Press
NY Daily News – Victimized twice by their abusers: When domestic violence drags women into the criminal justice system
10/22/2019
By CHIRLANE MCCRAY and CECILE NOEL
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | OCT 22, 2019 | 5:00 AM
When one woman’s abusive partner forced her to transport his guns she was arrested and charged with weapons possession. Another woman’s partner sent an attacker after her; when the attacker fell off a terrace in the ensuing fight, the woman was charged with murder. A college student’s abusive partner threatened to kill her and her children unless she accompanied him to an apartment, where he killed a man. The student was forced to clean up the mess — then she was charged with murder.
These real New York stories reflect the phenomenon of “criminalized survivors”: people, overwhelmingly women, thrust into the criminal justice system because they retaliated against abusive partners or committed crimes as a result of abuse. They face arrest, prosecution and punishment.
The school-to-prison pipeline has received much attention, but there is also a gender-based violence-to-prison pipeline that is exploding. Most incarcerated women have survived some form of sexual violence, and women’s incarceration is climbing: A national study from the Sentencing Project shows an uptick of more than 750% between 1980 and 2017, even as New York has achieved the lowest big-city rate of incarceration for men and women. A national study by the Vera Institute of Justice found that 86% of women who have ever been jailed also report surviving sexual assault and 77% percent have experienced partner violence.
This Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we want to raise awareness of criminalized survivors. We count ourselves among their advocates, but this vulnerable population is without an internationally known hashtag like #MeToo or celebrity cases. Many survivors come from historically oppressed communities — including those that are black, brown, low-income, immigrant or transgender. They need resources beyond the criminal justice system — housing, vocational services, mental health and substance misuse support. Their stories need to be heard.
A crucial first step is making certain that women are not incarcerated in the first place. New York City has reduced the total number of women sent to Rikers Island by 54% from 2013 to 2018.
And with city funding, Rising Ground’s STEPS to End Family Violence program is partnering with criminalized survivors themselves to design training material and offer training sessions to anyone working with criminalized survivors, including advocates, lawyers and NYC Department of Correction staff.
STEPS aims to highlight the real life experiences and challenges of survivors so that their behaviors and choices are better understood beyond any isolated crime, like stealing or sex work. Another training goal is to raise awareness of how bias impacts who is seen as a “good” victim. The organization will also hire a full-time advocate for criminalized survivors at the NYC Family Justice Centers, which are run by the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence to provide legal help and supportive services.
We are working to reduce future incarceration of domestic-violence survivors by identifying survivors who are in jail and providing them behavioral health care and referrals to supportive programs and transitional housing. Most incarcerated women are mothers, so our CMOM initiative, a project of the Department of Correction and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (CMOM), unites incarcerated women and their children at the museum for visits and recreation. It has won national acclaim since the first lady introduced it in 2018.
CMOM resonates because family disruption and domestic violence are tragically common. The CDC estimates that on average, 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner. Last year, New York City police responded to 250,447 domestic incident reports and the city’s domestic violence hotline received over 81,000 calls. Fifty-five New Yorkers ended up dead because of intimate partner or family homicides.
We ask that all New Yorkers, this Domestic Violence Awareness Month and beyond, not judge survivors, particularly not on any connection to or involvement in the criminal justice system. They are part of our community. We are calling for more from all of us: more policy discussions, more reforms and much more compassion.
McCray is first lady of New York City. Noel is commissioner of the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-based Violence.
