What does it mean to be compassionate to people who are engaged in destructive or self-destructive behavior?
A recent article in The New Yorker describes the work of University of Maryland law professor Leigh Goodmark, who teaches her students that we need to “decriminalize domestic violence.” The instructor of a class called “Gender, Prison, and Trauma,” Goodmark “began her career representing battered women, convinced that she could protect them through policing, protective orders, prosecution and prison,” the article says. “Now she argues that the legal system does not make abused women safer. Instead it makes their problems worse.”
The evidence for this depends on what you mean by “their problems.” It is true that the arrest and prosecution of domestic abusers is not a fix for all of the problems that their victims have. It’s very hard to enforce protective orders even if a victim is willing to call police when it’s necessary. Many women have children with these men and if they don’t remain in prison permanently, the men will want contact with their children at some point. Often one or both of them are affected by substance abuse, and that complicates their relationship.
But Goodmark and a number of her colleagues are worried about the ways that arrests for domestic violence contribute to high incarceration rates, particularly for Black men. Progressive prosecutors, the article notes, “are trying to square two ideals: protecting women from violence and fighting mass incarceration.” Does compassion for these men require that we keep law enforcement out of this equation? A book called “The Feminist War on Crime” argues that women’s liberation has been a significant factor in mass incarceration. The idea seems to be that we (or really Black women) owe it to Black men to stop arresting them for domestic abuse.
Of course, if there are interventions that work to prevent violence before it happens or before it recurs — screening for risk factors, counseling and so on — we should adopt those interventions. It may be true, as Goodmark suggests, that men with stable jobs are less likely to abuse, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that giving an abuser a job will get him to stop. Indeed, one might reasonably assume that men who have bad tempers and are violent are more likely to abuse a partner and less likely to hold down a job. Either way, the idea that we are going to remake society, and women who are victims of domestic violence should just wait for that to happen, is offensive.
We should acknowledge that decriminalizing behavior generally just means looking the other way. That’s what it has meant in the context of drugs and even school truancy. If we are not going to get law enforcement involved in some way, there is no mechanism for ending the behavior and no lever for change. This has not always been the case. Society used to have a lot more unwritten rules that people were forced to follow lest they be excluded. But in a society where we cannot agree on even the most basic values, it is hard to see how this will work. And usually the same people who want to decriminalize also want to destigmatize delinquent behavior, too. So it’s not like using social pressure is even an option for them anyway.
Last year, Mass General Brigham decided that it would no longer require its medical professionals to report substance-exposed infants to child protective services. And entire states, including Connecticut and New Mexico, have done the same thing. In an effort to reduce racial disparities in child welfare, the answer has been to offer these women some information about voluntary services but not involve child welfare agencies. The result in many cases has been that we send women home with infants and addiction problems, and the children often come back to our attention later in dangerous situations, even the victims of drug exposure themselves or unsafe sleep deaths while their parents were intoxicated.
New research suggests that many mothers struggling with addiction are not getting the help they need. A study in JAMA Health Forum by Ezra Goldstein and Sarah Font found that in Pennsylvania, the presence of maternal substance use disorder within the child welfare system population was 62%. The authors compared the likelihood of receiving treatment among mothers who received some kind of formal intervention from a child welfare agency with those who did not. Whether that meant the children were taken into foster care or the family was receiving in-home services while the children remained at home, the authors concluded that “formal child welfare services can facilitate substance use treatment for caregivers.” Those who received a child welfare response were significantly more likely to get inpatient treatment or outpatient treatment and to be in treatment 12 months after the referral.
As advocates want to get child welfare and law enforcement out of the lives of families, they might want to figure out what other mechanisms will get abusive boyfriends or abusive and neglectful parents to act in a way that will make their victims safer. Compassion dictates that we must think about the abusers in these situations. Domestic violence and child maltreatment are long-term relational problems. Locking up people and throwing away the key, or separating children from parents, are extreme solutions that are necessitated in only a small number of cases. That doesn’t mean that we can’t use law enforcement or child protective services to get people on the right track, to incentivize them to get help. These agencies are the beginning of the solution, not the end of it.