{"id":38600,"date":"2023-07-09T16:26:54","date_gmt":"2023-07-09T20:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/?p=38600"},"modified":"2023-07-19T16:29:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-19T20:29:17","slug":"column-domestic-violence-isnt-just-a-family-matter-its-community-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/column-domestic-violence-isnt-just-a-family-matter-its-community-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Column: Domestic violence isn\u2019t just a \u2018family matter.\u2019 It\u2019s \u2018community violence.\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case about abusers and guns. It\u2019s urgent to change the reductive narrative about intimate partner violence.<\/h2>\n
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By<\/span> Ren\u00e9e Graham<\/span><\/a><\/span> Globe Columnist<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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On July 4, Scott Swale broke into Tatiana Tavares\u2019s Raynham home. He fatally shot her as she lay in bed. He died by suicide. A\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0from Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn\u2019s office said Swale, 43, and Tavares, 30, \u201chad been engaged in a hostile yearlong on-again, off-again relationship.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first time Hema Sarang-Sieminski, deputy director of Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, has heard lethal acts of intimate partner violence described that way.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe coverage was concerning because it was the \u2018tumultuous relationship\u2019 kind of conversation as opposed to naming this type of harm as a pattern of power and control that results in domestic violence-related homicide,\u201d she told me in an interview. \u201cI think that kind of language is used to distance or dismiss the very calculated pattern at play in these kinds of scenarios.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That can affect perceptions of domestic violence in families, in communities, and in this nation\u2019s courts, she said. And this is particularly alarming because last month, the conservative-led Supreme Court\u00a0agreed<\/a> to hear a case during its next term on whether the government can keep guns away from people with domestic violence restraining orders against them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just last year, the high court ruled 6-3, with its three liberal judges dissenting, to\u00a0strike down a New York law<\/a>\u00a0that limited rights to carry a firearm in public. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said government \u201cmust demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation\u2019s historical tradition of firearm regulation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That flung open the doors to even greater erosions of gun safety policies. In February, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit trashed a federal law to bar domestic abusers from having guns, ruling it unconstitutional. But it was the decision\u2019s wording that was particularly chilling. Banning domestic abusers from possessing guns is an \u201coutlier that our ancestors would never have accepted,\u201d it read.<\/span><\/p>\n

Looking back to this nation\u2019s origins: Those \u201cancestors\u201d accepted enslaving Black people and marital rape. Women did not have the right to vote or any legal recourse against an abusive husband. There was no such thing as a restraining order.<\/span><\/div>\n

\u201cWe as a society have a real challenge in acknowledging that harm is happening within our own homes, and that also means we have to talk about who\u2019s causing that harm,\u201d Sarang-Sieminski said. \u201cWe have to look around our own communities, workplaces, places of worship, and schools and reframe the narrative that domestic violence is a form of community violence. Harm to one is harm to all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the circuit court\u2019s ruling, the Justice Department argued that \u201cmore than a million acts of domestic violence occur in the United States every year and the presence of a firearm increases the chances that violence will escalate to homicide.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But in a nation where about\u00a050 women are murdered each month<\/a>\u00a0by a current or former intimate partner and guns are the leading cause of death for children, domestic violence rarely seems to garner the same sustained outrage as other violent crimes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mass shootings over the long July 4th weekend in\u00a0Shreveport, La.<\/a>,\u00a0Baltimore<\/a>, and\u00a0Philadelphia<\/a>\u00a0received hours of coverage. But unless you lived in or near St. Ann, Mo., it\u2019s unlikely you heard that\u00a0Seychelle Schaumburg and her three children<\/a> were shot in their home by Coleman McIlvain, Schaumburg\u2019s boyfriend, who died by suicide. Only Schaumburg\u2019s 9-year-old daughter survived.<\/span><\/p>\n

Statistics show that most mass shootings are acts of domestic violence and that a majority of mass shooters have histories of domestic violence.\u00a0<\/a>Yet conversations about such massacres can reduce them to \u201ca family matter, a spat, or a lovers\u2019 quarrel,\u201d Sarang-Sieminski said.<\/span><\/div>\n

\u201cIt almost sends a message that this type of harm doesn\u2019t rise to the level of meriting restrictions on someone\u2019s Second Amendment rights,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like rewinding the language to narratives that we as a movement have really tried to overcome for decades. And it does feel like we\u2019re getting dangerously close to that narrative again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Judges are \u201ctaking these originalist interpretations and attempting to create a scenario where they\u2019re applying that framework to a particular issue,\u201d Sarang-Sieminski said. \u201cWe\u2019re in a time period where they\u2019re trying to roll back the clock and roll back history in such profound ways to an era when there were no protections available to survivors.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As with its decisions on abortion and affirmative action, the Supreme Court will likely wait until well into its next term, which starts in October, to issue a ruling that will determine whether this nation\u2019s highest court will again place the Second Amendment above the safety of American lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case about abusers and guns. It\u2019s urgent to change the reductive narrative about intimate partner violence. By Ren\u00e9e Graham Globe Columnist On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-coverage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}