Legal Shifts: Does Mandatory Arrest Add Insult to Injury?

According to Linda Mills, her book Insult to Injury is "an attempt to become conscious of the pervasiveness of violence, its role in our intimate lives, and the judgments we make about it." (2003, 2) To clarify Mills' thesis, she is actually attempting to become conscious of the pervasiveness of violence, its role in her intimate life, and the judgments she makes about it. Mills uses her book to exorcise her own violent demons that readers may only suspect while reading the last chapter.

The book begins with Mills recalling a scene she and a friend witnessed between a mother and her five-year-old son. The boy was demanding his mother's attention and trying her patience, so she slapped his face. Mills recalls feeling "sad for the child and angry with his mother." Then the boy punched his mother. "In that split second, we had witnessed the genesis of intimate abuse," she writes. "The little boy would grow up to become a man, and he was already being taught to respond to women with violence." (Ibid., 1)

As the mother of two adult children, I bristled against Mills' judgment on this incident. Not being a mother herself, Mills is not in a position to properly assess the situation she stumbled upon on a London sidewalk. In my view, Mills unfairly and unreasonably places blame for the situation squarely on the mother. Ignoring her own admonition, she judged the situation before attempting to understand it. I do not condone violence in any manner, but I know I join legions of other frustrated, exhausted parents when I admit to times when the temptation to warm my young children's behinds was nearly overwhelming.

Mills writes, "It was only when I started to write this book that I realized that I, too, was engaged in a dynamic of abuse." (145) This study, though, is about women victims of violence, not about Linda Mills' recovery and discovery.

On to the topic at hand, every state, except Arkansas and Washington, D.C., has mandatory arrest policies in cases of domestic violence. According to Mills, "strong evidence suggests that mandatory arrest may actually increase the incidence of violence in some women's lives." (2003, 37.)
A self-described feminist and veteran activist, Mills uses her book to reflect "on where some feminists went wrong" in relation to domestic violence and to promote the need for other feminists to pursue a different agenda. She comes out swinging, however, and attacks those whom she calls "mainstream feminists" for failing to understand intimate abuse and the choices women make when they are involved in abusive relationships. (Ibid., 5)

Among other issues, Mills argues that "continued advocacy for an almost exclusive focus on punishment in response to domestic violence represents [feminists'] fear that if they capitulate in any way, or recognize any limitations to their approach, they will lose the benefits they have gained." (Ibid., 4) Central to her criticism is that though some life-threatening cases of domestic abuse might call for arrest, prosecution and imprisonment, "in most cases a woman should be free to choose her own destin[y], with or without criminal sanctions, and after the state has provided options that respect her specific needs while also offering her methods that would help her be safe."

While Mills should be commended for her serious consideration of how we think about and respond to domestic abuse, unless and until society can rethink its norms, beliefs and sexist attitudes that sanction men's power over women, her suggestions about the "right" way to handle incidents of violence in the home are at least premature and at most dangerous to women.