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Editorial:Domestic violence, institutional violence: Making The ConnectionsIsolation, intimidation, humiliation, coercion,blame, emotional abuse sound familiar? These are some of the common methods used by abusers to maintain control over the women they batter. Many of these same techniques are used by prison staff on a regular basis to maintain control of the women they "guard". When a woman is told that if she behaves herself she can get more hygiene products or a better job, when she has to endure a cross-gender pat search, when she suffers a barrage of degrading words on a daily basis, when she is denied medical care because an MTA doesn't like her or when she is repeatedly put in the SHU because she is not cooperative and docile Šshe is experiencing the same types of abuse that survivors of domestic violence report. Studies show that the majority of women prisoners have experienced ongoing abuse before coming to prison, so they are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by such techniques which have victimized them before. Yet despite the prisons' efforts to keep women submissive and self-hating, many women transform their experience of personal and institutional violence and make the leap from victims into conscious fighters for their rights. Incarcerated survivors who come together and share their experiences and their pain in groups like Convicted Women Against Abuse at CIW, have gained personal insight and the strength to fight unjust sentences and win their long overdue release. Other women have exposed the ways in which Parole Board hearings are often nothing more then sadistic reenactments of the original offense primarily designed to inflame a woman's guilt. And every day when women help each other write letters, file a 602 or just sit and listen to another's problems, they are helping to break the cycle which breeds personal and institutional violence. Over the past couple of decades, the public has become more familiar with the reality of domestic violence, but too often people see the government and law enforcement as the answer to this pervasive problem. But can a government/state which is based on violence, which wages continual war against other nations, and here at home imposes the violence of poverty, miseducation and policy brutality on communities of color -- can this government be expected to genuinely oppose domestic violence? Women of color have led the way in insisting that to achieve real change the women's anti-violence movement needs to understand the intersections of domestic, state and community violence, and the ways in which these different levels feed each other. To us in CCWP, this means supporting concrete strategies like the extension of the habeas bill, SB 1385, which would offer more survivors of domestic abuse the ability to go back into court and win release (see page 5). At the same time, it means we need to develop a long term, holistic vision for eradicating the roots of abuse and violence - in the prisons, in the streets of our communities, and across the world. * * * The Surgeon General has reported for at least 10 years that battering is the single largest cause of injury to U.S. women. Each day between 5 and 11 women are killed by a male intimate partner, between 1800 and 4000 per year. A 1995 study of women in the California prison system found that 71% of incarcerated women had experienced ongoing physical abuse prior to the age of 18 and that 62% experienced ongoing physical abuse after 18 years of age. As of 1994 there were approximately 600 women in California prisons and approximately 4000 women in prisons nationwide convicted of killing an abusive partner. [Most of these facts were compiled by the National Clearinghouse in Defense of Battered Women, Philadelphia, Pa.] Statistics on verbal, psychological, and emotional abuse are not collected, or when they are mentioned, it's only to point out how few of those kinds of abuses are ever reported. Last updated February 14, 2005 06:52 PM |
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