Falsely Accused of Child Abuse?
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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.
Does The Law Protect Women More Than Men?
Item. Evelyn Humphrey was very drunk. She took a gun and killed Albert Hampton, her live-in partner. She claimed he had been abusive the day before. His death prevented him from claiming he wasn’t. She claimed “Battered Woman Syndrome.” The California Supreme Court gave her an acquittal.99 Until that time (1996), such a defense could only be used to
reduce
the charges to manslaughter for a woman who killed her spouse or partner. Now it can be used to give an acquittal to a woman – not a man.
The “Battered Woman Syndrome” legal defense is unconstitutional because there is no “Battered Man Syndrome” legal defense. Allowing a woman to claim she was defenseless when she, in fact, had time to physically escape gives women a permission to kill that is granted to no man under English or American law. In both respects, the “Battered Woman Syndrome” violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee to equal protection of all human beings regardless of sex. The only law more blatantly unconstitutional is male-only draft registration. The “Battered Woman Syndrome” is only one of eight legal defenses I discuss in
The Myth of Male Power
100 that women can use to kill that cannot be used by men. Taken together with longer prison sentences for men for the same crime, they give men a clear message: “you are less valued than women...you are second class citizens.”
Is the solution a “Battered Person Syndrome” allowing both sexes to kill abusers? Hardly. The implication? Physical aggression has been used to “resolve marital conflict” at least once in 60% of families.101 But it isn't just spouses who would be able to murder each other. Ninety-three percent of gay men and 88% of gay women who were abusers said they had been physically abused as children.102 Should we allow them to go to kill their parents, and call it self-defense? That would create a Family Murder Act to replace a Male Murder Act.
99
Maura Dolan, “Court Ruling Aids Women Who Kill Batterers,” Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1996, p. A1 & A26.
100
Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993; NY: Berkley, paper, 1994)
101
Suzanne K. Steinmetz, The Cycle of Violence: Assertive, Aggressive, and Abusive Family Interaction (NY: Praeger Publishers, 1977), p. 86. This was based on a random sample of families in Delaware. The percentage is so high doubtless in part because families were asked to keep a record of their conflicts and therefore did not just have to rely on memory – in which, perhaps, only the more severe conflicts are recalled.
102
The study’s author is Ned Farley of the Seattle Counseling Service for Sexual Minorities. The study consisted of 114 lesbian abusers and 165 gay batterers. Cited in Ojeda-Zapata, op. cit.
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