Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

In what appears to be grotesquely insufficient punitive action, a man has been sentenced to only 90 days in jail on a misdemeanor charge, with credit for 72 days served.

The crime? He is a serial domestic abuser, and this time his victim’s stomach was burnt with hot skillet, cut with a knife, and abused on a regular basis. “He got a slap on the wrist”, said Regina Hawkins, the domestic violence surviver.

What defies logic is that even as this abuser Dusty Bowman, 33, had been previously convicted of domestic violence charge, and this time he fled the Tri-State to evade arrests, the sentence has still been this inconsequential.

More researches suggest that the conviction cases in domestic abuses are pathetically low, whereas the amount of abuses is astronomically high. One can possibly find reasons within the very sexist framework of judiciary system that’s hugely dominated by men. Two, there have not been enough serious efforts to sensitize the lawmakers about the uniqueness of the domestic abuse cases.

Most often, the judges cite lack of enough evidence for the absence of appropriate conviction. But the reality is such an argument is fallacious simply because not all cases will be able to produce desired evidence. For one, the victim of domestic abuse already lives in a highly vulnerable condition. The vulnerability extends to the workplace which is male-centric and hostile. And usually, the victim has other responsibilities, such as children. Within the existing domains, to expect that the survivor “promptly” reports abuse by just normally walking out of the door is a highly improbable proposition.

As a rule, the law and order administrators and executors are dominantly male, and uncritically judgmental. And the domestic survivors face the dual oppression of the abuser, and the larger sexist system that perpetuates the abuse. The sooner we realize the need for radical reforms to the existing laws to uniquely accommodate domestic abuse cases with some exceptions, the better it will be.