Well isn’t this special (Daily Mail, 1/28/11). No, actually it’s a lot like the Amber Portwood incident in which the “Teen Mom” was caught on camera slapping, punching and kicking her boyfriend, Gary Shirley. All that was done in front of their two-year-old daughter Leah, but it took outraged calls by viewers and six months before police got around to arresting and charging Portwood. Here though, it seems that Sammi ‘Sweetheart’ Giancola put a haymaker to the face of boyfriend Ronnie Magro not too long ago. The star of “Jersey Shore” apparently was miffed that he’d had a cordial conversation with Jenni ‘J Woww’ Farley and hey, what’s a girl to do? So she socked him. All of which is perfectly fine with the local constabulary who say that Magro must “press charges” before they’ll do anything. Well, needless to say, that’s not true. They have photos of the assault and can interview any of several witnesses.
Do that and they’d have all the evidence they need to bring domestic violence charges against Giancola. But they’ve announced their intention to do nothing. That looks like an odd and certainly sexist approach to a domestic violence situation. Have any of the usual suspects in the DV establishment expressed their outrage? Nope, not a peep out of any of them. And of course it’s long been one of the strange aspects of our criminal law’s approach to domestic violence that, even when a purported victim entirely recants her allegations, the other person can still be jailed and restrained via court order. Not so here. Me? I’m on record saying that non-injurious DV should be treated with psychotherapy instead of criminally. But until the rest of the world agrees (and surely it will, won’t it?), the laws should be applied in a gender-neutral fashion, which currently they’re not. In fact, that’s one of the many reasons men don’t call the police when their partners attack them; they know to a virtual certainty that it’ll be they who take the ride and not the women who hit them. So the sexist “enforcement” of DV laws is one of the many things tending to perpetuate DV. Men know not to call the police and the women who assault them know they won’t and so are free to do what they wish. Likewise, there’s no requirement anywhere I know about that requires a DV incident to be injurious to get a man charged and ordered to stay away from his wife, kids, house, belongings, etc. So why is Sammi Giancola running around loose? Unequal application of domestic violence laws, that’s why.
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