty years and measure that against the cost of enforcing a felony strangulation law. Calculate the cost of special ed and therapy for the kids. And how do you measure up the generational costs of the kids who repeat the violent patterns they see in their own homes?
On occasion the cost is concrete and immediate. Such was the recent case of Crystal Brame. Crystal was the wife of Tacoma, WA. Police Chief David Brame. He battered her, and then tried to portray her as “unstable and violent.” As is typically the case, his colleagues covered up for him. Crystal Brame was defamed and called dishonest, abusive histrionic, unstable. She was portrayed as “making the whole thing up” and her accusations called “groundless.” After Police Chief Brame eventually killed her, the woman who had left him and was trying to divorce him, her family was paid nearly 4 million dollars by the city of Tacoma.
Strangulation is the single most obvious identifying predictor of future homicidal behavior in a batterer. Strangulation is the method by which 75 percent of women are killed. Oregon prison guard Robert Stamper had strangled his girlfriend, but had been released. He then went on to kidnap, rape and strangle a teen age girl, and then partially buried her in the woods. She regained consciousness, dragged herself to the road and told police about her attacker. He thought he had killed her. He later said “I was mad at my girlfriend and wanted to hurt a woman.” Charging men with attempted murder and locking them up when they first strangled someone would have prevented their subsequent horrors. The Green River killer and Ted Bundy favored strangulation.
Restraining orders have proven to be no deterrent to an enraged abuser, and time after time, after time after time after time, when a man who has threatened to kill his family (most often AFTER his partner has left him) follows through, it is always treated “as a shock” by the authorities.
Up to 50 percent of the children who are homeless today are fleeing domestic violence. Women who are battered make up 30 percent of emergency room visits. Lost work time due to domestic violence has been estimated to cost the US work force hundreds of million dollars every year. Many domestic violence victims subsequently suffer from depression and other mental illness as a result of the abuse. Locking up mothers of young children who protect them is far more costly than locking up the men who have threatened their lives, so the disingenuousness of the legislature must be examined.
One of the reasons Oregon law enforcement does not take strangling seriously is that 40 percent of law enforcement officers are batterers themselves. (It’s about 25 percent in the general population.) The Assistant Superintendent of Coffee Creek prison was arrested for battering, and yet, he sits in his office today. Law enforcement officers have been sued for firing female officers who filed domestic violence complaints, and the men who had the courage to tell the truth about these incidents have been fired for not sticking to the code of silence which allows battering to remain a part of our society.
Battering is widespread. It is not limited to pimps and drug dealers and out-of-work blue collar workers, as the common stereotype seems to expect. There have been many documented cases in professional fields. Ministers, Airline Pilots, Hospital Chief of Staffs, Therapists, Surgeons, Judges, Teachers, Entertainers, even Lawyers. (In my own case, even the defense attorney who was supposed to represent me had been arrested for domestic violence—a fact I did not know when he was hired.) Yet, despite the presence of battering in nearly all walks of life, nowhere is battering so prevalent as in the “men-in-uniform” professions, i.e. the police and military.
Reporter Tiffany Edwards explained this phenomenon:
“Several studies have found that 40 percent of police officers families experience domestic violence, and when it comes to men in uniform, arrests for domestic violence are not being made. This is especially true of a guy who is popular with his co-workers.” See also: http://www.womenandpolicing.org/violenceFS.asp
Penny Harrington, retired Oregon police chief points out, that “after a woman reports an incident of domestic violence and nothing is done, she loses faith in the system and gets beaten up for reporting it. These men know how to make her look like it’s all her fault, that she’s a mental case or a sexually free woman. The abuser will find a way to maker her like she’s the problem, (often with the help of his family and co-workers.) If a woman tries to escape, he will be able to track her down. Assuming a different identity is the only way to escape.”
Assuming a different identity is illegal and difficult for a woman on her own. If she has children, the advent of the Internet has made it nearly impossible, especially if the FBI is hunting for her at her husband’s request. The current laws make it a felony for a woman with children to leave the country without her husband’s consent, and if she does, she can be charged with kidnapping, imprisoned and then the batterer has the children who have no one to protect them.
Men in uniform have “the code” protecting them. Their co-workers frequently disguise the charges in such a way that their buddy doesn’t lose his job, or the charges are shifted to lesser offenses. Often his co-workers actively conspire to protect a charming abuser. His family actively defames the woman and publicly discredits her. She is vilified. It’s not unlike the Salem witch trials. If she died then, she was innocent, if she lived, she was a witch. Today, when an abuser does kill her (Crystal Brame, Nicole Simpson) then it’s “oops—apparently she was telling the truth about the abuse.” She was innocent.
If a woman has the audacity to survive her batterers attacks, then she is figuratively burned at the stake, naked and splayed and gagged, subjected to defamation and derision. She is defenseless in our modem stockades of prison, without a voice to speak the truth to the public-because prison policy does not allow controversial inmates to speak to the media. The clear message is that women are disposable-- that battering is not such a bad thing, and even if your life is threatened, you better not defend yourself, better not expose the truth, or you will be subjected to a fate worse than death.
I interviewed a number of women imprisoned because of this issue. One had been married to a police chief, who had battered her and her children and who had child pornography and reportedly had molested other children. No one would help her. She eventually killed him, having no other alternative when he brutally attacked them. Another inmate had sought a restraining order against her husband. After the order was denied by Judge Alta Brady, her husband beat their son to death with a baseball bat. She is serving sixteen years for “failure to protect.” (She once told me after she saw me visiting my children “I would rather be doing your time.Your children are still alive."
Another woman had fled her abusive husband and had been able to stay hidden in Arkansas for a number of years, until her husband, a guard at the prison where we were housed, finally found her. He has custody of their teenage daughter, and reportedly is abusing her, too. Several of the women were not American citizens and knew they would lose custody of their children if they left. One of these stabbed her much-larger husband in the arm when he was beating her and received seventy months.
Quite a few of the women who had killed abusive partners did so when it was clear the man intended to kill them. A number acted only after their children were harmed and in incredible danger. In ALL of the cases in which the woman actually killed her batter, strangulation had occurred previously. And 60 percent of the women I interviewed had reported the strangulation incident to the police. All of the women had sought help and tried different strategies to get free. This is entirely in keeping with the national norm. Rather than remaining passive, most women typical increase their help-seeking behavior as the danger escalates, and when they find no viable alternative, resort to protecting themselves in order to survive.
There is a flip side to these anecdotal interviews. A guard at another Oregon prison had discussed her own terrifying situation with me as we stood in the yard. Her boyfriend had threatened to kill her. I asked if she believed him. She did. I asked if she feared for her children. She did. I told her “In Oregon, it’s a choice between handcuffs or a headstone, and I advise you to be proactive.” A few months after we both were transferred to this prison, the officer was killed by the abusive boyfriend she had left. I sent my entire months’ pay check to a fund for her small children.
Since the Iraq war has been going on, 3,700 soldiers have died. In that same period, over 5000 women were killed in our country by their batterers, usually after the women attempted to leave. Why is our country not protecting its own vulnerable citizens from domestic terrorists? It’s because there has not been sufficient pressure on the legislature to change laws that protect their own. “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” (Bertram Russell)
Oregon needs to change its policy on strangulation, and the issue of domestic violence needs a nationwide overhaul. Some policy changes that would make a big difference in the lives of terrorized women and children are:
1. There needs to be a witness protection program for victims of domestic violence.
They currently are not eligible for help in legitimately obtaining new identities. A government agency which was responsible for setting up those fleeing with new lives and directing monetary benefits and income, contact with friends and family etc. is absolutely necessary.
2. Families fleeing abuse should be eligible for social security benefits, just as widows and the children of a deceased parent receive these benefits. People actively fleeing abusers suffer at least as much hardship. Families fleeing domestic violence make up 50 percent of the homeless children today.
3. Strangulation needs to be treated on a federally mandated level as attempted murder, and the perpetrators given severe consequences-such as removal from society, particularly in the cases in which they have threatened to kill their families. These men should be put in a long term “Emerge” Model program such as the one Lundy Bancroft has established.
4. Domestic abusers should have their passports taken away and their wages garnished, one they are released from an Anger Management program. That would allow their victims to flee to another country without fear of being discovered, and they would not suffer economic hardship from being victimized.
5. It should be illegal to file kidnapping charges against a woman when it can be documented that she is fleeing abuse. Batterers should have no unsupervised visits with their children.
6. Domestic abusers need to be held accountable, regardless of their stature in society. Everyone who is arrested for strangulation needs to be immediately placed into a program, before they go to trial, and their families need assistance navigating the situation.
7. All women who are currently imprisoned for killing their batterer should be set free. Those who were convicted of assault against a batterer need to be released. Often an abuser hits his wife and receives no punishment, but if another male intercedes and strikes the batterer, the rescuer is charged with assault. Men who intervened in another couple’s domestic battle and were subsequently charged with assault, should be given clemency.
8. All children of domestic violence should be given access to counseling for as long as they need it. So should the women who escape.
9. All Judges, law enforcement officials, hospital staff, school staff, clergy and counselors should be required to go through training programs such as Emerge.
Newspapers could print it on the front page every time a woman is killed by her partner. Imagine how much the awareness would be raised if our governor started attending the funerals of all domestic violence victims, as he now attends the funerals of each of our fallen soldiers.
Society needs to hold men accountable. We must not condone domestic violence. We must refuse to accept this as a normal part of society. Overturning Oregon House bill 2770, and making strangulation attempted murder, and legislating the nine measures above would be good and concrete action we can take to dramatically improve the lives of many women and children who live in terror.
(First published February 2008 DivineCaroline.com)
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