One of the greatest dangers women face is the men they love and live with and have children with. A Washington Post analysis finds that 46 percent of women killed in 47 U.S. cities over the past decade were killed by their partners. In more than a third of cases, the threat was already publicly known through things like restraining orders or prior convictions. And these are brutal, personal killings:
Nearly a quarter of the 2,051 women killed by intimate partners were stabbed, compared with fewer than 10 percent of all other homicides. Eighteen percent of women who were killed by partners were attacked with a blunt object or no weapon, compared with 8 percent of other homicide victims. While a gun was used in 80 percent of all other deaths, just over half of all women killed as a result of domestic violence were attacked with a gun.
Violent choking is almost entirely confined to fatal domestic attacks on women — while fewer than 1 percent of all homicides result from strangulation, 6 percent of women killed by intimate partners die in this manner, The Post found.
The legal system doesn’t just fail to protect women—all too often it victimizes them further, as the case of Minerva Cisneros, of Forth Worth, Texas, shows. Cisneros had shown up at a hospital while eight months pregnant in the wake of a beating that included strangulation—as noted, a major sign of danger to come. But she didn’t want to cooperate in an investigation, and the legal system terrorized her all over again:
As the criminal case waited, records show that child protective services officials opened a separate inquiry into Cisneros, alleging that she had failed to protect her children from witnessing the abuse she suffered. She and Sigala were required to enter couples counseling, and she took a class on how to manage her husband’s violent behavior, said Allenna Bangs, a Tarrant County prosecutor. Family members and authorities said Cisneros became concerned that she could lose custody. Child protective services officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Every sentence of this is a failure by the system that should have been protecting Cisneros. There are no words for how messed up it is that a woman could get in trouble for her children witnessing her being abused. The National Domestic Violence Hotline specifically recommends against couples counseling in abusive relationships. And a class on how to manage an abusive husband’s violent behavior? Are you f’ing kidding me? What’s next, a class for rape survivors titled “next time, lie back and try to enjoy it”? Men’s violence is not women’s responsibility.
Do I need to tell you that Minerva Cisneros was later killed, shot by her husband on Christmas with her 15-month-old in bed beside her?
A system that forces women to bear the brunt not just of horrific physical abuse by their partners without adequate protection but of the system itself is deeply misogynist and corrupt. But that’s the system we live in.