Domestic Violence as Hate Crime?

This past Saturday I attended a conference at a local College of Law exploring whether or not domestic violence should be prosecuted as a hate crime. Most of the attendees were law students and lawyers and only one other social-worker "type". I felt we were able to bring a different perspective to how they were looking at current laws in the state of Colorado and how to potentially word new bills.

Coming from California, I had no idea about criminalized domestic violence. I learned about that working with some of my single-parent participants when I accompanied them to their civil and criminal cases as witnesses. They were witnesses against their ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends; they were not there on the prosecuting side because of our laws. A lot of discussion on this topic on Saturday revolved around how the criminalization caused more problems than it helped.

The original intention was to make the penalties for domestic violence more stringent and to ensure that the perpetrators did not get away with the abuse if a woman did not prosecute. The problems that came about included the not so obvious side effects of taking away the power from the women to make any decision about the person who brought on harm. This often times leaves a woman feeling helpless and frustrated more than they feel helped.

And then there are stories of the ugly underside of the police; the stories include threats against women who did not want to testify. They had many examples of women being threatened; one included having marijuana planted in her house and she was told that the only way to make that "go away" was to testify.

The main topic, however, was on how to add gender to the hate-crime bill. So that if a man beats up a woman and the prosecutors can tie in the reason for the crime having to do with the fact she was a woman, the penalties will be greater. We spent a lot of time "trying" to write verbiage for a potential bill and it was not easy! We spent much time discussing how this could help victims, but also being very careful about how the bill would be worded to avoid potentially hurting them more.

The ultimate goal of this conference was to raise not only awareness, but also as inspiration to everyone to get out there and do something. There is much that we can do to make a difference and to be heard. And it was inspiring!