I don’t see that DV victims should have a special right to avoid witnessing a crime that the rest of us don’t have.

Exactly. The first time I served on a jury, the victim was compelled to testify under threat of arrest if he didn’t show. If a male gun-shot victim has to show up in court, I don’t see why a domestic violence victim doesn’t. What they choose to do on the stand at that point is up to them.

Noelle Mowatt is a woman in the last WEEK of her pregnancy. She has been in Canada for two years and before living in Toronto, she lived in Jamaica. She has no relatives in Canada. In December, 2007, Ms Mowatt called police to report that her boyfriend, the father of her child, was assaulting her. The police attended, arrested her boyfriend and documented Ms Mowatt’s injuries by taking a statement and photographs. Her boyfriend was held in jail without bail, pending trial.

With that trial coming up, police had difficulty tracking Ms Mowatt down to serve her with a subpoena to attend the trial. Apparently, they left messages for her somewhere, or with someone, asking her to pick up her subpoena at a police station. She never did so. A judge issued a bench warrant for her arrest as a material witness. The police managed to find her at that point and, with the approval of a Justice of the Peace, they imprisoned her, without charge, for one week, until she could be heard in Court.

This is both a ridiculous and counterproductive result. On the ridiculous side, hard to understand how the police could find Ms Mowatt to arrest her but not to serve the subpoena. Interesting that they should decide that she wasn’t going to testify BEFORE she failed to show up in court. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a bench warrant enforced with such alacrity. They sure do a better job of putting women in jail than they do of protecting them from harm!

On the counterproductive side, after spending her time in jail, some of it in segregation, the 19-year old, heavily pregnant woman was brought to court in a police wagon and forced onto the stand, where she denied that her boyfriend had ever assaulted her. What the Crown (prosecution) has now is her original statement and the photographs and the evidence of cops and doctors. They had all that to begin with. They have accomplished absolutely nothing, but at great cost to Ms Mowatt, who has stated that she will never be able to trust the police again.

I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine what motivated Ms Mowatt to withdraw her testimony against her boyfriend. Frankly, I’m getting tired of the notion that women behave this way basically because they’re delusional about the cost versus the benefit of staying with violent men. Often, as here, the choices are objectively difficult. Poverty, the vulnerability of immigrant status, lack of family or community support, shrinking social services - all these things and more influence women’s ability to make healthy choices for themselves and their children. Our justice system needs to take the complexity of these cases into account. We can’t expect that will ever happen if we forget that complexity ourselves.

Noelle Mowatt is a racialized woman with no job and no community ties. It is no coincidence that perhaps the first woman to be jailed in Canada in these circumstances was not a rich or middle-class white woman. Can you imagine the uproar?

The goal in these cases should not be to take over the part of the abuser and make the decisions for somebody else. That’s not to say that people shouldn’t express concern. In fact, that concern can often be the grounds for someone feeling like they’re not crazy, despite what the abuser is telling them. The goal should be to make sure that the person in the relationship knows that there are people who are there for them, who care about them, and that they have a safe place to go if they ever want to get out of the relationship. There are a number of reasons why people stay in those relationships, and to assume that the person is not capable of understanding their situation and making choices is to continue a long trend of taking control away from the person who has been abused.

And given that he’s an unemployable ex-con who’s in and out of jail, she can’t even argue that he’s supporting the family, because she pays for everything, including her own hospital bills the last time he knocked her out and burst her eardrum.

If you read through the link I so thoughtfully provided above, and are still no more enlightened than this… I might just have to agree.

I hope we can have a thread some time on the strangeness and irrationality of the abuser’s thoughts and actions, and how society can best address itself to that.

I really don’t think it is “stupidity” that makes people stay in these kinds of “relationships” and I think its a bit of an insult to the commenters here who have been in similar situations to suggest that. It’s always the easy answer, “Why does she stay/go back? She must be stupid”

From the (little) I understand about DV, like addiction, or being in a cult, or any other self destructive behaviour, the victim has to believe themselves that there is a problem in order to get anywhere in fixing it. Taking away all her agency is likely to make everything much worse, and make her feel like “It’s the whole world against him and me and only I understand him”

To be a cynic, it’s also not a workable solution because I don’t think for one minute that the police would be prepared to incarcerate a wealthy woman who was a victim of DV, no matter what the situation or how much danger they thought she was in.