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Legal sanctions for male violence
owner-end-violence(AT)edc-cit.org
Susan Robinson[srobinson(AT)einstein.tompkins-co.org]
February
2000
"Placing 'severe' legal sanctions on all forms of
male violence
against women and children", as Bronwyn Winter
suggests as an answer
to violence against women, seems so obvious.
Yet in New York State,
where there has been progress in recent years to hold
men more
accountable for violent and threatening behaviour, it is
still a more
serious offense to steal a pack of chewing gum or
cigarettes than it
is to push, shove, slap, or threaten your
girlfriend/wife. You can
get up to a year in jail for petit larceny, a class A
misdemeanour,
but you can only get 15 days in jail for
pushing/shoving/slapping
another person, a violation level offense.
With laws like these it
is almost impossible to transform men's behaviour
towards women -- if
the state doesn't consider it a crime, why should men?
Susan Robinson
Domestic Violence Prevention Coordinator
125 East Court Street
Ithaca, NY 14850
(607) 274-5455
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