If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...
Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.
(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com
and
www.warrenfarrell.info.
How Innocent Women Get Hurt When Guilty Women Go Free
Everywhere Cindy Barry of Minnesota turned, she encountered the assumption that her batterer was a man.95 Even in court, judges continually referred to her batterer as “he.” Now she is protesting this assumption. Cindy was abused by her lesbian lover, and the image of women as non-violent led to Cindy not being taken seriously.
Ironically, a woman is once again discovering that the elimination of men’s rights eventually hurts women – those women who have life experiences similar to some men’s, such as being battered by a woman. Cindy Barry is having to fight to receive justice because laws were protecting women so completely that Cindy had no protection against these women. Feminism had become a type of female Mafia, protecting women who battered because they were women, but forgetting the rights of women victimized by women, as well as men and children victimized by women.
How Innocent
Children
Get Hurt When Guilty Women Go Free
Item. Laurie Dann was already under investigation by the FBI for extortion.96 (She was demanding money in return for halting the phone harassment of the family of a doctor she had dated 18 years previously.) Police in the Chicago area had registered approximately a dozen complaints against her. When she and her husband Russell separated, Russell reported to the police “harassment, stabbings, purchasing of guns, and death threats.”97 He then reported that Laurie broke into the house and punctured him in the chest with an ice pick while he was asleep.
When Laurie Dann bought a .357 magnum revolver, Russell informed the police she threatened to kill him with it, but the police did not impound the gun. They did not even confront Laurie; they confronted only her father. Laurie then took the .357 magnum plus two other handguns and shot six children at an elementary school, leaving eight-year-old Nicholas Corwin to die.98
When we fail to believe men who report abuse, we jeopardize children and the community. Is this “the system’s” fault, or do our attitudes create the system? Thus even with all the complaints against Laurie, no inhibiting action was taken, and even when Laurie was accused of threatening to kill her husband with a newly-purchased .357 magnum, Laurie herself was never approached. The reverse would have led to a national police scandal.
When we think only men are serial killers, we are less likely to look for patterns when a woman is reported, therefore less likely to prioritize catching her, and thus leave all of those we love at risk. When we don’t take seriously the men who report women, we unwittingly abuse our children. When we don’t take seriously the female who commits a crime, she won’t take committing a crime seriously.
