Thank you for posting this! I don’t believe most people realize the depth of this problem. We need shelters but we also need society to stop giving tacit approval to the subjugation, abuse and murder of women and children.
In Florida you can legally shoot children and get away with it. Trayvon Martin and the other young man in Jacksonville are proof of this absurdity. But if a woman fires av warning shot, harming no one, in self defense against her long term abuser, she gets a long jail term. Down hierarchy violence is acceptable in America. It is only when the oppressed return fire that punishment ensues.
(Reprinted from MS Magazine, Summer 2014. Author Lindsey O’Brien)
A unanimous Supreme Court decision in late March reaffirmed a federal law making it a crime for domestic-violence offenders to possess a gun. James Castleman had claimed that his state conviction for assaulting his child’s mother had not required proof that he had used violence. But as Justice Sonia Sotamayor pointed out in her opinion on United States v. Castleman, domestic violence includes “seemingly minor acts” such as pushing, grabbing, shoving, pulling hair and “a squeeze of the arm that causes a bruise.”
This was a major victory in fighting violence against women, and will undoubtedly saves lives. But at the same time, there is a disturbing trend that has gone little notices: the reduction in the number and staffing of domestic-violence shelters.
Last year, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDBV), cuts to domestic-violence funding caused the…
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