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Mapping the Obstacles to Criminal Justice for Women

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Why Women? Funding Resource

Victims Fund

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Mapping the Obstacles to Criminal Justice for Women

The criminal justice system has established increasingly tighter controls over the funding and functioning of domestic violence and rape crisis centres, and hence, over you, the advocate. Throughout the US, this criminal justice system control of advocates has succeeded in corralling crisis centres into a narrow role of passive service providers while crushing crisis centres' role as advocates and agents of social change.

In short, the current violence against women movement has become increasingly embedded in the criminal justice system. This creates a profound and highly unethical conflict of interest for advocates, and a dangerous void of advocacy for victims. Most advocates in the US today are unable to act independently on behalf of their clients in the criminal justice system, at exactly that point at which vigorous advocacy for victims is most needed.

It is bad enough that rape and domestic violence victim advocates have no official powers for advocating in a system which has more unfettered power than any other government entity. At least back in the early years of the violence against women movement, advocates were independent agents. In the last ten years, however, criminal justice officials have cunningly gotten ever increasing control over advocates and their work.

Today, most core funding for domestic violence and rape centers flows from the federal government and is administered either by a state criminal justice office or state health department. In order to renew these grants every year, many states (including California) require that the victim centers obtain the signatures of their local law enforcement chiefs. This gives law enforcement officials direct veto power over the core funding of victim advocate centers. And whether you are aware of it or not, law enforcement is using this power to control you one way or the other.

In California, for example, the State Office of Criminal Justice Planning (OCJP) administers the violence against women funds. And every year, as a condition of grant renewal, OCJP requires all rape and domestic violence centers in the state to obtain the signatures of every local police chief in the center's area, the signature of the district attorney, and of other law enforcement officials. Naturally, if law enforcement officials feel that advocates are pushing them too hard to deal more seriously with violence against women, all law enforcement has to do is simply refuse to sign onto the annual grant request, or threaten to refuse to sign.

This is not an idle or theoretical threat. There are many cases around the country where law enforcement has indeed withheld their signatures from crisis center grant requests in order to punish centers for their vigorous advocacy. What's much more common, though, and in many ways more insidious, is the quiet touch. It's carried out in a couple of ways. Law enforcement officials may approach agency directors and boards to lodge their protests about certain advocates. Agency directors, knowing they need the official's signature, simply reign in the advocate, fire the advocate, and/or write policies into the agency rule books that prohibit advocates from confronting law enforcement. Such repression and firings of women's strongest advocates and ever more restrictive internal good-girl policies have become commonplace in rape and domestic violence centers around the country. Nowadays, an ardent feminist doesn't even get hired in the first place.

The predominance of counseling, social services, and accompaniment services have won out over vigorous advocacy and social change. Feminist analyses, activism, and strategies have been abandoned. Advocacy has been whittled down to service providing. Social change has become social work. And woe to the victim who thinks she has a real advocate on her side who is free and willing to stand up and fight for her rights.

Dependence on law enforcement signatures for grant funds, by itself, puts rape and domestic violence centers into a profound conflict of interest to the great detriment of their clients. It's a conflict of interest that has only worsened as the federal violence against women moneys have increased.

But as detrimental as this veto power has been, there is an even more crushing development that has been proliferating in the last ten years. Rape crisis and domestic violence centers across the country are increasingly entering into highly stipulated joint contracts with law enforcement. Many advocates now go to work and have their offices in the police department or district attorney's office with whom their agency is contracted. Women's advocates are increasingly physically and financially embedded in law enforcement. The fact that the advocate's paycheck is signed by the crisis center is empty of independence since the flow of the paycheck money is tightly bound by the terms of contracts with law enforcement.

This proliferation of contracts between law enforcement and women's advocacy groups has for all intents and purposes spelled the end of honest, effective advocacy. Advocates can no longer stand up to law enforcement on the victim's behalf without the advocate risking her job.

And in the last few years it's gotten even worse. Many police agencies and district attorney's offices around the country have now established their own victim services units, and have cut the women's centers out all together. In many jurisdictions, law enforcement control over the violence against women's movement is complete. In these jurisdictions, victims of rape and domestic violence are being told they have advocates, but in reality they are putting their lives in the hands of pawns of the patriarchy.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that this has happened. It's consistent with everything humans know about the exercise of power through the ages. The criminal justice system so outsizes the violence against women movement in power and money, that, naturally, the system uses this power and money to stop the feminists from making them do what they don't want to do. The male dominated power structure, of which law enforcement is the most potent and entrenched, always has and always will use their unfair share of power and money to repress any movement that threatens to put controls on their use of that power and money.

What is so disheartening is the extent to which women have so blindly walked into the trap. One of the most urgent tasks on the to-do list for ending violence against women, is the need for women's advocates to reestablish their independence of the institutions where we most need to fight for women's rights. As things stand, in fact, it is highly unethical to tell a victim that you're her advocate in the criminal justice process when the criminal justice system in any way controls your paycheck, your office space, or the policies of your place of work.

Imagine you were the victim of violence being ignored by police. How would you feel if you found out the advocate you trusted to help you was herself working for the cops?

The increased control of law enforcement over rape and domestic violence centers has strangled effective victim advocacy in a number of ways. Here are just some of the effects that have taken place in the last decade.

The Repression of Advocacy: "We let the police do their job and we do our job," is the sorry refrain we hear on the lips of far too many victim advocates who have swallowed this repression hook, line, and sinker. "We want to cooperate with law enforcement, not fight them," is another version of this refrain. Indeed, cooperating with law enforcement is admirable when the victim is being treated properly. But when the victim is being denied her rights to equal protection and justice, 'cooperating with law enforcement' is a betrayal of the victim. It's serving as a pawn of the patriarchy right at the point where the patriarchy most powerfully perpetuates the violence against women.

The prosecutor says there's not enough evidence to prosecute the case. Instead of assessing the validity of that prosecutor's statement, the advocate turns to the victim and says, "I'm so sorry, there's not enough evidence to prosecute. It's not your fault. Let me help you with a safety plan. Have you thought about leaving town?" One advocate who asked for our advise as to how to help a victim who had been badly mishandled by police, said it best. When we suggested she might consider taking this particular case to the press, the advocate responded without a blink, "Oh, I could never do that. I have to remember who I work for."

Holding the woman's hand while she gets shafted by the system is the antithesis of advocacy. The patriarchy and all its violent perpetrators and enforcers couldn't be happier than to see women's advocates shrink into a counseling, hand-holding, social service mode. Tragically, women who once fought ardently for women's rights to justice now dutifully dedicate themselves to mopping up the human debris left strewn in the patriarchy's wake.

This will not lead to women's liberation from violence. In fact, this erosion of advocacy into a nurse/doctor relationship with law enforcement too often leads to dead women. In the course of investigating the path leading up to domestic violence homicides in our own and neighboring counties, we've frequently exposed the law enforcement failures that paved the road to the woman's murder. But it wasn't just law enforcement failures we've found leading up to domestic violence homicides. In many of these cases the murdered women had had advocates along the way.

The murdered women had victim advocates who were present when the criminal justice system was denying the women the protection and justice they so desperately needed to save their lives. And though our investigations revealed that advocates had performed admirably as social workers, in helping the women fill out restraining orders, in finding housing, obtaining counseling, and providing other social services, we found these advocates had done absolutely NOTHING to confront or correct obvious failures of criminal justice system handling of the victims' cases. These advocates bear responsibility.

In an earlier section we recounted the travesty of the Philadelphia Police dumping upwards of four hundred rape cases a year in the late 1990's by filing those cases under a low priority code. The question must be posed: How could this have possibly gone on for so many years if advocates had been doing even the most minimal oversight of law enforcement handling of their rape cases? Certainly advocates in Philadelphia must have been seeing a constant flow of rape victims who were complaining about police mishandling of their cases. What happened? Did they abandon these victims to the good-girl altar of, "We do our job, and we let the police do their job?"

Similar abdication of advocacy is underway in most every rape and domestic violence center in the country. So thoroughly has this erosion of advocacy permeated the violence against women centers, that the younger women coming onboard have little or no concept of what advocacy is. They often respond to this criticism by saying that indeed they do talk with police or prosecutors about victim complaints, and maybe even talk with the officer's boss. But mere verbal protesting is a far cry from the full spectrum and time-honored tool kit of activism and strategies that must be used to win women's rights. The sad fact is, women's centers no longer teach such tactics, and they certainly don't allow them to be implemented. With rare exceptions, it's no longer about women's lives; it's about keeping the grant money flowing.

Bureaucratization: Along with the repression of advocacy, the violence against women movement, particularly in urban areas, has also become increasingly bureaucratized. Victims rarely anymore have one victim advocate who oversees her whole case. This is especially true in the domestic violence arena. A victim may start with a telephone advocate, then move on to a shelter advocate, a restraining order advocate, a police advocate, a district attorney/court advocate, a victim assistance advocate and more.

This fragmentation of advocacy shatters the possibility of
victim-centered advocacy and leads to task-oriented services. In addition, victims end up completely confused about who's who on their case - and, for that matter, so do the advocates. What this bureaucratizing does accomplish is heightened control of the system over both victims and advocates, and heightened assurance that the system can continue to dispose of these cases as it wishes without any annoying backtalk from women.

Backwater, non-threatening analysis: There have never been more studies, analysis, task forces, committees, death review teams, discussions, and recommendations on violence against women than at present. This barrage of attention, by itself, has done much to lull the populace into complacency that rape and domestic violence are being adequately dealt with. And with few exceptions, lulling the populace - not stopping violence against women - is often their first order of business. Few question how much of this frenzy of activity is truly targeted at ending violence against women, and how much is dog and pony show designed to dazzle the eye, drown out the rebellion, and draw more funds.

Look more closely at all these studies, theories, and committees. Virtually all of it avoids working with a gender-based, feminist analysis like the plague. This doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't touching on truths about violence against women. But those truths are often so peripheral to the core dynamics of violence against women as to be irrelevant to ending the violence. By actively ignoring discussion, research, and focus on the sexism that drives violence against women we are avoiding an analysis that will lead to digging out the root cause.

Suppose, as with domestic violence, the people who claimed to want to stop the lynching of blacks did study after study examining the differences between those whites who lynch and those whites who don't lynch. And suppose, like domestic violence researchers, they focused their examination on emotional variables, alcohol use, or family histories. In all likelihood, such studies would reveal that, indeed, whites who lynched have more emotional problems, use more alcohol, and have more traumatic family histories than whites who don't lynch. You could even do studies that would spotlight cases to show that, are you ready, 'black people lynch too', because, in fact, black people did, on occasion, lynch whites.

In fact, you could do these red-herring studies ad nauseam, just as a mountain of red-herring studies are being done on violence against women. Not only that, but the findings would in all likelihood be true. The problem, of course, is that the findings would also to a great degree be irrelevant, a great decoy to divert the eye from looking squarely at the societal racism that drove lynching, and the institutionalized racism that motivated southern law enforcement to fold their arms and look the other way.

There is the old joke. A person is looking for their car keys in their front yard. A neighbor asks, "Where did you lose your keys?" The person responds, "I lost them in the back yard." So the neighbor asks the obvious, "But if you lost your keys in the back yard, why are you looking for them in the front yard?" Says the person who lost their keys, "Because there's more light in the front yard." Substitute money for light, and it should be clear why violence against women research is looking everywhere but at sexism to describe the dynamics of the violence against women.

Copyright © Marie De Santis,
Women's Justice Center,
www.justicewomen.com
rdjustice@monitor.net