@BillRM,
Quote:Can give you postings of women who are crying out due to the state forcing de facto divorces on them as they can not get restraining orders removed on their husbands.
What does that have to do with women being killed by their domestic partners? Or trying to prevent that from happening?
Quote:Lot of women will not then call the police in the first place if they know they will give up all control to the state.
More women may fail to call the police out of fear--of their partner--and fear of what their partner will do to them if they do call the police..
A restraining order, without additional safeguards, offers a woman little real protection because the order can be violated. It would have given Jennifer Martel no real protection from Jared Remy.
The most dangerous time for the woman is when she wants to get out of a controlling abusive relationship, because that often escalates the man's behavior. And Jennifer Martel apparently did want to leave Remy--she sent e-mails to people telling them she was in fear of him and planning her escape. That may well be what set off the violence in the relationship, the fact she wanted to leave.
Quote:In any case, it is once more taking the rights of adulthood away from women in order to protect them whether they wish the protections or not.
That's not how the domestic violence intervention programs, like the High-Risk program in Massachusetts, approach the situation. They assess the situation, and if the risk to the woman is felt to be high, they will help her not to be in denial about it, and they work on obtaining her confidence and cooperation. They also take action against the person posing the risk, either by a dangerousness detention, or a GPS monitoring of his whereabouts, in addition to a restraining order--they put him under surveillance--which affords her a much higher level of protection.
There is a difference between a woman who is in an abusive relationship, and a woman who is in a potentially lethal situation, where there is a high risk of her becoming a victim of a homicide. In the latter situation, much more drastic measures should be taken to protect the potential victim and to restrict the ability of the dangerous individual to harm her, or anyone else--the threat has to be reduced or contained, as much as possible.
Jennifer Martel was in a controlling relationship with a man who had a significant past history of violence, including threats to kill a previous domestic partner. It does not appear that there was ongoing physical abuse in Martel's relationship with Remy, but she was in fear of him, with good reason, because of his explosive tendencies, and she wanted to get away from him. She needed the protection and help of the state, and she really needed to ask for it.
If Martel had had any visible signs of injury from the alleged assault that resulted in Remy's arrest, I think the prosecutors would have been much more reluctant to just let him walk out of court, and an attempt to hook Martel up with domestic violence social workers might have been made, given Remy's past history. But the state really lacked evidence on which they could act, because, given her lack of injuries, they couldn't even really prove he had assaulted her, and she didn't even appear at his arraignment.
Quote:In any case, it is once more taking the rights of adulthood away from women in order to protect them whether they wish the protections or not.
The state has an obligation to evaluate and restrain/retain any person who may pose an imminent danger to someone else--whether or not the potential victim wishes that to be done--that's why psychiatric evaluations for dangerousness are done. This is not "taking the rights of adulthood away from women"--that's how our society protects itself from potentially dangerous individuals.
