Is there a space in the anti-carceral world for survivors of intimate partner violence?
Like all stories, it’s easier to start this one from the beginning.
“I never should’ve had you, quit crying.” — 1990
“C’mon, just touch it. [your friend] touched it, she wasn’t a little bitch about it.” — 2000
“You don’t like fun? I thought all girls liked fun.” — 2001
“Now quit crying, you’re making me soft.” — 2006
“Your stories don’t add up. I told my mom and she doesn’t believe you.” — 2007
“You’re pissed I thought you’d be down?” — 2008
“I don’t know, I just can’t be the asshole who leaves his sick partner.” — 2012
“Who are you gonna tell, the cops?” — 2014
“Dirty Jewish bitch.” — 2015
“I hope you get raped again. Bitch.” — 2015
“He’s got a gun. We gotta go.” — 2019
“How about this: I won’t kill you if you shut the fuck up and quit crying.” — 2019
“You played a role in this.” — 2020
“When y’all ready I’ll take u to war, and I won’t hold back.” — 2021
“Kut off her head.” — 2021
I don’t always remember the faces — thanks, aphantasia — but I remember the words (cadence, volume), the smells (fire, duct tape), the sounds (car door locking, taser). I wish I could analyze the amounts of cortisol constantly coursing through my body so I can pick apart the days/months/years that fear has taken off my life, but since I can’t quantify that, I count the words. I count the people who have tried to kill me.
It’s difficult to not feel like the common denominator, like something in my DNA ignites a deathly bomb within people who have claimed to care for me, turning them into hate-filled harbingers of death. I try to counteract this within my own brain by remembering what I tell my clients: that it’s never the fault of the survivor. As I awaited the protective order hearing I attended last week, I spent my time making sure my doors and windows were locked more times than necessary, about as often as I checked the county jail website to make sure he hadn’t made bail yet.
I also found myself wondering if this is all an over-reaction. This was the first time I had filed a criminal complaint against someone who had harmed me, and I wonder why, still, that I chose this as the time I would no longer tolerate violence against me. Objectively, this man hadn’t hurt me as much as the others, but I believe he has the most capacity for it. For those asking what brought on his threats, my crime was simply not responding to the 15–60 text messages he would send me a day. Maybe he had rightfully assumed I had his number blocked (not yet, just muted), so he created two new, separate VOIP phone numbers to text me from. After he was banned from a local business for making female patrons uncomfortable, he wrongly assumed I had complained, so he messaged me on Facebook to threaten my life, and began posting various threats toward me on his public Facebook page. After I filed for the initial protective order, I discovered he had four other unserved protective orders, for alleged crimes ranging from stalking to sexual assault; this is in addition to his four outstanding warrants from which he was actively evading arrest. This is a man who will be incarcerated for a lengthy amount of time, even without my input, so why did I pursue this?
The answer is pretty simple: I had finally had enough.
I despise the feeling of being here, yet again, and I know he won’t receive the mental health treatment he desperately needs while incarcerated. I may not be his clinician, but my five years of knowing this man (plus my eleven years of combined social work education and experience) gives me insight into the disconnection from reality that pervades his life. Even though I am afraid, even though his actions led him here, the thought of seeing him in a cage makes me nauseous.
One of the keystones of my life’s work is in criminal legal systems reform. I am an abolitionist, and I strongly believe that incarceration directly undoes public safety. I know that prisons and jails are traumatic institutions filled with traumatized people. The man whom I filed these criminal and protective orders against will be another individual with extensive pain, and he will likely suffer further pain behind bars.
Restorative justice is easy enough to practice when you aren’t living in active fear. It’s simple to say you want to abolish the prison industrial complex when you feel safe at home, and it is difficult to walk this walk knowing that I feel safer with this particular man currently incarcerated. I have spent the greater part of the last month wrestling with this dichotomy in my head, and I feel like a hypocrite when I say I want to abolish prisons while filing criminal charges against someone. I have been struggling to make these two pieces fit together in my thoughts. It’s a constant battle to give myself the grace to put down the fight for reform while I heal from this.
I’m not naïve enough to believe that the prosecutor working my case cares about me. To understand more about how police departments and district attorneys talk a strong game about stopping intimate partner violence and rape, without doing the actual work, I recommend reading this Mother Jones article about how women are suing local police departments who refuse to test rape kits, and this piece that two of my friends and colleagues wrote about the mythology surrounding the so-called “rape backlog.” I know that the prosecutor will only bother with me when it is time to use my vitriol and pain to push for what will likely be a lengthy, draconian sentence against the man who harmed me. I will be a tool to pad his conviction rate, an additional accolade in his CV he will use to prove he is “tough on crime.”
It is a damned shame that my only recourse is to become another cog in the wheels of alleged justice that will only harm this man further. Am I a hypocrite? I don’t know. I just don’t want my head to be cut off.
I have spent so many nights these past few weeks praying that this experience does not make me more carceral. I believe in grace, mercy and second chances. If I am ever murdered, I hope the ones who love me will stand up in court and scream, I’m talking screaming at the tops of their lungs, until that judge refuses to sentence the one who killed me to life in prison, or worse, to death themselves. I believe there has to be another way for society to handle those who perpetrate violent crime. I believe it inside the deepest part of my bones, but that way does not currently exist in our current structure.
So what does a survivor do? Do I put my phone away and refuse to phone the police if he bonds out and I find him waiting for me by my car? The three-year protective order I received won’t protect me from a knife or a gun, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that police do not have a constitutional duty to protect someone from harm even if I did call. Additionally, it’s not like I can hoist my abolitionist pedestal and chuck it through the window to protect myself, either. For now, I will do what scores of people have done in my situation for decades: I will rely on my friends for help, I will be open about what happened to me, and I will continue looking over my shoulder for the foreseeable future.
There has to be a space for someone like me in abolition. I still want to advocate for everyone behind bars, even the man I am writing about. I will still fight for comprehensive, meaningful mental health treatment for those who have caused harm. I will continue to tell my story and push for change, as unpopular as my story may be in both the abolitionist and victim advocacy circles. I will strive to ensure that survivors’ voices are heard, even if the truth they are speaking does not serve the state or prosecutor.
I don’t know where that space is, but I will continue to carve my own path and make sure this pain does not silence me.
Edited 2:09pm EST 3/8/2021 to fix a typo, and to include this: Thank you so much for the feedback I have received. I have to thank my boyfriend and closest friends for their unwavering love, as well as Meaghan Ybos, Alyssa Leader, Heather Marlowe, Abby Honold, Beth Lynch, and the rest of my Twitter family for their support during the past several months. I am only as strong as my support systems, so thank you for providing me some strength while I had difficulty harnessing my own.
