Gender, Violence and The Law
On average, abusive men who beat their wives to death after many years of putting her in the emergency room regularly do less time for finally killing her than abused wives who finally kill their husbands in self defense.
The laws under which these cases are judged assume a context that distorts reality, as if two people in a conflict are on some kind of equal footing that doesn't typically exist in an abusive marriage.
He typically kills her "accidentally" with his bare hands. It is written up as a crime of passion, not premeditated, possibly even "an accident" (manslaughter).
She typically is charged with premeditated murder involving a weapon and gets charged with something much more serious. Quite often, she did so after being told "I'm killing you in the morning." which she had reason to believe he meant and could pull off.
Generally speaking, in most heterosexual marriages:
1. He is bigger than her, sometimes by quite a lot. Even if he's not, he probably still has significantly more upper body strength.
2. He is much more likely than her to have training pertinent to physical confrontation with another person, such as basic training in the US military, martial arts or boxing.
3. She is probably financially dependent on him. She may be a full-time homemaker, working only part time or simply making a lot less money from her job.
4. As the years pass, the income gap is likely to grow even if she consistently works full time because couples routinely make choices that prioritize his career at the expense of hers, such as moving to where promotions take him. Which means if they move, he now has more income and better benefits and she has likely taken a pay cut and demotion as a direct consequence of the decision.
5. Abusers actively seek to disempower their victims to make them easy marks. Making them financially dependent and undermining both the careers and the earning potential of their victim is one of the ways they do this and when a man does this intentionally to his wife -- as I believe my ex did to me -- it's nigh impossible to prove and typically goes completely unnoticed even if, like me, she did well in school and hoped to have a serious career.
Another known way in which abusers disempower their victims is through socially isolating them and intentionally destroying their social safety net. Again, this is frequently an invisible process that goes largely unnoticed and can be done to a large degree by the prosaic happenstance of accepting a promotion that moves the family elsewhere and likely makes sense for the family in most cases even if the husband is very committed to women's equality and being part of a two-career couple.
It's hard to make a clear determination of intent. My husband's shitty behavior that helped deny me a real career didn't involve domestic violence and large parts of it were things I very much eagerly went along with or actively encouraged in order to distance myself from my brother who had molested me.
When I was on Metafilter, it came up that abused women tended to be people who had been abused before.
There is probably a complex set of reasons behind that from grooming the victim into being a better mark to poor self esteem to the practical reality that you are more likely to be victimized if you are already in a vulnerable position.
My father was very much a speak softly and carry a big stick type, even though he was a gregarious nonstop storyteller with a barrel chest and deep voice. He didn't boast or threaten, no.
He was a twice-decorated military veteran and my parents treated a three-bedroom house like a four-bedroom house by using a family room with attached half bath as their master suit.
We also rarely used the front door and it was frequently defacto unusable for half the year due to makeshift insulation tactics my mother used to make the house more comfortable while keeping the heating bill low.
The end result is that most people entered the house through the side door that passed through my parent's bedroom where my father's two shotguns hung decoratively on the wall above his bed. Per gun safety best practices, they were not loaded.
This fact likely made it more obvious daddy was prepared to shoot your ass because there were two shots laying in the groove of the barrel and all of this was on the wall you were facing if you stood at the door knocking on a hot summer's evening when the screen door was locked and the inner door was wide open to facilitate air flow back before the entire US decided that locking the house up tighter than Fort Knox and running the AC nonstop should be the norm. Opening doors and windows used to be the norm.
"Coincidentally," our house was the only one not hit when there was a rash of robberies in the neighborhood breaking into the house through a common point of vulnerability all the local houses had.
So I tell that story for two reasons.
1. I married the asshole I married because no man was ever good enough for either of their daughters and my husband could survive my family. An earlier boyfriend got his life chewed up and spit out because my family didn't approve of him.
2. Dangerous people tend to downplay it and context matters for deciding who is dangerous and how to handle the situation.
One study went looking for what personality traits women who killed their husbands had in common. Like Milgram, they ultimately learned their hypothesis was baseless: These women had no personality traits in common.
Milgram's hypothesis was that Germans were a bizarro special breed and no American would do what Nazis did in Germany. They learned that it's mostly situational and most people will go along with this garbage up to and including being told you could kill the person receiving shocks because they have a heart condition and we're turning it up extremely high.
What this study of women who killed found instead is that what they had in common is that they were the most abused, the most isolated, the most hopeless and in a situation where killing their abusive husband looked like the only way out.
Proviso: DARVO is a set of tactics used by abusers to claim they are the victim, so if it were to become the norm that murdering your husband in cold blood, premeditatedly etc. gets routinely dismissed as clearly and obviously a case of self defense, at that time you would see women use that as an opportunity to marry for money and kill the man and get away with it.
I'm not writing about this imagining such information would make your job easier as a judge or similar. Doing a good job as a judge is a giant pain in the butt.
I'm trying to give the world new tools for trying to accurately assess what are always, without fail, ugly cases involving complicated decisions. I do so in hopes of reducing the tendency for abused women to be shafted with no hope of justice no matter what they do.
Footnote
I recently came to believe my sister was the abuser and painted herself as the victim. Her first husband supported her career, which never struck me as the mark of an abusive relationship. But I recently realized she likely intentionally threw my life under a bus by leaving me alone with her then boyfriend's best friend -- thereby intentionally fostering a controversial relationship between a 21 year old college student and her own 14 year old sister -- and then trash talking him to our family.
Context not written about anywhere else:
I went to visit my sister at college the summer I turned fourteen. I was extraordinarily beautiful and completely unnecessarily my sister arranged for me to be alone with Alex.
That same summer, Alex wanted to take me to Disneyland and my mother didn't like the idea and only agreed if my sister went along as chaperone. So I, my sister, Alex and Julius went on vacation together and sometime after that my sister threw Alex under a bus after establishing sufficient "evidence" he was a pervert with an unhealthy interest in an underaged girl.
I write some about age differences in relationships because I had the highest SAT score of my graduating high school class and really wanted to try to go to college early and skip most of high school. Most boys attending school with me couldn't have a real relationship with me. They couldn't follow half of what I said.
So I have spent a lot of years contemplating what makes it a problem that he's older. Alex wasn't the problem. He was good to me and it ripped my heart out that my family chose to end the relationship in a traumatic fashion and then my relatives told me after the fact that me being upset was yet more evidence Alex harmed me.
I'm confident, though I can't prove it, that this was intentionally done by my sister for the express purpose of removing an important form of support from Julius socially.
Alex was roughly my sister's age. Julius was exactly as much older than my sister as she was older than me.
My sister is 6.5 years older than me. Alex was 6.5 or 7.5 years older than me. Julius was 13 years older than me.
My birthday is in June. My sister's birthday is in November. If I recall correctly, Julius had a birthday in July and Alex had a birthday in December.
It's coincidence that his name was Julius and he was born in the month named after Julius Caesar. He was named Julius Mitchell Byrd III after his father, Julius Mitchell Byrd II. His older sister was Julia Michelle Byrd.
Some men just name all their kids very similarly. It happens.
Julius was pursuing his master's degree. He had a lot of student loans and delivered newspapers or sold shoes. He wanted to be a writer and supported my sister's career aspirations because it supported his career aspirations.
I've touched on this debacle in various posts scattered across multiple blogs, probably including Genevieve Files and Feminine Character Works.
It is offered as a case study where the genders are flipped. Julius died of a gunshot wound. It was written up as suicide. I have come to believe he was murdered.
I'm not trying to promote a rubric of assuming women are all victims and paragons of virtue. Context is case specific. Larger societal trends make it easy to speak in generalities but cases should be decided on the facts of that specific case.
Last, my view of the Harley Quinn character is loosely based on me marrying someone who was kind of an asshole and putting up with crap other people sometimes couldn't understand a bright and educated woman doing because I didn't want to explain "I'm the victim of incest twice over and he's protecting me from worse shit. BUTT OUT if you aren't ready to provide me a winning lottery ticket and armed guard."