<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/09/trump-domestic-violence>
"Speaking at a Christian museum on Monday, Donald Trump claimed, falsely, that
his deployment of national guard troops to invade the nation’s capital has
eliminated crime in Washington. He complained, however, that domestic violence
was being counted in the crime statistics, which he claimed meant that the
influence of his policy was not being seen as significant enough. “They said,
‘Crime’s down 87%,’” the president claimed, not explaining who “they” were. “I
said, no, no, no. It’s more than 87%, virtually nothing. And much lesser
things, things that take place in the home they call crime. You know, they’ll
do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the
wife, they say this was a crime. See? So now I can’t claim 100%, but we are. We
are a safe city.”
If Trump wanted to endorse domestic violence decriminalization, he may take
some comfort in the status quo: as it is, about 24% of adult American women
have been the victims of “severe physical violence” by an intimate partner,
according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline; the Centers for Disease
Control, meanwhile, puts the proportion of women who have experienced “contact
sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner” at 41%.
and many of those incidents are not reported or not prosecuted – meaning that
the perpetrators are free, and that their assaults have not been treated as
fully “criminal”.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been working to make sure that victims
of domestic violence have even fewer resources and even scanter opportunities
to escape their abusers. The Trump administration has moved to drastically cut
federal grants to domestic violence non-profits, which rely heavily on the
federal government for funding. The administration has further sought to freeze
funding to domestic violence charities that serve trans women victims and
participate in diversity, equity and inclusion programming, severely hampering
the work of groups that seek to serve marginalized victims from LGBTQ+ or
racial minority populations, or to frame domestic violence as a gender justice
issue. The administration has also moved to condition domestic violence funding
on charities’ willingness to hand over abused women to Ice, a move that would
severely limit the ability of undocumented victims to seek help.
Trump’s complaint that private violence enacted by men against women in the
home should not be considered criminal is of a piece with old and
long-abandoned misogynist legal understandings of women’s status, the nature of
marriage, and men’s prerogatives in the home, which dictated that women had no
rights in the private sphere that their husbands or fathers needed to respect,
and that men could enforce their dominance and control over women in private
with violence.
This notion – that gender, family and sexual relations are private matters that
the law has nothing to say about, and that the state has no duty to defend the
rights and safety of its women citizens from the violence of its male ones –
was dismantled over the long course of the 20th century by feminist legal
activists that worked to criminalize domestic battery, establish a woman’s
right to sexual refusal, and build institutions that would provide material
resources and physical opportunities for women to leave the homes where they
were being abused."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
