Okay, tumblr, I'm giving you a tricky one. Let's talk about mandatory arrest laws on domestic violence charges.
Early studies on domestic violence found that abusers who were arrested were less likely to recidivate, or be arrested again for doing the same thing. This resonated with the law enforcement community, who in general assumes that arrests are a good idea and solve problems, so many police departments around the country eventually adopted mandatory arrests on domestic calls: if anyone is visibly injured, the officers must arrest the "primary aggressor."
Let's make this as simple as possible.
Officer arrests "primary aggressor." There are two possibilities here. 1) The "primary aggressor" is the abuser. 2) the "primary aggressor" is the abused person, who has been provoked.
Option 1: Primary Aggressor is Abuser
This is probably the more common scenario. The officer has arrested the abuser, before the victim is ready to leave and become a survivor. The victim has been tormented on a daily basis; they are panicked and terrified at the thought of their only support system and the person their life revolves around going to jail; they often do not want to press charges.
Even if they are later on in the cycle and ready to leave, they know instinctively that this is going to make the abuser furious and also that the abuser has to come out of jail sometime. As a matter of simple survival, they know the justice system cannot protect them (because it has not protected them). So they try to mitigate: get the charges dropped.
Cops say, tough luck, it wasn't up to you, now only the prosecutor can drop the charges. Prosecutor refuses, because they believe this is the only way to fight domestic violence.
The amount of times that a victim of domestic violence comes to me pleading to get their abuser out of jail is... I don't know if I can describe it. It's unreal. It's so common that it's one of those running jokes in the office that's not a joke. (To be clear, that is not a joke that disrespects the [usually] women involved; they are struggling against a system that is causing irreparable damage to them and their lives as well, and we understand that completely.)
The whole endeavor becomes a desperate quest to get the charges undone. Then, when she's ready to leave (I know abuse happens to more people than women), and she does want to press charges, she has already probably dropped them multiple times. She is "unreliable." She has a "reputation."
Option 2: The "Primary Aggressor" is the Victim
I similarly can't describe how often this happens. I'm always giving people the link to Lundy Bancroft's book Why Does He Do That. The stories they tell are heartbreaking: abusive men trying to take away their children, trying to trap them inside the house, cheating right in front of them, chipping away at all their self-esteem until they crack and crack and crack.
When this kind of scenario happens, police show up. Police are often men, who like guns, who are drawn to positions of authority. They encounter, in a "typical" scenario, a man who is now cool as a cucumber and manipulative as a snake, telling the officer that she's bipolar or borderline (a common misdiagnosis for people who have complex PTSD) and she's off her meds, she's on drugs, she was a danger to herself. She came at him for no reason. She's crazy, I'm telling you, officer. These men as are accomplished at grooming witnesses as they are at grooming victims.
And then the officer encounters a woman (last week one officer literally described a victim as "hysterical" in a police report), who is freaking out with the aftermath of a traumatic violent attack, who may have behaved in a way she thought she would never behave, who is crying and asking for her child and maybe not cooperating (bad) or maybe telling the police the truth (more common, even worse).
Because the women that these men target have only one trait in common: kindness. The ability to take responsibility for their actions and give grace to another. That's the only thing these men need to take advantage of them.
Calm man with reasonable explanation with whom the police officer has much in common... "hysterical" woman. Obviously she was the primary aggressor, because now we know that men can be abused too.
Now she's got assault charges. Maybe they'll even stick. Because assault and battery is not the concerning part of abusive behavior. Committing assault and battery is also a symptom of being abused. This conviction will deny her access to the paltry, bullshit, meager domestic violence services we have on offer, and might cause her to be evicted from housing or fired from her job. She could lose custody of the children to her attacker, and he most certainly will file for custody, because that's part of coercive control.
Mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence are garbage. They produce garbage. They perpetuate the cycle because they buy into the myths that abusers, men in particular, have perpetuated about themselves for much longer than those laws have existed.
And, as a final note, regarding abuse of men and abuse in same-sex relationships: while I have seen the results of this kind of abuse as well, the violence of abuse of men is nearly always confined to humiliations, slaps and shoves (NOT OKAY, to be clear, and this is not an absolute rule, my god the very few exceptions in my career have been horrific) and the violence of the abuse of women is strangulation, broken bones, stab wounds, and much much worse constant sexual violence. Male violence against women is unrelenting. It's not a problem of reporting. Space for survivors MUST include men, MUST include the lgbtq+ community, MUST include women, in order for us all to be safe, but any discussion of abuse is simply incomplete without acknowledging this reality.
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