Held to answer

October is the season of Santa Ana winds, which blow hot and dry through Southern California, making people jittery.

“Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks,” wrote Raymond Chandler, in one of his most famous lines.

The Santa Anas must not push the meek little wives too far because October is also Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and most victims of domestic violence are women and children.

Here in Portland this month we had a visit from Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, who was in town to raise funds for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

I didn’t go to the NARAL fundraiser, so I don’t know how directly Steinem linked reproductive freedom and domestic violence. Nothing keeps a woman in a violent relationship like pregnancy or children. A man may feel entrapped by a pregnant girlfriend or casual fling, but his body is still his own.

Reproductive freedom is the most important issue to American women and the least understood, she said in a Willamette Week interview.

“The deep anthropological, political reason for controlling women is to control reproduction,” Steinem said.

She has it backwards. Controlling reproduction through forced pregnancy is how to control women. (Keep them barefoot and pregnant.)

“The impulse to think of women in reproductive terms makes it hard to imagine a world in which the center of authority is within each woman,” Steinem added.

She is too polite.

How is it that women are still fighting for equal rights across much of the planet? Why are gains, such as Roe v. Wade, at risk of being overturned?

“They are always trying to divide us,” Steinem told Willamette Week.

The problem is that women are more likely to coalesce around the helpless, the weak, the vulnerable.  They would rather protect the weak than pursue those who prey on the weak. And feminist organizations tend to align themselves with the wrong advocates.

Here in Oregon, the Ms. Foundation has lent its support to Partnership for Safety and Justice, a deceptively named organization that lobbies on behalf of convicted felons, including men who have abused women. The organization originally was founded in 1999 under the name Western Prison Project, and its volunteer director was the mother of an inmate.

The organization not only changed its name but tinkered with certain labels. People who are harmed during a “criminal event” are called “crime survivors.” It sounds more positive than “victim” and reinforces “hope for the future,” the group’s website says. “Life may not be the same, but it can be good.”

The group concedes that sometimes the term “victim” is used because it has a legal definition. What it doesn’t say is that sometimes the term “victim” has to be used because there is no survivor. (It’s hard for a “criminal event survivor” to have hope for the future when she’s dead.)

Here’s some of the wisdom the former Western Prison Project offers for Domestic Violence Awareness month: “Do you know someone who is being abused? Listen. Provide non-judgmental love and support.”

The key word there is “non-judgmental.” If you know a woman who is being abused, don’t suggest that she use law enforcement to go after the SOB. In fact, don’t call him an SOB. Remember: non-judgmental. Don’t urge her to seek prosecution and punishment. Instead, urge her to vote for politicians who will spend more money on shelters to house women who are being abused.

“In 2011, over 20,600 requests for shelter from violence could not be met because of a lack of resources. Raise awareness about the services survivors need,” says the Partnership for Safety and Justice.

Perhaps there might not be such a need if more abusers were arrested, prosecuted and locked up.

In its current incarnation as the Partnership for Safety and Justice, one of the group’s stated goals for 2013 is to help Oregon legislators rewrite the state’s sentencing laws, particularly Measure 11. The voter-approved initiative includes minimum sentences for such crimes as assault, attempted murder, rape, sexual abuse and murder – the kind of acts associated with domestic violence.

Steinem helped put a face on domestic violence, but she has presented a weak face in fighting it.

After reading Willamette Week’s interview with Steinem, I dug out my copy of her 1983 book, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” which I eagerly bought shortly after it was published.

Steinem quotes from feminist lawyer and black activist Florynce Kennedy: “Unity in a movement situation is overrated. If you were the Establishment, which would you rather see coming in the door, five hundred mice or one lion?”

Why does Steinem now fret about women being divided?

In 1983, she wrote optimistically about treatment for “wife batterers and other violent men,”  insisted that society stop blaming the victim and refuse “to allow male-female beatings to be classified as ‘domestic violence.’”

Thirty years later, there’s an entire month devoted to domestic violence, and Ms. Magazine itself uses the term. Many victims still refuse to pursue prosecution, which means they should share blame. And all those treatment programs for wife batterers and violent men that Steinem championed?

Well, the Partnership on Safety and Justice thinks they work.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

The Man Who Walked Into a Door