Remember that bumper sticker, “There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence”? That’s so yesterday. What we now know is that domestic violence is generally just fine as long as it’s a woman doing it to a man. Few DV advocates even admit that women commit domestic violence. Their websites and publications routinely refer to perpetrators as “him” and victims as “her.”
Police are trained to arrest men, but not women. I’ve written before about the DV training course given to Maine police officers that not only uses sexist language, but provides no examples of female perpetrators. In that course, even the hypothetical case in which a wife hit her husband with an ashtray and he did nothing to her, police were instructed to arrest him and not her, even though he had committed no crime and she had.
Then of course there’s “battered wife syndrome.” Now, according to psychologists who came up with that notion, actual physical abuse does not have to occur for a woman to exhibit the syndrome. Not only that, if she denies that abuse occurred, she’s lying because, in the through-the-looking-glass world of DV zealots, her denial of abuse is objective proof of abuse.
According to the tenets of “battered wife syndrome,” anything a woman does to her mate is OK as long as she can prove the syndrome. And proving that she suffers from the syndrome is surprisingly easy. As we’ve seen in the writings of one psychologist, the symptoms of “battered wife syndrome” are the same as countless low-grade mental problems.
Now, “battered wife syndrome” doesn’t seek to excuse just spur-of-the-moment, heat-of-passion-type violence. It excuses literally anything a woman chooses to do. That includes long-range planning of the type described here (Australian News, 6/7/10).
In that case, Susan Falls paid her accomplice $5,000 to buy her a pistol with a silencer on the black market. She then drugged her husband’s food, waited until he was asleep, shot him in the head, waited a few hours and then shot him again. Satisfied that he was dead, she left him lying around the house for three days before asking her accomplice to dispose of the body. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s premeditated murder.
The verdict? Not guilty. She claimed battered woman status and, despite never having displayed any outward signs of battering, prevailed. Apparently under Australian law, it was the prosecution’s burden to prove that she didn’t act in self defense, and the judge so instructed the jury.
So tear that passé old sticker off your car. There are plenty of excuses for domestic violence as long as it’s a woman doing it to a man. In fact, it’s something to be proud of. Don’t believe me? Check this out. It’s their best-selling shirt ever!