Why are the police imprisoning the battered wife instead of the husband threatening to kill her?

The Israeli police went to court to try and force an abused woman to go into hiding in order to protect her from her violent husband. When she refused, they could not understand why. I'll explain.

When I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, a woman was raped on my street corner. I wasn’t there, of course, nor did I know who she was or what happened exactly. But because it happened at 9PM, the rule after that in my house was that girls were not allowed to be out alone on the street after dark. We were a house with four daughters, so that was a LOT of control. If we needed to go out, we had to find a male to escort us. It didn’t matter who that male was — if he was scrawny, wimpy, or cowardly, 12 years old, or even a potential assailant himself. This is how it was. It’s kind of the way men are chosen to join a minyan in Orthodoxy. Doesn’t matter who the guy is, if he’s an axe murderer, homeless, or a heretic. If he has a penis, he counts. That’s how we were able to leave the house. If a person with a penis walked next to us, we could go. The thinking was simple enough: There are men who make the world unsafe for women and girls; ergo, women and girls need to hide out and not go anywhere or try to do too much. Everyone sort of accepted this logic.

You may think that this kind of thinking is archaic and passé, a product of the 1980s or 1950s or 18th century Victorian England. You might think that it’s now long gone, that nobody believes this kind of thing anymore. But you would be wrong. The idea that women need to be punished for the wrongdoings of men who want to hurt us is, unfortunately, alive and well and still determining social policy.

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EXHIBITION A: Locking up the victim of a violent husband.

This week, the Israeli police practically arrested a woman because her husband was trying to kill her. They were trying to force her to go to a shelter, which they said was the only way that she would be safe from him. She did not want to go. It entailed uprooting her entire life, her kids’ lives, her connections, her support network, and her work. While many women in her position want and need shelters, this was the wrong solution for her. Anyway, just last week, Rabab Abu Siyam was killed by her husband AFTER she went to a shelter. So, you know, there’s that.

Anyway, the police were trying to physically force her to go into hiding, and when she refused, they took her to court. Thankfully, they lost. But they did not understand her point.

I think it’s quite simple: Dear Police Officers, if you KNOW that the man is trying to kill his wife, ARREST HIM. Take HIM off the streets. Put HIM away in some locked-up location. NOT HER.

They apparently have not gotten the memo.

To be sure, shelters are an important temporary solution for many abused women. But overall, the thinking is faulty.

The idea that women need to be punished, or to be kept away from places, or to adjust or modify their behavior, because they are under threat by violent men is just wrong and twisted.

Law enforcement should be looking to remove the offenders and change the culture that gives them impunity rather than punishing the victims.

(And btw, Maid did an excellent job at exposing how twisted the system is.)

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EXHIBITION B: The IDF soldiers who were sex trafficked in the Gilboa prison that I wrote about the other day.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the conversation around this appalling story turned away from the people trafficking women to the topic of keeping women and girls out of potentially “bad” places.

The first clue was when some Israeli pundit with a too-big and undeserved following posted: “I’m just going to say it: Women should not be serving as guards in men’s prisons. Feminists, bite me.” Yeah, like that.

(Like, he KNEW that what he was saying was bad for women, and absolutely doesn’t care. Because, you know, mansplaining or something. But that’s the subject for a whole other blog post….)

The next clue was on my own FB page, where I posted my blog on the topic. As if on cue, one of the commenters wrote, “This is why many religious people don't want their daughters going to the army.”

So first of all, the main reason why rabbis are against women’s army service is because of what they consider to me the MEN’s needs, not the WOMEN’s needs. That is, it’s about women acting as sexual distractions for men. (I wrote about this a few years ago in Slate.) So let’s just get that clear. This entire issue has very little to do with what is good for girls and women.

More than that, it is still astounding to me how women’s pain and suffering can be twisted into another excuse to promote gender exclusion and gender inequality. Sure, today it’s just prisons where women should not be allowed to work. Tomorrow it’s men’s colleges (that’s already happening actually; I wrote about that, too). Political parties. Fire fighter squads. Bus drivers. Whatever. There is an endless list of places in which women have been excluded for all kinds of reasons. Mostly, because men said so. But here, we see how easily this awful story leads to a pile-on about the exclusion of women and girls. As if this is somehow “good” for us. It’s just another version of staying in at night and locking our doors. Unless some male comes to rescue us.

This whole line of thinking is a farce. It’s the old patriarchy in new wrapping paper. It’s looking for any excuse to cast women and girls as weak and fragile, incapable of handling the “real world”, blah blah blah. INSTEAD OF getting to the ROOT OF THE PROBLEM, which is the PATRIARCHAL culture that enables men to hurt women and get away with it.

(When I starting to use ALL CAPS, you know it’s bad.)

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EXHIBITION C: Benny Gantz.

And as if on cue, Security Minister Benny Gantz announced today that he has ordered the Prison Service to ban female soldiers from certain positions.

Here we go. It’s starting. Punish the victims instead of the perpetrators. After twenty years of women fighting for equality in the IDF, struggling to be considered for all positions, Gantz is ready to undo all of that and send women backwards.

Benny Gantz. Stupid looking old man with a blank expression on his face.

I just want to say, I hope Benny Gantz fizzles away into the ether, and that his political career, as unimpressive as it has been, remains less than a speck of dust on this nation’s collective memory, for all the insane ridiculousness he has wrought on all of us. As broken as the political system was, he rendered it to shreds. I hold him personally responsible for bringing us into this quagmire of the endless elections. He could have fixed this long ago, at the first round, if he had any concept of loyalty to his voters, of sticking to his one and only campaign promise, and of having some kind of moral spine. He has none of that. He ran on a platform with zero content or cohesiveness or any original thought. (His Number 2, Hilli Tropper, famously said after they won that he now had to manage his 35 MKs like a kindergarten class. Um… that’s because there was absolutely nothing holding them together. No ideology, no platforms, no plan. Just a lot of egos…And the maturity of five-year-olds. ) The ONLY thing Gantz said he would do if elected, the ONE JOB he had that was the ONLY REASON people voted for him was that he promised to oust Bibi. So he got 35 seats to do that — and then we he had the opportunity to do exactly that, caved and didn’t do it. He could have and just didn’t. He is a fraud. A spineless, small-minded fraud. And to make matters worse, the REASON he couldn’t keep his one and only thing was because some of his people refused to sit in a government with Arabs. So in addition to everything else, he’s just racist. Or at least he supports racism or racists and gives them seats on his list and gives them veto power and lets them control his entire party and make decisions and drag us all into another election while throwing Arabs under the bus, and….. well, you know the rest. Plus, you know, he tried to make himself out to be some kind of moderate but really he’s just as right wing as everyone else over there. I mean, he’s now in step with the super-right-winger Gidon Saar. He was lying the entire time. It was all just a ruse, and 35-seats worth of Israeli voters fell for it and got conned and here we are in this mess. Gantz can go hide out in a cave for the rest of his life as far as I’m concerned. Nothing will make me happier than seeing his party die a painful death, or at least fail to make it into the next Knesset and send his list go back to kindergarten where they belong.

But I digress.

(We’re heading to ANOTHER election, and I guess I’m annoyed.)

My point then, is that, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the thoughtless, spineless, simplistic, misogynistic approach of punishing female soldiers rather than their pimping, sex-trafficking commanders is now being enforced by none other than Benny Gantz. Stupid Gantz. Gantz the Spineless Dimwit. Jellyfish have more spine than Gantz. The man stands for nothing and understands even less. I hope his party implodes and is left a pile of ashes eaten by a group of laughing hyenas.

Anyway, this is where we are right now. Very far from understanding what is really going on here.

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I always come back to the issue of culture. The way to stop people from getting raped and sexually assaulted is NOT by telling women to stay off the streets at night, or to keep women out of certain jobs. That is just punishing the victims.

Instead, the way to put an end to all of this sexual violence is by ensuring that people in our community and society KNOW that sexual assault is WRONG. That sex trafficking is WRONG. That offering up the bodies of the women under your command as a sexual toy to a murderer terrorist in exchange for information is WRONG.

That’s it. That’s all that has to happen for these kinds of things to end. We need to create cultural understanding and consensus that this is all wrong.

And we can start sending that message clearly by punishing those who violated the norms. By punishing the OFFENDERS and not the VICTIMS.

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