A Country Rag

Note: The following article was submitted by Dr. Jonathan Farley, a native of Massachusetts and Vanderbilt Mathematics Professor at the time, and printed, with some editing, in their 2002 University Women's Newsletter, along with in some African-American on-line and hardcopy magazines. A companion piece by their then-Project Safe director detailed "police protocols, federal grant requirements and important do info." A few of her e-mail comments at the time were: "This is a great article. I certainly understand the desire to forego the whole legal system, especially with its propensity to re-victimize. However, 1) when you discourage battered women from reporting, they are left with few legal options for protection; 2) some women have positive experiences with the police (okay, that's a pretty weak reason, since the positive experiences are predicated on a paternalist notion of the "good victim"); 3) police have protocols and legal responsibilities for which they should be held accountable -- it's not enough to let them off the hook by choosing simply to not contact them; instead we should arm women with resources and information about their legal rights so that they know when their civil rights are violated. And, we need to continue to collect these types of stories. There are several women in my support group who have had similar experiences.... These mutual arrests and arrests of battered women not only completely skew the statistics about the incidence of domestic violence, they prevent women from reporting in the future thus putting them at greater risk of lethality...."

Today, Dr. Farley, a Fulbright scholar with a degree from Oxford, England, is a distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Theory at CalTech and still expresses his views in well-received publicly published articles.

"Spoilers: Killing the Dream," from which this is excerpted, is dedicated "For my Mother and Stepfather" and derives its title from an extant letter. Victim of one of my mother's campaigns, a man-love of my grandmother's wrote her in the early 1940s trying to straighten out and convey the truth of things, calling my mother 'a spoiler.' Nobody was really important but Dorothy Scranton Baillie and what she (and her husband) wanted, without law or good will, for herself and others. The original opens with a quote from a Melissa Ethridge song: "Let it rain, let it rain down on me/ Let the rain fill my hand, let the rain set me free."

Spoilers: One Woman's Story of Violence and Abuse

by Jeannette Harris with Jonathan Farley

On a warm October day in 1997, in the mid evening, and in a place called Page County, Virginia, I found myself dialing 911: a criminally-inclined, occasionally violent man was in my home, and he refused to leave. He was 13 years my junior, twice my size. He had been frightening me for some time. He was my husband.
When the deputies arrived, I met them at the front door and requested that my husband be asked to leave voluntarily. Their only other legal recourse was to arrest him.
Instead, deputies arrested me -- for assault (I had tried to defend myself) -- and I was kept in jail overnight by the magistrate. He claimed I was "intoxicated." The next morning I was released ("on bond to keep the peace") to the same man who had been threatening, abusing and harassing me. I had no shoes (they had arrested me without them), no money, and no identification. After some argument, I was allowed to call a legally-connected acquaintance, who said there was nothing he could do. The County Attorney, a woman who had helped create an outreach program for abused women, refused to drop the charges of assault.
Eventually I left my house -- the house which I bought in 1978, and which, under Virginia law, I owned -- in order to preserve my personal safety. During the two months I was gone, the court vacated the charge of assault (Note: Actually, I went to Court and it was thrown out by the Judge, after hearing testimony, on the grounds that there was no basis for the charge), and, in a subsequent hearing, ordered my husband to leave. Nevertheless, the police refused to supervise his departure. He left my home unlivable, letting throngs (Note: Actually, two that I know of) of vandals into my house.
Our legal system had suborned false imprisonment, criminal trespass, rape, perjury, robbery and fraud.
There is something sick about a system that can take away the most precious thing we have -- the freedom to work productively and constructively; the right to choose what is done to us and to what belongs to us -- when we have done nothing wrong. There is something sick about a judicial system that can force violence and criminality on a woman's mind body spirit soul heart house property credit finances and living. A legal system that should prevent and punish criminality, so help us God, should not itself engage in criminality, and punish victims because they happen to be female.
I am not a lump of meat, without rights in my own house and state and country, a country whose legal system appears to be neither just not legal, but perhaps just an enforcement arm of "the good ol' boys" club. Our country doesn't need irresponsible middle-aged boys. It needs men.
From my experience, I would never recommend that a woman call 911. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have dealt with the situation better than deputies and magistrate who arrested me and put me "on bond to keep the peace."
911 is not a joke, as the rappers say. If you are a woman, it can kill your soul, and your peace.