Domestic Violence Victim Jailed for 3 Days

There is this woman I know who, for decades, played the following game with her husband. All day and every day she would pelt him with hurtful comments.

“You are ugly, fat, stupid; has anybody even seen a bigger loser?; you are a total schizo; you are a brainless fat-ass jerkwad; you are such a disgrace; God, you are pathetic; can you do anything right?; I have never seen a bigger idiot; you smell real bad; shut you mouth, you useless piece of shit”, on and on and on she’d go.

Once every 6 to 8 months, the husband would explode and beat her up. And then the whole cycle would start all over again. This continued for 28 years until the husband died. The couple’s children were always present to observe every aspect of the show.

This kind of S&M dynamic tends to be very exhibitionist. When children can’t be scrounged up to create a captive audience, the S&M pair recruits relatives, friends, neighbors, or law enforcement officers to watch the show.

I’ll put the rest under the fold because this is getting too long.

Another woman would call one friend and relative after another and describe to them in great detail how her husband beat and raped her the day before and then shook the baby really hard. When the terrified relative or friend would respond with, “I’m here to do anything you need me to do to help you leave this animal”, she’d retort with a supercilious, “How dare you speak badly about my husband? You don’t even know what it means to be in a committed, loving relationship like mine” and hang up.

The reason why I’m writing all this is the news item everybody is discussing about a judge who sent a domestic abuse victim to jail for 3 days for failing to appear at a court hearing:

A Judge in Seminole County, Florida will not discuss her harsh tone toward a sobbing domestic violence victim whom she sentenced to three days in jail. . .

Collins, who was re-elected last year, sent the woman to jail for refusing a court order to appear during the trial of her abuser.

Victims of domestic abuse should get every kind of support and protection from the justice system and any kind of support from people who are freely choosing to offer it. However, the exhibitionist aspects of their behavior should be clamped down the moment they begin to manifest. And these are not mutually exclusive things. The criminal who beats people should go to jail. At the same time, when the beaten people begin to perform for an audience, it is perfectly fine to let them know as clearly as possible that there will be no audience here.

And by the way, the woman with the abusive husband and the shaken baby? For as long as everybody was cooing “Oh God, this is so horrible” and “I’m so sorry this is happening to you”, nothing changed. But when somebody finally said, “I’m on my way to CPS right now to get them to come over and take the baby away from this insane situation”, that put an end to the whole thing immediately. The woman left the abuser, and he never got a chance to shake the baby again.