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164 8 “Asking for It” Battered Women and Child Custody Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then. —Donald R. Roberts, North Country (NY) village justice, who refused a woman’s request for an order of protection against her husband (quoted in New York Times, September 25, 2006) In 1999, Jessica Gonzales obtained a restraining order against her estranged husband, Simon, who had a history of abusive and erratic behavior. The order barred him from contact with her and their three young daughters, ages 7, 9, and 10, and stipulated that the police were to arrest Simon if he violated the order. A month later, Simon took the girls without permission. Jessica called the police at 7:30 p.m. who told her to call back at 10 p.m. if the girls had not returned. An hour later, Jessica called the police again and told them that she had spoken to Simon on his cell phone and he was at an amusement park. She requested that the police arrest him there. They didn’t. Jessica called two more times over the next few hours, and each time was told to call back later. Jessica drove to her husband’s apartment and found it empty. She called the police, but after 40 minutes, no officer had arrived. Jessica drove to the police station and filed an incident report. The officer who made the report left for a dinner break without taking any action. At 3:20 a.m., Simon drove up to the police station and started shooting a gun that he had purchased, as it turns out, only an hour after he had taken the girls. During the gun battle, Simon was killed. Afterward, police officers discovered Jessica’s three daughters, dead, in Simon’s truck. But the story doesn’t end there. Jessica sued the town of Castle Rock, Colorado, for refusing to enforce the restraining order against her husband. “Asking for It” 165 In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales that police are exempt from legal action, even when their refusal to enforce a valid restraining order resulted in death.1 As NOW president Kim Gandy observed , “The U.S. Supreme Court just hung a ‘shoot here’ sign around the necks of battered women and their children all across the country.”2 Child abductions are not uncommon. Some 200,000 children are abducted by family members each year; in most of these cases, the abductor is a man in his 30s or 40s, typically the child’s biological father.3 In about 60 percent of all cases, the police are contacted, usually to recover the child from a known location or to help locate a missing child.4 In the vast majority of cases, the child is returned; however, in more than one-half of all cases, the child is gone for a week or more. In around 44 percent of family abductions, the child is concealed, and in almost one in five cases, the children are moved out of state with the intent to make recovery difficult. Typically the abductor intends to prevent contact between the child and the mother and to change the custody arrangements permanently. Intimate partner violence is an even bigger problem, accounting for onefifth of all nonfatal violence and nearly one-third of fatal homicides among females 12 years of age and older.5 According to estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey, in 2001, an estimated 590,000 women experienced physical violence by their current or former intimate partners, who are usually—though not always—heterosexual men.6 Most rapes and other physical assaults against women are committed by a current or former spouse, a live-in partner, or a date.7 As many as one in five rapes are marital rapes (that is, nonconsensual sexual acts between a woman and her husband, ex-husband, or intimate long-term partner).8 Around 1,200 women in the United States are killed each year by a husband, ex-husband, or boyfriend.9 Sociologist Michael Johnson distinguishes among four types of intimate partner violence, two of which are especially relevant to the present discussion .10 “Intimate terrorism” (originally known as “patriarchal terrorism”) escalates over time and is more likely to cause injury. Intimate terrorism is motivated by a man’s need for power and control in the relationship; it helps us understand why an abuser’s violence against a woman may actually escalate when the woman leaves...

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