PUTNEY — In 1994, at the Women's Crisis Center in Brattleboro, we were very careful about how we spoke.
We did not speak on behalf of battered women, for that would be to rob them of their voices.
Nor did we call them “battered women,” for that imposed an identity of powerlessness.
Nor did we call them “clients,” for that assumed that we had some authority and expertise, as if we were Social Workers.
We fretted over language because we didn't want to exert control over a population who we believed had been disempowered by patriarchy. Eventually, we came up with the Women With Whom We Worked, shortened to “the five W's” in the urgency of staff meetings.
Our primary teaching tool was the Power and Control Wheel: a simple graphic that explained how all aspects of a heterosexual relationship could be read as controlling.
A man controlled his female partner by treating her as if she were a servant (exerting male privilege), by isolating her from friends and family, by calling her names, by threatening to hurt her pets, by not taking her seriously, by threatening suicide, by keeping her from getting a job. A woman who might have been ambivalent about whether or not she was in an abusive relationship would always file for a restraining order after looking at the Power and Control Wheel.
The State's Attorney's Office loved the wheel. State's Attorney Dan Davis hauled it out in front of a jury during the trial of John Grega, who was accused of raping and killing his wife while on vacation at Mount Snow.
I was in the courtroom with a lawyer friend, and we could see the effect this graphic was having on the jury. My friend and I were both committed feminists. We both wanted the law to protect women from abusive men. But neither of us wanted a teaching tool to stand in for solid evidence.
The jury convicted Grega of aggravated murder and aggravated sexual assault. He served 18 years in jail for a life sentence until DNA evidence overturned the prior conviction. He died in a car crash on Long Island before he was fully exonerated.
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Grega was convicted in 1994, the same year that President Clinton passed the biggest crime bill in the nation's history. Block grants were available to cities and towns where the prosecutors and battered women's shelters coordinated their efforts. My salary as a court advocate for the shelter was paid out of DOJ funds.
One day, when I told the assistant state's attorney that a 5W was not going to testify against the accused, he reminded me in no uncertain terms that I now worked for him.
I did not point to the section of the Power and Control wheel that explained how men intimidate women, but other staff members did when I returned to the shelter and gave them an update.
“If she doesn't want to testify, she doesn't have to testify,” said the director of the shelter. “I don't care what the state's attorneys say.”
Some argue, and I agree, that the battered women's movement ended with Clinton's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.
“[F]eminists of the 1980s and '90s,” explains law professor Leigh Goodmark, “were enormously successful in restructuring the legal response to domestic violence, a feat made possible only by virtue of their political power and their willingness both to assert that power and to seek partnerships with others that would maximize that power.”
Those victories “came at a price,” Goodmark said.
“The movement went from being woman-centered to victim-centered, from self-help to saving, from working with women to generate the options that best met their needs to preferring one option.”
And advocates hastened that process.
Once we started listening to prosecutors, we stopped creating the conditions for a woman to figure out independently what was in her best interest.
We also lost our capacity for collective action. Instead of making demands on the state to restore welfare benefits, to improve early-childhood education, to provide more Section 8 housing vouchers with fewer restrictions, we became a willing army of victims in need of police protection.
What was a mass movement became part of the neoliberal apparatus of control.
Our chief concern at the Women's Crisis Center - that women have a voice - was corrupted by a state that listened only when women spoke as victims. Our endeavor to create empowerment through the Power and Control Wheel was co-opted by a well-meaning prosecutor who had women's safety foremost in his mind.
The battered women's movement became a tool of neoliberalism because it fell for the snake's charm. Too many of us who worked as advocates came to believe that women would be safer if more men were put in jail.
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If I were on Grega's defense team, and if I knew then what I know now, I would have provided the jury with a new Power and Control Wheel, one that outlined how the neoliberal state exerts its power by blaming the poor for their poverty and threatening men with incarceration.
One quadrant would explain how low self-esteem serves an apparatus of service professionals and pharmaceutical companies and how the rhetoric of personal responsibility keeps suffering individuals from organizing for change.
Instead of advocating for one group against the evils of another group, advocates now must advocate for the entire community against the dehumanizing policies of the neoliberal state.
To advocate for a community requires advocating for pregnant women who use drugs and men with anger issues. To advocate for a community requires advocating for housing for people who on first sight might make you afraid. To advocate for a community requires giving each member the dignity of being part of the solution.
Instead of giving lots of airtime to isolated cries of “I am afraid,” we need to be continually asking ourselves, “What do we need to thrive?”
The snake wants us to see ourselves through simple graphics that require police protection.
We need to see the snake, acknowledge its power, and then get back to work.