Jennifer Richardson comments

Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

@ Frungy

Yeah, restricting ammo in that way sounds like it would work, if it has that short a shelf life. Was actually unaware of that--I've never noticed any expiry date on any of mine or had anyone tell me that, but I tend to rotate through mine at least every few years, since I don't really stockpile & I shoot regularly.

I just asked my dad & he said he'd used shotgun shells that were 30 to 40 years old with no problems, maybe a misfire or two out of several hundred shells. Internet anecdotes are backing that up--firing military surplus from the 50s, for instance, and getting 100% fire rate. I'm also seeing quotes mostly of 20+ years for properly stored ammo before it starts to degrade--but that means a decrease in accuracy, not failure to fire. So I'm wondering where you get your 10-year figure? Not trying to be combative, honestly wondering, because it seems like a pretty big difference between "in ten years most of the ammo that people currently have stockpiled (or would stockpile before a law goes into effect) will be more or less unusable" and "in 20 - 50 years that ammo will not be as accurate and may occasionally misfire." In the first case, I think there's real potential for effective gun control in a reasonable time frame; in the second, not so much...

Still, I think you're right that ammo is indeed the best leverage point for any kind of effective restrictions.

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Posted in: Youth video project features debut of over-the-top Super Ninja Japanese Schoolgirls See in context

I loved it! I expected it to be eye-roll-y and vaguely skeezy, but no! Awesome!

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

The solution here is to take the guns OUT of the hands of irresponsible gun owners, not waste time at school trying lame band-aid solutions.

Well, yeah, except by the time they've proven they're irresponsible, someone's likely to have already died. Plus, it's the same problem I addressed before--enforcement. I mean, say I was an irresponsible jerk and left one of my handguns laying around when my little cousins came and one of them shot the other. Say that the court decided I never got to buy another gun, ever. Say even that they declared all my current guns should be confiscated (I'm not even sure if that's a legal possibility, but say it was).

The fraction of guns that I own that I bought myself, that there is even any record of me owning, is maybe one in twelve, and there's no registration in Texas at all. Most of my guns are inherited, or were given as gifts or traded between friends. Even if they sent officers to, like, search my house or something (again, seems unlikely), I could put my guns in a box and stick it in at a friend's house or in the pasture or whatever and no one would know I had them. And this is completely disregarding people who acquire guns through criminal means. Maybe if another kid died because of my negligence, they'd throw me in prison? Then when I got out, I could go pick up my guns from whoever was storing them.

I'm not arguing against gun control; I'm not even saying this idea is not a "lame band aid"--I think it is, actually. But again, I think there's going to be a huge gap between the passing of stricter gun control legislation (if it ever gets passed) and a meaningful decrease in the amount of circulating guns and irresponsible (or downright criminal) gun owners out there. And obviously there are a lot of kids out there in the meantime who are encountering guns and view them as toys. Public school is where we have the most access to malleable little child minds all gathered in one place for convenient brainwashing purposes, so why not at least try? We have time for hour-long pep rallies before football games and abstinence-only pledge seminars...

And you say that there's no way that kids won't just follow their parents footsteps, but I don't necessarily think that's true. Lots (basically all) my classmates had parents who smoked, but after a lifetime of lame skits in the gym and commercials featuring blackened lungs and health class lectures, many fewer of my peers smoke than their parents. I know that stuff had an impact on me; both of my parents are smokers, and I never touched one, because all that stuff creeped me out. Wouldn't an hour or two a year and however much some PSA commercials on TV cost be worth it, even if it had a minimal impact? I'm mean, the "impact" we're talking about is kids not dying.

Forcing them to learn about guns at school and sending the message that guns are acceptable is against the parents' wishes, and the school and state have NO right to interfere there.

Fair point, but I'm not sure teaching basic safety necessarily sends the message that guns are acceptable. We teach kids what to do if they suspect that a friend is being abused or neglected, or what to do if they see a friend taking drugs or playing with matches or whatever. I think teaching kids what to do when encountering unattended guns pretty much falls into that category.

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

Texas is ranked last or pretty close to it in literacy, so even if they got that book, well, you know, there's always the movies.

To be fair, we have a very large immigrant population, many of whom do not speak English well (or at all), so our literacy stats are skewed. (Not that we don't have massive problems in this area even aside from the ESL issue, because we absolutely do.)

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

@ tinawatanabe

Well, I think that people who lobby for horrible things are horrible, regardless of whether they make the laws or not. For instance, the Westboro Baptist Church (the "God hates f@gs" people) are despicable, despite the fact that they don't actually draft the legislation that determines the rights (or lack thereof) of GLBTQ people. I hate neo-Nazis whether or not they have any legislative influence whatsoever. The NRA lobbies for things like restoring gun rights to serial abusers and murders, out of some combination of rabid ideology and cynical financial self-interest, therefore they fall somewhere on the evil/crazy/greedy spectrum, to my way of thinking. Luckily for me, I have enough bitter political resentment to cover both corrupt legislators and awful lobbyists.

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

@tinawatanabe

The lawmakers are definitely a problem, but the NRA (leadership, not necessarily membership) are sort of evil and crazy and greedy (and I say this as someone who is relatively pro-gun, in that I own them and use them regularly and do not hate guns qua guns).

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

And this is the difference between a class where kids get told stuff and responsible parenting where you experience stuff and find out that guns are really a huge pain in the posterior. You can tell kids that the fire is hot until you're blue in the face and they'll STILL touch it someday. Or you can let them touch a candle flame and see how much it hurts (without any real harm) and they'll remember for life.

For sure. Although actually I had the opposite reaction from you; I didn't think guns were a pain at all. I started shooting at five, got my first deer at six, fell in love with hunting (okay, with the delicious homemade sausage my dad made from my deer) and still get most of my meat that way. But still, I quickly got over any idea that guns were glamorous or anything like that. I knew exactly what to do and what not to do with them and had zero interested in "playing" with them or showing them off to my friends or anything like that.

Classes won't cut it, and a teacher can't safely instruct dozens of kids in gun safety.

I wasn't thinking of actual hands-on gun safety classes (I definitely don't think that belongs in school, and seems likely to end in total disaster), just a sort of general "this is what you should do if you or your friends encounter an unattended gun or if you see someone improperly handling a gun" lecture. I mean, do I think it will solve all problems? No. It will probably be about as effective as those "why drugs and smoking are bad" skits and "make a family emergency plan in case of fire" seminars we used to have to go to in the gym, but I actually do think that having things like, "never point a gun at anyone or anything you don't want to kill" and "never assume that a gun isn't loaded" drummed into your head every year at those obligatory meetings might be marginally effective, especially since it's clear that a lot of parents are irresponsible jerks who will never even mention these very basic things. Although, I was also the kind of kid who actually did go home and make an emergency evacuation plan after the seminar, so maybe even my dimly positive expectations are exaggerated. I will say though that I've seen kids change their behavior after I've explained things to them--like, neighbors' kids whose idiotic parents were letting them "shoot" at their siblings (and me) with a .22 because "it's fine, it isn't loaded."

This is something that parents who own guns should be doing together with their kids, possibly overseen by an instructor at their shooting range. It doesn't belong at school.

Agreed. My suggestion was more to fill the gap for kids whose parents are 1) either incredibly irresponsible gun owners 2) non gun-owners whose kids might still encounter guns owned by group 1. And again, not at all thinking of actual hands-on handling of guns in school.

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Posted in: Violent video games linked to risk of crime, alcohol abuse See in context

@senseiman

Yeah, my problem is not so much with the original study (I also hit paywall, so I can't comment on it, but I assume it addresses this stuff...although honestly I have seen some unbelievable things make it through peer review so I never have complete faith) but with popular science reporting in general, which frequently not just oversimplifies but outright misrepresents the conclusions of studies and clinical trials. I have hit a string of misleading articles this week, so I am kind of suspicious of this one...plus I just wish it was common practice to at least touch on these things when stuff is being reported. I mean, I don't need a detailed recounting of methodology, but a couple of comments about obvious confounding variables, significance of results, etc. would not go amiss.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

Sounds to me like a very good reason to move out of America if you have kids. The world's a big place: find somewhere safe for your kids to grow. Or at least safer. Where people don't have weird ideas about kids needing to learn how to handle guns.

I mean, okay, that may be an option for individual parents, but I don't think the US is going to be, like, completely free of children anytime soon, either, so I don't see how this is an argument against teaching basic gun safety to the kids who do live here.

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

But what it means is that kids don't have the "freedom" to grow up without this kind of worry, so some folks can protect their "freedom" to trample on other's rights. I live in a western state in the U.S. that has among the highest rate of gun ownership, and the most "liberal" carry laws, and I am tired of having to worry about whether every time I go out to the movies or a restaurant, some guy is going to lose it, like the guy in Florida did, and endanger my safety.

I definitely get where you're coming from. Obviously I'd prefer that kids never have to worry about this sort of thing. But even if my state (Texas) or yours instituted stringent gun control laws tomorrow (basically a political impossibility, in my view), actually getting guns largely or entirely out of homes and off the streets in any kind of reasonable timespan (like, before your kids are grown) seems like a total pipe dream. IDK about your location, but here, most families have anywhere from several to a couple dozen guns of various types, many inherited and unregistered/no record of purchase, and a fair amount of ammo lying around, so even if we stopped manufacturing guns tomorrow, it still wouldn't happen. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to try to improve things, but I think the unfortunate reality is that kids do have to worry about this kind of thing, and trying to shield them from it entirely in areas where gun ownership is prevalent actually makes things more dangerous. I mean, I wish that people wouldn't drive like fools or be pedophiles, either, but I'd still teach my kids to look both ways before crossing the street and not to get in strangers' cars, you know? In a lot of ways, I feel like it was safer for me as a seven year old to regularly handle guns and be around them all the time than for a kid who knows nothing about guns to encounter just one unsecured gun that slips under someone's radar. I'm not saying the way I was raised was ideal, but I also can't envision (in my lifetime) a world in which a kid here in Texas or most places in the US can confidently expect to never encounter a single unsecured gun, so I do favor gun safety education starting very early, the same way we teach fire safety or traffic safety, etc. Everything I'm saying here is for accidental shootings--deliberate mass public shootings are a different story which obviously gun safety does nothing to solve.

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Posted in: Texas boy, 7, shoots 8-year-old cousin See in context

It will probably deal with the problem by offering gun safety classes to first graders or something.

Honestly this would probably be an improvement. Considering that guns are so prevalent here (in the US in general and especially Texas), some people are always going to be despicably irresponsible with them, and kids are liable to encounter them at someone else's house even if said kid's parents don't own them or are conscientious about keeping them inaccessible in their own home, I don't think it's a bad idea to teach even really young kids basic gun safety, like "never point them at people" and "treat all guns as if they are loaded" and "if you or your friends find a gun lying around, don't touch it and tell an adult right away." I definitely knew all that stuff by the time I was in first grade, in addition to things like, "never walk in front of someone holding/aiming a gun" and "don't wander around in the woods during deer season."

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Posted in: Violent video games linked to risk of crime, alcohol abuse See in context

I am not unwilling to believe that playing lots of violent/anti-social videogames may affect behavior somewhat, but I do wish that when studies like this are reported, the writers would more explicitly address causality and the structure of the study--for instance, is it the video games that cause behavior change, or is it that teenagers who are becoming more rebellious/taking more risks/hanging out with jerks/whatever are more likely to find these types of games appealing, or maybe that these sorts of games are heavily marketed to kids in particular demographics who are already at high risk, or maybe just that kids whose parents let them play violent video games for many hours per day in many cases don't have the most supportive and involved family environment? I mean, when I was a teenager, I'm pretty sure studies would have found a correlation between cutting yourself and listening to CDs purchased at Hot Topic, but I'm not at all convinced that the Hot Topic music section was directly responsible for the cutting, y'know? The study design may have addressed this (I hope so) but these sorts of news articles rarely do, and it's irritating.

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Posted in: U.S. scientists take step toward blood test for suicide See in context

I wonder if it's the gene that causes suicidal thoughts/behavior, or if the circumstances, stress, pain etc. that cause one to become suicidal alter the expression of the gene (epigenetics)?

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Posted in: U.S. Congress acts to prevent international child abductions See in context

I agree LaWren, I believe we've said everything there is to say and are just rehashing it at this point, so I'll leave it there as well.

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Posted in: U.S. Congress acts to prevent international child abductions See in context

I tried to keep this as short as possible, but there were many things I wanted to address, and I hope we can come to an understanding on this topic. I apologize for the length.

@ LaWren

For the cases I referred to, no children could identify themselves or their mothers from the details I posted. In fact, the women probably couldn't identify themselves definitively, since I mixed bits of different cases together, and since almost every circumstance I mentioned has occurred in multiple cases over the years, not just one particular case. I really do take privacy seriously.

I definitely don't blame a Japanese woman who is suffering abuse from taking her child and running back to Japan. I also think it is wrong to punish her for that. I really want to be clear that I'm not saying that the law as it stands is a good thing. I just think it's really dangerous to make a policy of ignoring that law altogether, because not everyone who takes a child and leaves is an abused woman. Many times it is the abuser who abducts the child, and I have unfortunately seen many cases where a child's birth mother is abusing that child, so I don't think that the fact that it's the birth mother taking the child necessarily guarantees safety.

I'm not denying that many people working in DV are jerks. Obviously I don't think I'm a jerk; you clearly disagree. But I think you're making assumptions about me and the way I relate to the people I work with that just aren't true. And I do think your ideas about who abuses whom are a little bit black and white, when my experience has been otherwise. Our shelter is not women-only, like many are, so we get a lot of clients who are not comfortable or not allowed at other shelters: trans men and trans women, gay men, lesbians, an increasing (but still very small) number of straight men who are abused by their wives or girlfriends, etc. The vast majority of people coming to us are still straight women, of course. I never doubt anyone of any gender who claims to have been abused without very, VERY good reason, because I've seen what people do to each other, so nothing surprises me.

But I want to ask you to sincerely consider the following scenario, which is pretty typical of what I dealt with on a daily basis (although, again, pieced together from different cases so as to preserve privacy):

A woman, let's call her Ann, comes to you and tells you that her partner, Sheila, has been abusing her and has locked her out of their apartment and told the school not to let Ann pick their son up from school. Since Ann is the adoptive parent and Sheila the birth parent, the school did as Sheila asked. Ann has bruises on her arms. She is admitted to the shelter. Ann gets a call from Sheila's lawyer, and it's passed over to legal staff at the shelter. Sheila alleges that she came home to find Ann whipping their son with a belt because he was dunking Sheila's cat in the bathtub and nearly drowned it. Sheila wrestled Ann away from their son and shoved her out of the apartment, which left bruises. Ann says that it's not the first time Sheila has hurt her, Sheila denies it, and says that now she wonders how often Ann has been hurting their son, who is autistic and could not necessarily report the abuse. There are no hospital records documenting previous injuries to Ann, although their son did break a finger once by having it slammed in a car door (at the time, everyone accepted that it was an accident on Ann's part). Sheila now wants to terminate Ann's parental rights on grounds of child abuse. Because of the son's autism, it's difficult to get accurate testimony from him, but his account seems to support Sheila--but Sheila is also his birth mother, and the woman who has complete control over him while he's cut off from Ann, so she might be coaching him. No one knows what happened to the cat. Ann says that the cat drowning/belt whipping incident never happened, and that Sheila made it up to explain the bruises and is holding the cat hostage to threaten and hurt her. Sheila says that the terrified cat ran off when she shoved Ann out the door and she can't find it. You have young children staying in the shelter, many of whom have been abused and/or have developmental disabilities. Do you allow Ann to stay, despite her alleged abuse of her son? Do you kick her out, despite the bruises and the fact that she has nowhere to stay?

Now, most cases are not this complicated--I'd say about one in ten are like this. But the thing is, abusers LIE, they lie constantly, and they often lie ABOUT abuse and make counter-claims, so just believing anyone who claims to have been abused without question is impossible in practice; what do you do when both parties claim to have been abused, or each claim that the other was abusing their child? What if Sheila in the above story had been Donald instead--would that change things? Or what if Sheila was Kome instead, and had taken their son back to Japan instead of just locking Ann out of the apartment? I think there are cases where you really have to look at the evidence closely to determine the truth and figure out what's best for the child, and the only feasible way that I know of to do that is to go to court.

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Posted in: U.S. Congress acts to prevent international child abductions See in context

@LaWren

I bet I could link you to many many more stories where women and the children were killed and harmed by the men they are fleeing from. Many more stories of these men like these, who ended up terrorising a dear dear friend of mine to such an extent she was badly hurt AFTER she got away.

No arguments there. Men are far more dangerous to women than vice versa in the vast majority of cases, and the most dangerous point is when the woman is trying to get away or immediately afterward. Far, far too many women are injured, terrorized, or killed after they've fled abuse and the system has failed to protect them, which I've acknowledged over and over.

I'm not arguing that women are worse abusers than men, or that they are more likely to try to manipulate the system. The exact opposite is true. However, just because men are usually the abusers does not mean that they are always the abusers, and I believe that any case of child abduction should be subject to legal review for the safety of the child, rather than just sticking our heads in the sand and gambling on the statistics of abuse, since I have seen many cases in which children would have been in horrible danger if left unquestioningly with their mothers (again, not nearly as many as the cases in which the father was the danger, but a significant number).

You said that my merely acknowledging that women are capable of abuse was evidence of substandard care at the shelter I worked at, which is clearly ridiculous. Don't try to turn it around and make it seem as if I'm arguing that men don't commit abuse.

The convention forces women to stay near their abusers, and to do so for the love of their child.

Which is a big problem which needs to be fixed. Again, I've spent years advocating legal reforms, so it's not like I'm ignoring this problem (although this particular piece of legislation is not one in which I've been particularly involved). My point is that to ignore the abduction of children and allow it to pass with no legal review at all is not a solution, and is in fact a terrible idea, because not every parent who abducts a child and takes them out of the country does so for pure and valid reasons, whatever their gender.

Of course, some people might like to tell stories of women who are caught in these places BEING the abuser. For a start telling stories like that is a terrible way to deny these women the basic human right of PRIVACY. If you worked on a case like that, to then use it on an internet forum is plain morally and possibly legally wrong.

First of all, I don't "like" telling these stories, and most of the cases I usually discuss and deal with involve male abusers. I was directly addressing your assertion that my statement that some women are abusive and manipulative indicates that I was providing substandard care. I offered a few examples of these cases in order to show that I was not just making assumptions about these women, and that in fact it would have been dangerous for me to ignore them and their crimes--which would have actually been substandard care.

Secondly, I gave no names or identifying information about these women or children, and violated neither the law, my contract, nor my ethics by discussing generalized cases of abuse that I witnessed. You shared the personal example of your friend, as well. Did that violate her right to privacy?

To then call these allegedly REAL people names, to say they are mentally ill. Are you QUALIFIED to make that MEDICAL assessment, which you put SO politely. Have you ceased to think of them as human beings with feelings?

Umm, no, we work with psychiatrists and psychologists, as do the courts, so the women I refer to as mentally ill were indeed medically diagnosed with various mental illnesses. The more severe cases often had a history of incarceration or being involuntarily committed. "Mentally ill" is the correct term, at least in my area, and is common in the literature. And again, I provided no identifying information or any way to associate a diagnosis of mental illness with any particular woman.

To allege sexual and physical assult of children is common amongst women in refuges absolutely sickens me. The vast vast majority are decent good women, doing their very best to protect themselves and their families.

I didn't say it was common, I said that it happened. Sexual abuse of children by women is rare, in my experience (and statistics back me up). Men are by far the worst offenders when it comes to sexual abuse. Physical and verbal abuse by women towards children is relatively common, but it was pretty rare in our shelter--although quite common in the court cases I dealt with as a child advocate.

I suggest either you get a new job, or else a sense of compassion and decency.

Yeah, because acknowledging reality precludes compassion and decency. I should just let women keep abusing their kids because women are angels and their ex-husbands are probably worse.

The Hague has sent MANY a woman back to her abuser, and many a child back to a man who will hurt them emotionally and physically. It does not give women a chance to succeed in breaking free.

I've said over and over again that I acknowledge this problem, and that I spend a great deal of time working on legal reforms. I just don't agree with your proposed solution, which is to simply ignore the abduction of children across borders on the assumption that their abductors have good reasons.

The fact you work in a refuge and argue in defence of men absolutely sickens me, but doesn't suprise me in the slightest.

I don't argue in defense of men, I argue in defense of anyone who is being abused, whether child, woman, or man, and no matter what the sex of their abuser. I am a feminist and a queer woman and I have spent years working to end violence against women by men, but that doesn't mean I turn a blind eye to violence just because it happens to be committed by a woman.

I PITY the women you work with.

Maybe you should learn to deal with people as individual human beings rather than making categorical assumptions about them based on faulty, preconceived ideas. Trying to shove every woman who has suffered abuse into this idealized mold of a battered woman does no one any favors. Women do not have to be perfect angels in order to deserve protection from abuse. And just because one woman has abused someone or lied about being abused does not somehow invalidate the abuse suffered by all other women. I understand the urge to deny these sorts of things because women are so often disbelieved about abuse or (especially) rape. However, the fact is that these things do happen, albeit rarely, and sweeping them under the rug is cowardly and unjust to the victims.

And maybe you could reconsider insulting me and the work I do, since you've never spoken to any of the women I work with or (I presume) done this sort of work yourself.

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Posted in: U.S. Congress acts to prevent international child abductions See in context

@ LaWren

As for someone who worked in DV saying that "some" women are abused, but others are just crazy and manipulative, that says a LOT about the standard of care in some of these refuges, and the attitude taken by the workers. NO woman puts herself in that position willingly, and they should ALL Be believed and helped.

Okay, no. You don't get to insult me and imply that I was offering substandard care to abused women because I acknowledge that some women commit violence and abuse and then lie about it. It's a fact. I can link you to a hundred news stories about abusive women and mothers who murdered their kids in grisly ways, often because they were mentally ill. It's ludicrous to pretend that this doesn't happen. I've seen it happen over and over again.

If a woman ends up in our shelter, and I see her pinching her daughter's earlobes between her fingernails until they bleed and grinding the girl's bare toes under the heel of her shoe underneath the table, and that woman is trying to get custody of her child, I'm supposed to...what? Ignore it? Assume that the father is worse because he's a man and the mother must have had some reason for leaving him? Maybe the father was also abusing the girl, and the mother was telling the truth about that. But I know for a fact that the mother was abusive, and that she was trying to pass off injuries that resulted from her own abuse as the father's fault.

In a situation like that, you need a court to sort out what the heck is going on. What are the ages and patterns of the girl's various injuries, what kind of strength/size would you need to inflict some of them, what has been witnessed by friends and neighbors and teachers and nurses, do all the witnesses happen to be close friends of either parent? or is all their information second-hand, only what they've been told by the mother or father about the other parent, but they've come to believe it as if they've seen it themselves? Are the parents cooperating to abuse the kid, or is one parent blaming the other in order to cover up their own crimes? Is the kid self-injuring and got too scared to admit it, so told her mom that her step-dad was the one hurting her? Is the father abusing both of them, and the mother is so mentally ill that she thinks her own abuse is some sort of ritual to ward off his far worse violence? I've seen all these scenarios play out at one point or another. Abuse is complicated, and it doesn't always fall neatly into categories by gender. I worked with many lesbian couples in which one woman was abusing another (and in a few cases abusing a child. You can pretend that it's some kind of insensitivity or moral failing on my part to say that women sometimes lie and hurt people, but it's plain truth.

Do I doubt the testimony of abused women for no good reason? Never. But pretending that fully half the human population is completely incapable of violence, manipulation, or deceit is ridiculous. The vast, vast majority of women who seek shelter or legal recourse from rape or abuse are telling the truth. And yeah, a sexist culture and legal system mean that they are often disbelieved and/or that the protections offered to them are pitifully inadequate (how many victims of stalking or abuse are found dead with their restraining orders in their pockets or purses? lots), and often their abusers are able to manipulate the system in order to keep abusing or terrorizing them, to keep them close and deny them a chance to move on.

I've been working to reform that system for years, and to help women navigate it in the mean time. I've met these women at the hospital and held their hands while their rape kits were completed. I went to court with them, and went shopping to find them decent clothes to wear to court because they couldn't go home for their clothes or go to the bank to get money because he drained their accounts. I also worked as a child advocate for kids whose futures were being decided in court, and followed some of those cases for years, until the judges knew me better than they did the parents or lawyers or kids themselves. These cases are not nearly as simple as you're making out. Often both parents are abusive, or one parent is abusive and the other is mentally ill or on drugs, or there is no abuse but very bitter conflict over infidelity or finances or other family members and both are trying to use the child against the other, often lying (both parents, both sexes, to each other and the kid and the cops and the court) in order to do so. Often there is genuine fear of violence, but no actual violence has yet been committed. Sometimes the kid is in foster care, and the birth parents are unfit but the kid has been abused repeatedly by foster parents and sexually assaulted in group homes, so even neglect and verbal abuse at the hands of the birth parents is looking like a better option. Pretending that these cases can be neatly categorized and the truth easily determined based on the gender of the parents is both dangerous and wrong.

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Posted in: U.S. Congress acts to prevent international child abductions See in context

No woman will leave and flee with the children for no reason, and fears of violence should always be taken seriously.

Yes, most women who flee with children have very good reasons and deserve protection, but there are crazy, manipulative, abusive, or just plain selfish women out there as well. Again, the whole point of having a legal system is to judge cases on individual merit rather than making sweeping assumptions about people and depriving them of basic rights. The legal system is indeed often used to further bludgeon and harass women who are experiencing violence, and that is a huge problem. I used to work at a women's shelter, it's not like I don't know this. That system should absolutely be reformed. But ignoring legal process altogether and simply saying, "Well, the parent that ran off with the child must have had good reasons, I guess we'll just let them keep the kid," is hardly a solution. Even aside from the unfairness to the other parent, it endangers the child. Like I said, I used to work at a shelter, and the number of mentally ill and violent spouses (not all men by any means) who run off with their kids every year is staggering. Not to mention, many spouses leave because of reasons such as infidelity, which, while reprehensible, doesn't necessarily mean that the guilty party should be denied custody/visitation of their children. Again, the whole point of going to court is to review circumstances like these.

And yes, fears of violence should always be taken seriously, but taking it seriously does not automatically mean unilaterally depriving the spouse of their rights without any sort of trial or legal review and allowing the child to continue living with someone who abducted them. A lot of things are indeed over-legislated, but violence and child abduction are not "private matters" that can be solved by turning a blind eye.

And I'm speaking as someone who was abducted as a child by a violent, mentally ill female relative, although luckily she only had me for a few days before we were found, and she didn't manage to cross any borders.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

Posted in: U.S. Congress acts to prevent international child abductions See in context

@LaWren

In cases where the fathers did do something to the mothers and/or children to justify not being given access to the child, of course that should be addressed (and honestly, courts have a crummy track record in this regard, so I somewhat understand your feelings), but you can't just unilaterally deny people's parental rights based on an assumption that they must be bad people because their wives left them or decided they wanted to live in a different place. And it's not like it's unheard of for abusive men to abduct kids to use as leverage or punishment over their wives (or vice versa), either--should these people also be left alone to do as they please just because they crossed a border? The whole reason we have things like legal rights and court systems is to tackle issues like these, so better that people can't just use national boundaries to circumvent legal proceedings.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

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