Black Women and Black Lives Matter: Fighting Police Misconduct in Domestic Violence and Sexual Assa

[niyad]

Black Women and Black Lives Matter: Fighting Police Misconduct in Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Cases

In the year since Ferguson, we have been reminded that police misconduct and brutality doesn’t discriminate, at least not based on gender. We know that Black women, like Sandra Bland and others before her, aren’t spared from police violence. Several commentators, including Charles Blow, Lisalyn Jacobs, and Roxane Gay, have authored profound pieces about Black women’s experiences and the cloak of invisibility that too often surrounds them, particularly when the discussion turns to violence, police misconduct, and holding law enforcement accountable.

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Fortunately, that is changing. #SayHerName has elevated and honored Black women’s experiences and the dynamic #BlackLivesMatter social justice movement has broadened the conversation to highlight the many ways in which all Black people are affected by violence, police misconduct, and injustice.

But the lens must expand even further. When we speak of the reality of Black women’s lives and efforts to reform the criminal justice system, we must continue to also speak about gender bias in policing and how it results in improper, and often illegal, police responses to domestic violence and sexual assault cases.

The reality is domestic violence-related calls constitute the single largest category of calls received by the police. Over one million women are sexually assaulted each year, and more than a third of women are subjected to rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. And have no doubt: Black women and other women of color are disproportionately impacted.


In Detroit, researchers documented how stereotyping of sexual assault victims – a significant percentage of whom were African-American – led to poor criminal investigations and failure by police to submit thousands of sexual assault kits for testing.
In Oklahoma, 13 women reported that a police officer sexually molested them while he was on duty; that officer now faces 36 charges including felony rape, forcible oral sodomy and sexual battery.
In Puerto Rico, the police department systematically underreported rape crimes and rarely took action when their own officers committed domestic violence, allowing 84 officers who had been arrested two or more times for domestic violence to remain active.
In Norristown, PA, Lakisha Briggs, an African-American woman, faced eviction because police concluded that acts of domestic violence perpetrated against her – including a stabbing that required her to be taken by helicopter to a trauma center – should be considered nuisances under a local ordinance.

. . . .

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/08/09/black-women-and-black-lives-matter-fighting-police-misconduct-domestic-violence-and

[zazen]

1. APA says three women a day are murdered by intimate partners in the U.S.

When an African American women and her children were murdered by her intimate partner this weekend in Houston, I thought, does her life not matter too? Does your life warrant a national movement and disruption of presidential campaigns only when you're murdered by a stranger on the basis of your race? Is murder because of your gender perceived as "natural?"

What gives?

Another issue related to the isolation of battered women of color, beyond police abuse, is that there's additional silencing and guilting (that works in the batterers' interest) that occurs within the community because of the real racial burden faced by her male partner in other spheres. There's a subtle message within the community that she's betraying POC by reporting him and/or subjecting him to additional risk. I report this from working with a shelter and research on these issues.

I'll probably start an OP on this because it's really disturbing to me. Why is the murder of more women each year by intimate partners than of citizens (mostly POC) by police considered less of an urgent outrage that needs to be addressed?

Both phenomena are heinous and frankly are interrelated in that police cultures seem to bestow honorary masculinity on their officers that seems to lead to the same sort of entitlement to abuse that some men feel toward their intimate partners.

[Novara]

2. I just posted an article about the 8 horrific murders in Houston

Because it's "domestic violence" we all pay less attention. This has to change.

[zazen]

3. absolutely; thank you so much; they called it "conflict in the relationship" here in N&O

It made me sick.

While battering occurs across all races and classes, it's still a little easier for a woman with means (as long as her partner isn't uber powerful) to get out. Given the increased impoverishment in minority communities, the guilt about turning in your abuser, and the increased chance of violence at the hands of an often equally male-dominated, abusive court system, battered women of color are in an unusually awful position.

[Novara]

4. Yes, and because they are battered women of color, and poor....

.....the world looks the other way.

[niyad]

5. please do post that, and post it here, as well. domestic violence is another issue that

is not taken seriously.