They were sober but likely not rational. To a practicing alcoholic, alcohol isn’t the problem, it is the solution. To this alcoholic, the fear, shame, and pain of drinking were not sufficient motivation to stay sober. They were just more reasons to get drunk and escape the fear, shame, anxiety, etc. for a while. The fear of further wrecking my life was less than the fear of having to face, sober, what I had made of it.
It was around six months after my last drink when I started to work this out. What seems obvious now, I was oblivious to then. It took not only removing all traces of alcohol from my system, and allowing my brain chemistry to stabilize (perhaps ten weeks) but dealing with life’s ups and downs without drinking and learning that things turn out better when I face up to, and deal with my problems rather than drowning them in ethanol.
I am not attempting to justify their actions in any way. Just pointing out that it is folly to try to apply rational analysis to the behavior of people who are not rational. I would bet that judging them and shaming them won’t change their behavior except perhaps to make it worse. Non-judgmental concern/love is what finally convinced me to seek help. For others I know, it took court orders and the threat or even experience of prison.
As for the law in question, getting evicted sucks, and fearing to call the police on an abuser for fear of eviction sucks. Yet I can see the landlords and other tenants interests as well. After a couple of cycles of cops getting called, the police just become part of the dysfunctional pattern of behavior. The victim learns that when it gets too bad, the police can come and call a time-out. This can actually encourage the victim to stay in the relationship.
Silver lining thought: Now that they have been evicted, the victim has one less reason/excuse not to leave/report the abuser. Assuming the usual gender roles, she can go to a shelter, he is now on the street.
I lied, but chickenshit Chimera had to post when he’s safe from a quick rebuttal.
This case, Chimera, how about this one?! Didja’ read the summary of the Complaint? If it is true, after getting out of jail for beating her the last time and was her ex, he intimidated her into letting him in by saying something to the effect if I can’t have you no one can. Then he stabbed her and cut her head.
The way both ordinances are written could have resulted in this even if someone came in to your house in Norristown and raped you by force as the language allows for that if considered a domestic disturbance–regardless of fault of the tenant. To take it to extremes, a crazy person you don’t know could break in, unlawfully discharge a gun, and it is “disorderly conduct” by virtue of the plain language of the ordinance. THE LAW MAKES IT SO IT DOES NOT MATTER IF THE TENANT WAS A PARTICIPANT OR NOT.
Now, after this Plaintiff was evicted, Norristown can’t do so any longer; rather, it fines the landlord and encourages eviction. I truly hope that laws similar to this are not so boneheadedly written such that any such instance would happen outside of Norristown.
ETA: Nice goalpost changing since I proved your sorry ass wrong.
A lot of people DID leave prior to the time when they would have been taken to the camps, so by your logic, perhaps we should question why the others didn’t and conclude that they were fools and thus deserved their fates.
What is this “allowed to leave” you are talking about? Are you truly this unfamiliar with the reality of domestic violence? You don’t think taking the threat of physical harm/death seriously from the actual person who has just physically harmed you makes any sense? People are most at risk when they try to leave. This is when they are typically murdered, not when things are going “well.” A restraining order is just a piece of paper, and may help the prosecutor get a conviction after you are dead.
Add to that the fact that calling the police will typically result in one person being taken to jail–but it’s a real gamble that they will choose the correct one, and an abuser will become even more enraged and typically will be released the very next day, regardless of whether the victim is willing to press charges. Do you think all abusers are too broke to post bond? Even if they are, they will be RORed most of the time anyway.
Blaming victims appeals to people because it makes them feel safe and like the world is fair, alleviating them of any responsibility to be helpful instead of judgmental.
As someone who grew up in an abusive household, I can’t see how kicking my mother and sister and I out of our home would have made things any better for anyone. This kind of “solution” just treats the symptoms rather than the disease, and at best, it’s just kicking the can down the road to the next place the family ends up (because, believe it or not, people do have to live somewhere; evicting them from one residence doesn’t just banish them to the netherworld where they’ll never trouble anyone else ever again).
I know. I don’t think I’m the appropriate person to really provide love, since I barely know them outside of these episodes. I only get harsh and judgey on this message board, where they don’t know me and I can vent. In person, I’m all gentle concern and offers to help in any way I can, including offering their son a safe place to stay whenever he needs one (although to their credit, they almost never get stupid when he’s home.)
Am I the “victim” of domestic violence? No, absolutely not. But in an *indirect *way, my family and all the rest of the neighbors who are in earshot of the screaming, begging and blood *are *victimized by the situation. We’re the ones who have to decide when to call the cops, knowing full well it’s not going to do any good, but not knowing what else to do. (Apparently in our city, they can’t make an arrest or press charges without the victim’s consent.) We listen to every crash and scream trying to decide if there’s actual injury happening or just good hard make up sex preparation. Yes, damnit, that’s pretty damn stressful, especially considering that I’m a nurse, and husband’s a retired paramedic. All our training - not to mention one of the requirements of keeping my nursing license - is to intervene when people are hurting each other. I’m a mandated reporter, and I never know if the kid is at home and in danger until the police have come in and looked around.
And I’m also vocal here at least a little bit to try to raise some awareness and a perspective shift that Domestic Violence isn’t a private matter, at least not in an urban setting. It’s not “all in the family,” it’s all in the neighborhood, or the block, or at least the building. It doesn’t just affect the one(s) with physical bruises. There’s plenty of pain to go around.
Let me be clear: I’m not crazy about the unintended consequences of this ordinance, and I do hope that this lawsuit provides the impetus for some reasonable change. But there’s got to be something between the extremes of “sorry, we can’t do anything,” and causing people to be afraid to call the cops when they’re in actual danger. Neither extreme is working.
Well since Godwin’s out of the bottle and we’ve had our little laugh at the strawman…I recall this actually being a significant theme in post WWII German literature. War guilt, selective memory, wrongness of rationalization, that sort of thing. So yeah, it sucks to be a victim of domestic violence, but being a relatively helpless witness is something you live with as well. And you get to rethink for years how you did or didn’t intervene.
Well, it would make it better for those that live nearby, and after being evicted from enough places, your family could have moved somewhere where the sounds of the abuse were just one voice in the choir, or maybe to a remote property where no one would hear the screams. See how that could have worked out for everyone?
I agree that if the law says that someone can be attacked on their own property and then evicted for it, the law is fucking stupid and needs to be changed or overturned. This isn’t anywhere in the same galaxy as Justice.
So it would appear that I was wrong about this particular law.
(sorry, very busy at work and didn’t have time to read every detail to know if you were talking about same law as the OP, but I’ll assume you were).
Good enough for you?
Well, except I’m still not going to give anyone slack for suggesting that it is compassionate to accept that someone can be endlessly abused and how dare we think they should GET THE FUCK OUT of that situation. Or that their neighbors have no right to want them to go away.
Or maybe, just maybe, one or more people involved might realize that they’ve had a fair number of what normal people refer to as “wake up calls”, that the situation is entirely dependent on their own behavior, and that just perhaps, they are the ones who need to make a change.
I got out because my sister came over to our house, told me to my face ‘you need to get out, I’m taking you to talk to a friend of mine’ and drove me to Family Court, where I talked to her friend and, as surprising as it was to me, an Order For Protection was filed against my wife. Yeah, it took someone I cared about to get in my face and make me do something. Not idiots saying “we need to be compassionate” and continuing to enable it.
Do you think your flailing, sputtering posts here spouting self-righteous nonsense (in a thread that’s supposed to be about a case that you didn’t even bother to actually read the details of, no less) count as the “tough love”-style prodding that you assert abused spouses need?
If not, why not shut up?
Seems like it would be both less embarrassing to you and less irritating for everyone who has to read your posts if you would maybe stop perversely jumping in to congratulate yourself for having the gumption and wherewithal to leave your abusive spouse (after your concerned sister pleaded with you to let her set you up with a place to stay, of course).
Who the fuck is flailing and sputtering? Me or the people (read: You, right now) trying desperately to shut me up because they disagree with me? Seems somewhat ironic that in a thread about abuse, some people feel the need to be abusive and controlling about how right they think they are.
You. You are doing those things. You are doing those things in a thread that is not about you and has no relation at all to your story of being an abused spouse who by your own admission were unable to escape your situation without external aid. If your sister had given you some shit about how you’re responsible for your own situation and left instead of giving you the emotional and material support that enabled you to lift yourself from peril, where would you be right now?
Not in the slightest. Now stop reading things into it to justify your behavior and stop with the stupid Abuse 101 tactics. (seriously? trying to claim I’m embarrassing myself and should shut up? Have you pulled this ‘shaming’ crap to silence your boyfriend or girlfriend when they say shit you disagree with? Do you slap them around a bit too and then yell at them for being ‘hysterical’ and ‘flailing about’?)
The discussion was initially about the law, but in the middle of that we have the idea that people should be ‘compassionate’ and just let the abused and abusers go about their lives without intervention, without mean-heartedly putting them out on the street. With abuser tactics being used to shut down anyone who even goes so far as to imply that this isn’t the best idea.
Aren’t you the guy who took an anecdote about a woman you were alone with in an elevator who shrank away into the corner opposite you while letting you see that she was holding a can of pepper spray and turned that into a story about her brandishing a weapon at you?
May I suggest to you that your abuse-meter needs some serious recalibration?
I haven’t yet… but then, I’ve never been in a relationship with you. I suspect that would test anyone’s patience.
Do you think your sister should have left you to live on the street?
What an ass! Not only did BottledBlondJeanie go to PACER to find the case, which is more than anybody does for 99.999% of Internet discussions, and post the details back over here–but the details that she posted are exactly what you are throwing a fit over her not posting.
I checked to see if you had an April 2013 registration date. That’s how much you look like a troll.