WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU GET

Right now, we say that domestic violence is a crime. But it’s not.

We have an antique legal system in this country that sees domestic violence through an old-fashioned prism: one that picks out disparate puzzle pieces and focuses on physical violence. It doesn’t even attempt to see the whole picture.

Since the first refuge opened in 1974, women and kids have said over and over that it wasn’t just the physical violence that hurt, but the ways in which they were isolated, degraded, oppressed and trapped. Despite this, our legal system has clung stubbornly to the notion that domestic violence is an incident-based crime.

This means that when victim-survivors turn to the criminal justice system, the magistrate will only hear about