REVISITING VICTIM RIGHTS 4

As promised, I am going to continue looking at Lynne M. Henderson’s 1999 Victim-Rights (V-R) article, which follows up on the 1985 article which I looked at two Posts ago. Instructions for accessing the text of the article are in Note* below.

This is my last Post on Henderson’s 1999 article and I am focusing on the section in which she more specifically discusses Victim-Rights (V-R) dynamics in regard to Domestic Violence and SO law.

Her concern throughout the article has been the then-proposed (that subsequently failed to pass) Constitutional Amendment for V-R: especially its insistence that victims of crime (however defined) be granted certain Constitutional rights specifically attaching to the status of being the victim of a crime (however defined).

“Surely”, she says (p.68), “if victim’s rights are to be corrective to defendant’s rights, victims should be entitled to counsel to represent them in court”.

And (p.68) that can’t be the prosecutor, because the prosecutor’s responsibilities and agenda may not coincide wholly or even largely with the victim’s. (This flows from the problem that while a civil tort action is designed precisely to adjudge the ‘harm’ caused to the complainant-plaintiff-‘victim’, the criminal trial process is designed to adjudge matters of the State’s interest in conducting formal punishment for illegal acts and crimes.)

As there is a vital asymmetry created when you attempt to insinuate or inject V-R concerns into the criminal trial process, so there are significant potential conflicts of interest created among the relevant participants, i.e. the victim(s) and the prosecution.

Prosecutors (p.68) must i) represent the community’s and the State’s interests and ii) as Officers of the Court must ensure that Justice is done and Truth is served. Adding a third responsibility, meeting the needs of the Victim and carrying out an agenda acceptable to the Victim’s desires and feelings and ‘needs’, is doubly ill-advised.

First, it loads another task onto an already burdened Prosecution.

And second, it loads a task that may at rather vital points create demands that conflict with Prosecutorial responsibilities (i) and (ii) above.

For one thing, it is well within the realm of possibility and a prosecutor’s discretion and responsibility to Truth and Justice that an accused not be charged – which, of course, does happen and quickly enrages the V-R advocacies, fueling demands that legislation be passed to force prosecutors to charge and try anybody whom any self-declared victim accuses. The V-R presumption, blended with the radical-feminist presumptions, implies that one is innocent until accused – so they can’t quite see what all the ‘complication’ and ‘delay’ is, unless it is motivated by ‘insensitivity’. And, of course, a strong thread of radical-feminist thought holds that all (heterosexual) sex is crime and all males are guilty even if not yet accused.

I would add that since ‘truth’ and the search for ‘facts’ is not really high on the advocacy list (the only real Truth is that of the Victim’s feelings and ‘facts’ simply confuse that matter and delay the vengeance) then the Prosecution is put in an awful fix.

Now it was precisely the law-and-order Right that got this V-R thing going in the early 1980s to begin with, but what you are starting to see here in the late 1990s is the Victim bunch – perhaps emboldened and advised by the already revolutionary radical-feminist advocacies – starting to actually take on a life of their own, beyond the ‘front’ and ‘puppet’ status for which the Victim was originally embraced by the Right in the 1980s.

Henderson (p.69) mentions certain very real tactical concerns that would not occur to a lay reader: for reasons of a successful prosecution, a prosecutor may not want a complainant to reveal all the facts and ‘tell her story’, simply in order to avoid “opening up possible avenues of defense” by providing the defense with what is known professionally as “free discovery”.

This conflicts with the emotions and agenda of victims who are seeking to ‘tell their story’ and have been led to believe (by advocacy spin) that that is pretty much what courts are all about (and in the case of ‘victim-friendly’ courts, that may well be too disturbingly true).

I add that if complainants have either been prepped by advocates or have simply read or watched too many media stories and ‘reports’, they may come to the prosecutor already assuming that V-R visions are official legal praxis: finding out that such is not the case, they may well immediately feel betrayed, and it is those (mistaken) feelings of ‘betrayal by the system’ that simply create even more juicy if whackulent ‘news’, which is then battened upon by advocates for even more ‘coverage’ to generate even more ‘pressure’ for their demands.  Again, the self-licking ice-cream cone dynamic.

Henderson then observes (p.69) that “advocates of the [V-R] amendment often point to feminist law reforms as examples of the need to have victim’s rights”.

But Henderson quickly observes that many feminist law reforms have (in 1999) already been passed without any need for a V-R amendment at all.

She continues (p.69) that “until the needs of rape and battering victims were brought to public attention, violence against women was ignored by the public and prosecutors”.

I would add here that I think Henderson is far too generous referring to all the changes as simply and purely “reforms”; I think it is clear that to a far larger and deeper degree than is acknowledged they were derangements, and lethal ones, and insidiously injected into the American legal and cultural Universe.

She continues (p.69): “Yet massive law reforms, accomplished by feminists in alliance with crime control conservatives, have in no way been dependent on whether victims have [V-R type] rights”.

She has noticed the alliance between Left and Right even back in 1999.

And again, I am going to say that many of those ‘reforms’, and many of the consequences of those ‘reforms’, have been precisely hostile to the primary responsibilities of the criminal-justice system.

 And she continues (p.70) that “rape survivors and prosecutors may frequently be at odds with one another about whether to prosecute”.

I point out again that “survivor” – a term once used only in regard to people who walked away from a plane crash – gained massive (and legitimate) credence in this country in the late 1960s as a term referring to those who escaped alive from the Holocaust. It was quickly taken over by feminist and victimist advocacies both to describe the recipients of this or that targeted experience and also as a sly framing of the targeted experience itself: thus, for example, a woman is (an innocent and helpless) ‘survivor’ of rape because rape (or all heterosexual activity) is a Holocaust and men are the Nazis who create and sustain it. Neat.

But toooooo neat.

And as the ‘trauma-recovery’ business has expanded, there are now untold numbers who derive some satisfaction from describing themselves as “survivors” (of this or that) while the term also automatically does the heavy (and dirty) lifting of shrieking that the ‘perps’ (so often males) are the Nazis bent upon wiping them off the face of the earth (who, being Nazis for all practical purposes, deserve to be eradicated forthwith and who, being Nazis, have no rights that the government need recognize or honor).

You can’t seriously conduct the grave and vital business of a great commonwealth and Republic while governed by such melodramatic and manipulative scripts. It is wrecking the legislative and judicial and law-enforcement systems, deforming the very political dynamics that are the life-energy of the Republic, and – as it has migrated into foreign policy – has led to massive military misadventures.

Henderson also observes (p.70, Note 135) that there is a distinction to be made between “rape by strangers – real rape – and rape by acquaintances”. This distinction is precisely what the date-rape advocates have been trying to eliminate, yet it is precisely the boundary between the relatively solid-ground  legally-workable territory of adjudicating a crime perpetrated by a stranger upon a thoroughly uninvolved victim and – on the far side of the boundary – the swampy jungles of he said-she said, where for centuries any sober and serious and responsible agent of law would be hesitant to tread with the dread Sovereign power, for fear of misapplying it and further engorging Leviathan while simultaneously undermining the credibility of its legitimacy.

So, she determines (p.71), you can’t take V-R and “simply graft it onto” prosecutorial responsibilities. Nor can you take V-R and simply inject it into the criminal-trial system.

But that is precisely what the radical-feminist and victimist agenda has been working to accomplish. (See Note ** below.) And the SO Mania Regime is a Frankensteinian product of those efforts.

Henderson also shares that she prefers the term ‘relationship violence’ to ‘domestic violence’ since nowadays so many of the cases involve incidents that take place outside of marriage.

Henderson notes (p.71) a then-recent article that demanded the mandatory prosecution of batterers. (I note that the legal qualification for being a “batterer” now can include simply maintaining silence in a phone conversation, even a long-distance one. When speaking of “battering” now, one must include those quotation marks I use here not to ‘scare’ readers but simply to remind them – like yellow flashing barriers around road hazards – that the term is not necessarily what it would appear to be on first glance; the actual legal working definition has expanded far beyond any dictionary’s power to describe. So too, of course, in so many SO terms, from ‘abuse’ and ‘molesting’ all the way up to ‘rape’.)

But the author (herself a female former prosecutor) of that article is pushing for mandatory prosecution because in her own experience so many victims of ‘battering’ do not want to prosecute (and not simply because they are ‘afraid’).

This reveals, I would say, a deep abyss that is obstructing the feminist-victimist agenda: too many of the alleged (and apparently the actual, too) victims do not want to prosecute, yet it is in the advocacy’s agenda to ensure as many prosecutions (and guilty verdicts) as possible in order to achieve their purpose of ‘changing society’; a purpose for which they seek to dragoon the criminal justice and judicial systems, come hell or high water.

This abyss was potentially there in the 1980s, but at that time the Right saw – accurately – no equally organized political pressure groups on the Left who might develop an agenda of their own and actually pull the entire legal (and legislative) system into territory that not even the law-and-order Right dared to envision.

And, indeed, it would have to be said that in light of subsequent developments, up to and including the SO Mania Regime, no genuine and conscientious law-and-order advocate would dare to create such a profoundly deranging pressure on law-and-order as have the Domestic Violence and SO Mania Regimes.

But, I would also have to add: what conscientious and Constitutionally-grounded law-and-order advocate would have really plumped for the Victim-vs-Accused gambit in the first place? After all, the most essential thrust of this whole gambit has been to derange the Framing Vision’s and Constitution’s guarantees to any accused Citizen. This whole thing was profoundly anti-Constitutional from the get-go 30 years ago.

The Correct justifications for mandatory prosecution, rehearsed by the article’s author (p.72), are that the female-victim must think of financial considerations since she is dependent on the accused male for economic independence; and because – perhaps being a more sensitive creature than the lumpish and brutish male – she would not want to “feel responsible” for his punishment; and she may be “subject to the controlling behavior” of the accused and even the subject of “threats” from him (however defined or interpreted); or she might fear his retaliation.

But if this is all true – and how on earth to determine it in many cases? – then the accused will be subjected to a court process already greatly deformed against the rights of the accused. And that doesn’t include a secondary deformation: judges who have been appointed (perhaps to a ‘special’ court) precisely because they are committed ‘revolutionaries’ (my term) who come to each case committed thoroughly to the presumption that all males are presumable perps in matters of sex and violence.

This is no way to conduct fair and impartial justice. This is also no way for a government to assault one-half of its Citizenry with its Sovereign authority. And it cannot end well.

Henderson also observes (p.73) – and sensibly enough – that at the heart of these cases is a relationship of actual love and care that governs the attitudes and actions of both complainant and accused.

She quickly points out the Correct comeback to this possibility: that the victim is herself deluded by “false consciousness”, i.e. that she ‘just doesn’t get it’ because she is not completely governed by the advocacy presumptions about the inherent violence of all men and most sex.

So you wind up with the advocacy itself turning upon the purported victim. Funny how the Mania night moves.

Henderson also notes (p.73, Note 144) the advocacy claims that women are more ‘relational’ and thus “fear abandonment and isolation”. But if this is true – and we are now veering close to making rather general judgment statements about all women, as the advocacy thinking itself is doing here – then a profound question is exposed, which is relevant to both Domestic Violence and SO matters: if women generally are possessed of such characteristics, rendering them greatly liable to initiating relational and even sexual encounters, then from the get-go, decades ago, legislators should have been hugely careful in trying to figure how – and to what extent – government authority, especially the Sovereign police power, could be deployed in regard to such matters.

Because clearly the Framework and the Framing Vision of the Constitution presumed the maturity and general life-competence of each Citizen (and thereby focused on preserving the independence of those Citizens from the arbitrary and excessive intrusions created by deploying the Sovereign police power against them).

And ‘rape’ and wife-beating have been crimes in Western civilization for as far back as the records go.

The argument that the former prosecutor’s article puts forth (p.74) is that “aggressive prosecution” would serve as a ‘signal’ (would ‘send a message’, you might say) that the ‘offense’ is ‘serious’ and this would lead to “deterrence and proper punishment”.

But the first and foremost Framing concern (and this should also constitute a compelling State interest) is not to be sending messages in the service of this or that advocacy agenda, but rather primarily to ensure the careful deployment of the Sovereign police power so that Leviathan doesn’t consume the lives of its own Citizens.

To declare that “quaint” or to insist that the Framers ‘just didn’t get it’ is a profoundly dangerous gambit, since it opens the door – a watertight protective door, I would add – to all sorts of pressure groups and agendas getting control of the Sovereign police power for their own purposes. (And in that regard I envision the government nowadays as looking very much like the government of Chicago in the 1920s, where the pressure brought by the organized mobsters dragooned or bought the entire apparatus – legislative, executive, and judicial – of the City and County so that all would function in the service of the mobsters’ interests.)

The former prosecutor then makes the assertion (p.74) that “failure to prosecute leads the State back to being a silent partner in condoning” all of the relational and sexual violence. 

That assertion doesn’t work, I would say.  

The key reality is that the State can only do so much before it deforms itself and betrays its Framing role and mandate, thereby deranging the entire Constitutionally-envisioned machinery and dynamics that allow the Republic to operate.

But it gets worse (p.74). “Allowing battered women [however defined] to refuse to participate in prosecutions undermines the State’s important interests in prosecuting violent criminals, preventing revictimization of women and any children involved, and ending the cycle of violence that may occur in these relationships”.

So as you see, the advocacies here wants to refuse a batter-ee (however defined, and the thresh-hold has become remarkably low) her choice not to be involved.

This dragoons batter-ees into the advocacy Scheme, whether they want to participate or not. Some liberation.

The element of coercion in so much of advocacy Theory becomes clear here. And of course the Sovereign police power will be the agent of that coercion (against both complainants and accused).

Indeed, this author will (p.75) assert that prosecutors should force (mostly female) battering victims to participate in the prosecution, even if it means jailing them if they refuse to do so.

The claim is that the State has an “interest” in requiring participation in order to prevent the battering (however defined). There is most surely a sound logic to this position. Although this logic quickly leads to the State having an “interest” in prosecuting just about any evil or unhappiness that may arise in relationship and sexual-relationship issues. Which rather profoundly undermines the Framing Vision’s determination to boundary the scope and intensity of the government’s intrusion – especially with its police power – into the lives of Citizens.

And taken in the context of the widespread and deep deconstruction of any cultural Shape to relationships – in the service of ‘total freedom and autonomy’ for women to do whatever they like in initiating or entering into relationships of any kind – you can imagine that the horizon for such a dynamic becomes almost infinite, with no boundaries to it at all.

Against which – as I have been saying – one must ideally balance the compelling State interest in adhering to the Framing Vision or otherwise risk profoundly deranging the whole Vision (leading to some type of America that is hell-and-gone from any faithfulness to the legitimacy of the Framing Vision). But this is the type of common-sense and deeply vital consideration and analysis that the radical-feminist and victimist advocacies in this country have always sought to short-circuit, stampeding the public into simply recoiling in horror and outrage at the (relatively rare) actual horrific incidences of genuine battering.

And by opening the most intimate relationships to criminal law, there is thus absolutely no realm of Citizens’ lives that is immune to the intrusion of the State and the Sovereign police power.

So there is a vital calculus and balancing here, and one that must be governed by a) the Framing Vision and b) a wide public deliberative political consideration of the core Question: how far should the government be allowed to go in rectifying (or preventing) crime and the evils of human life before some vital balance and dynamic is hopelessly deranged?

Ideally, Citizens would be presumed to be mature and responsible in their life-choices, though the criminal law would always be available for dealing with individual cases.

But this is not what ‘revolutionary’ praxis seeks, and thus the almost literal ‘construction’ of this or that Mania is required to generate the unthinking public emotion that will lubricate the slide into some Alien Universe.

“Police will not investigate carefully or take relationship violence seriously if prosecutors will not pursue these cases” (p.74). But in the context of the necessary Mania, such ‘investigation’ becomes skewed from the get-go against the accused, and such ‘trials’ become heavily weighted against the accused, even to the extent of deranging vital Constitutional protections for any accused Citizen.

And thus such trials also come perilously close to Stalinist ‘show-trials’, where the purpose is not to discover Truth and adjudge the guilt or innocence of the accused in the particular case. Rather, the trial is designed to ‘show’ all the Citizens the power of the State, and that they will not be able to ‘hide’ from the State behind any ‘abstract’ rights. This is a recipe for Constitutional disaster and for a slide into some Alien type of America.

For all Branches of the government to collude in this and enable it … this is one of the most vividly lethal developments of the Age of Advocacy. And the Domestic Violence and SO Mania Regimes are the result and the clear example of this.

Further, as Henderson quotes (p.75) this former female prosecutor, the purpose of all this is not to put the Victim at the center of events (which is a departure from most Victimist thinking) but rather “to punish the batterer [however defined] in order to protect potential victims via deterrence and incapacitation”.   

So whatever Constitutional rights the accused might have, whatever prosecutorial discretion the State might have, whatever deformity such an agenda might produce and whatever consequences might flow from such deformity, the Constitutional rights of the accused and the Framing Vision itself … must run a distant second to the demands of the advocacies’ agenda.

This is the result of pressure-politics and ‘deal politics’. (I will have something more substantial to say about this in the Addendum to this Post; see below.)

Henderson makes the professional observation (p.76) that “overidentification with victims can result in a loss of perspective and judgment” on the part of prosecutors (and judges and juries, I would add).

But it is precisely “perspective” that the radical feminist and victimist gameplan seeks to prevent. To ask if the ‘cure’ is more dangerous than the illness is to somehow demonstrate that you ‘support’ the violence and the ‘criminal’. This is a vital element in stirring up a Mania: you foreclose the opportunities for Citizens to exercise their deliberative and analytic capabilities, and instead substitute a manipulative whipping-up of ‘public opinion’ to lubricate whatever demands your agenda makes.

Henderson quickly balances that by noting (p.76) that prosecutorial and judicial “biases against victims can lead to unequal representation of their interests”. And I agree.

But I would say that a) you have to clearly and precisely define (i) their “interests” and (ii) what distinguishes such “unequal representation” from simply exercising legitimate and necessary prosecutorial, judicial and police discretion in conducting criminal process.

And surely some legitimate ‘consciousness-raising’ or training sessions in dealing properly with claimant-victims is apropos. But that excludes the type of cadre-brainwashing that is far too prevalent nowadays and has been for some time, whereby personnel are simply forced to accept all of the Theory and demands of the Agenda and are told that they must operate on those assumptions totally and in all cases, regardless of any reservations about a particular case or – the horror! – any Larger concerns about the Constitutional and Framing Vision’s integrity and the subsequent integrity and legitimacy of the criminal justice system as it conforms itself to the Demands of the Agenda (and of the Mania).

It’s perfectly legitimate for advocacies to conduct such dogmatic ‘consciousness-raising’ among themselves, but to then seek – with the collusion and collaboration of the Branches – to impose it on the criminal-justice system’s personnel and through media-assisted manipulation on potential jurors … this is not legitimate, at least not in the American Universe. And it cannot and will not end well for the Republic.

Henderson, again speaking from a professional experience, says (p.77) that “Even well-trained prosecutors can do more harm than good if they become overidentified with the victim … The rescuer impulse can lead to a sacrifice of critical judgment and loss of perspective, and therefore such sympathy is not necessarily good for the victim … To see oneself as a champion of victims is dangerously self-righteous and can lead to promises that cannot be fulfilled … By taking over for the victim prosecutors can console themselves as heroes, but in the process deprive the victim of autonomy and choice”.

That’s a mouthful.

I would add that this is precisely the reason why one must be extremely careful in accepting the creds of prosecutors or attorneys who flaunt a large experience in domestic violence or ‘sex crime’ trials. There is no small chance that that ‘experience’ includes the assumption of the ‘rescuer’ and ‘hero’ and ‘champion of victims’ mindset that necessarily must degrade any professional concern for the Constitutional rights of the accused.

And, of course, such a mindset – so psychologically and emotionally rewarding for the prosecutor or attorney (or judge or jury-member) – would lubricate a blithe and callow (even self-righteous) ignoring of the profound ill-consequences that are the truly portentous down-side of all this.

And I support Henderson fully when she notes (p.78) that one quite possible result of such pressure is to incite a counter dynamic: “an unthinking identification with the perpetrator” (I would say ‘the accused’).

My hope is for a criminal-justice system rooted in the search for Truth and Justice, and not skewed and deeply deranged by some pre-existing dogma in favor of either the complainant or the accused. Anything less will unleash uncontrollably anti-Constitutional dynamics which may create so much damage to the integrity of the system and the Citizenry’s deliberative capacities that, if allowed to go on for long, will create irreversible damage to the integrity and legitimacy of not only the criminal-justice system and its various agents but of the Citizenry’s basic capacities to govern the government.

Henderson then goes on (p.80) to observe that some attorneys have now (1999) specialized in representing alleged crime victims. There is very little reliable information on how they go about this specialization. “Financial rewards, however, appear to be gained in any civil action that exists”.**

Henderson concludes her article with a personal reminiscence section that I won’t discuss in this Post.

But I think it is clear that any analysis of the radical-feminist influenced Victimist Agenda – which is still very very much alive even though the actual V-R Amendment failed – demonstrates the stunning range of complications and vital derangements that are required to impose the Agenda.

And that huge and deep Questions are raised by all such agitation and ‘pressure’: How far can an American government go in deploying its Sovereign police power without essentially becoming an Alien government operating on an Alien Vision that is hell-and-gone from and antithetical to the country’s Constitution and Framing Vision?

And surely the Methods used by now highly-organized and professional advocacy organizations in and of themselves lethally undermine the civic competence of the Citizenry, while in the process also derange (to the point of delegitimizing?) not only judicial process in the civil and criminal forums, but also utterly undermine the legislative responsibility to a deliberative democratic politics in which The People (regardless of whether they ‘just don’t get it’ or not) must be accorded their proper role in the Framing Vision as governors of the government and as having an indispensable authority to weigh in on matters of wide and deep concern to the common-weal.

In that regard I invite your attention to the Addendum below, following the Notes.

NOTES

*To access this article (and it’s free and well worth the look): follow this link; it will take you to an abstract of the article. Then at the top of that abstract page click on the option for One-Click Download; that will take you to several options depending on what part of the country you are in and you can simply click on one of them and the article will come up.

**Probably the most vivid example of this is the attorneys who represent alleged victims and complainants in the seemingly sempiternal sex-abuse claims against the Catholic Church.

In that regard, I note here one very recent listing of the complexities facing an attorney seeking to defend against such charges or – far far more often – lawsuits made in this arena: the alleged abuse took place more than half a century ago; the alleged offender is dead; the accuser never reported the offense to the authorities; the accuser never contacted the alleged offender’s ecclesiastical superiors; the school where this allegedly happened no longer exists; the accuser says he never remembered the alleged abuse until he watched a TV show about molestation in the late ‘00s; the accuser says that the Penn State case has added to his pain; the accuser says he doesn’t trust people; the accuser has been married seven times; the accuser has had by his own count 82 jobs.

I do not say that this list pretty much demolishes the plaintiff’s lawsuit.

Rather I say that the defense attorney’s task – especially in a time of Mania (which is still burning strongly in the arena of lawsuits against the Catholic Church) – is rendered almost ludicrously complex. Which is a situation no attorney for an alleged victim would want to see changed.

ADDENDUM

I am putting this material in the Addendum because it deals with political theory and dynamics which, although they underlie the derangements caused by the Mania Regimes, are not specifically involved with them.

As Henderson herself notes, there is some deep connection between Victimism and radical-feminism.

I am not at all opposed to improvements in the status of women in American society.

But I am deeply concerned not primarily for the Content of some of the demands of that political agenda, but first and foremost for the Method by which those demands and that Agenda have been introduced into American culture, society, and all aspects of government.

It is the Method even more than the Content that has, I believe, profoundly damaged the health and vitality of the Framing Vision and the Constitution that was meant to embody that Vision.

This is, I believe, the elephant in the middle of the room that all current commentary – and legislative Findings and so very many judicial Decisions and Opinions – seek to ignore.

This is, I would say, blatantly obvious in, for example, the 1995 Poritz case in New Jersey and the 2003 Smith v. Doe Opinion by the US Supreme Court (both cases which I have discussed in Posts on this site).

In what is almost a magician’s trick of distracting attention from the ‘real action’, the thinking sought to restrict itself to surface elements without going near the ‘elephant Issue’: how far can this Sex Offense legislation go before it becomes an entity from an Alien and anti-Constitutional and anti-American Universe?

I offer this  entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in regard to feminist political theory to indicate just to what extent most feminist philosophical thinking is opposed to “deliberative democratic process” in way or another, for one reason or another.

Whether that thinking embraces a “Maternal” approach (modeled on Carol Gilligan’s idea of Mommy At the Breakfast Table, with government being the Mommy and the Citizenry being the squalling kiddies) or an oppositional approach of one kind or another (that doesn’t trust deliberative democracy to provide the desired outcomes for feminist theory), the point is that the dynamics of deliberative democratic process are not and have not ever been well-received by the feminist agenda which – as I have said in the essay – was embraced by the Dems after 1972 and by the Republicans later in the decade for their own purposes.

I also offer this link from Wiki in regard to Antonio Gramsci, the early-20^th century Italian Communist thinker who took aspects of Marx’s and Lenin’s thought to develop his theory of “cultural hegemony”. Gramsci called for the undermining of a culture’s established traditions and institutions by means of the working class (changed to ‘women’ for feminist purposes) first developing its own culture and then forming a “historic bloc” by making whatever (temporary) alliances and compromises (again temporary) in order to take over the core institutions of a targeted culture and then subverting it to Marxism-Leninism (or feminism, as it were) from within.

For those interested, I go into these matters at more length in an essay on the legacy of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan on my other site.

As one of the most vulnerable ‘weaknesses’ of male ‘hegemonic culture’, sexual activity (and the apparently Evolutionary tendency of males to seek to propagate – which I am not here proposing as a justification for genuine sexual imposition on anybody), sexual activity no doubt provided logically a ready-made vital target for the Gramscian-Leninist strategy of attacking and weakening and subverting the male ‘hegemonic culture’.

And given the delectable political prospect of catering to (or pandering to) a ‘new and really big demographic’, the Beltway put its full faith, credit, and authority behind this – can there be any lesser word for it? – assault.

And the media, eager to increase viewership by running the easy melodramatic script of Innocent and Pure Good ruthlessly attacked (and ‘oppressed’) by Pure and Incorrigible Evil, went with the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ gambit.

Nobody – including those who have a sworn responsibility to look into these things – cared to consider what would be the consequences of introducing and actually injecting by imposition Leninist political praxis into the American political bloodstream, and thereby deranging the entire government into the embrace of political dynamics that are not only from an Alien political Universe but are literally from an avowedly and deliberate anti-democratic (and anti-Constitutional and anti-American) Universe.

This is what lubricated the construction of the Mania Regimes.

And it is what is even now and still now continuously eroding the genuine American dynamics that are the ‘genius’ of the great American Experiment that constituted this nation’s most enduring and valuable gift to human history and to humanity.

So much remains to be done.

ADDENDUM 2

I just came across this quote that seems too relevant to pass up.

David Frum, former Bush 2 staffer and speech-writer, has come to realize that things have gotten verrrrrry bad and gone verrrrrry wrong with American politics.

Although he is writing here about the economy, his thought on how Beltway pols seem to be dealing with things is also of relevance to the SO community, as an example of a new variable and new force pushing pols away from facing up to their mistakes.

Speaking of economic problems that require a serious and effective response, Frum observes that the all he can see coming from the Beltway is basically to promise more of what they have already been doing “followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares”.

I can’t help but thinking that this is precisely the attitude taken by pols when they allowed themselves to be seduced or dragooned into supporting the SO Mania Regime. If, as Frum says in his article, they really didn’t care too much for the commonweal or the general Citizenry, but only about their own short-term political advantage, then, I wonder, how much concern could they be expected to show toward SOs, even though potentially the Mania would assault the entire male half of the Citizenry.

It apparently goes without saying that none of them cared to give a thought about the integrity of the Framing Vision or the compelling government interest in preserving it.

And, at this point, as I have said before on this site, the attitude that Frum observes in them is precisely the attitude of the Soviet nomenklatura as their long-running scam began to unravel in the later 1970s: let’s just stick around long enough to qualify for the pension and scoop up as much as we can, then get out of town – and after that it’s not our problem.

Let’s hope things haven’t reached that point in the Beltway.

But even if it has, and if the Republic of the Framing Vision goes, the Mania Regime may well remain. Because it is based in an anti-democratic and anti-Constitutional scheme of government that has now been instituted here; a scheme of government precisely designed to impose its will on a Citizenry that ‘just doesn’t get it’.

So let’s not be under any illusions about what urgent work remains to be done.

And more than perhaps any other group of Americans, the SO community has seen the awful shape of things that may come.

Let us work while the daylight lasts, as the Apostle saith.

1         http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/

VICTIMOLOGY 2

We continue reviewing the 1986 book entitled “The Politics of Victimization” by Robert Elias, then of Tufts University.*

Summing up what he sees a Victimology’s contributions, Elias writes that it “has provided new methods for understanding victims (who had long been ignored), but also crime generally. It has allowed us to view crime as a totality, and to fill criminology’s many gaps. Beyond its scientific achievements, it has also made a normative contribution … Aside from being at the forefront of developing new victim services and assistance, it has helped spearhead a new political movement for victims.” (p.22)

The “new methods” rely on a highly dubious combination of surveys and self-surveys combined with ‘advocacy science’ extrapolation of those numbers by persons whose credentials are not always impressive for the task and whose primary objective is not to discover existing Reality but to Shape a new Reality. Which is much in keeping, coincidentally, with the entire Revolutionary approach: you have a vision and a pretext for ‘whatever action it takes’ to bring your vision’s agenda to fulfillment.

The ‘victims’ had been “ignored” – and for quite a long time – because the concept of Law in the West had evolved beyond revenge and emotionalism and toward detached and objective assessment of provable and relevant facts so as to a) prevent the misapplication of the sovereign police power and b) to prevent society continually being wracked by private and personal vengeance.

And you can look around today and see that with the re-introduction of the victim-focus – coincident with the commonality-fracturing adoption of Identity Politics – both (a) and (b) are now back in full swing.

But I do support the “victim services” which in their basic efforts help persons unfamiliar with legal processes to get through the complexities of law enforcement process and especially court process.

Many of those “gaps” were the things put aside when the West shifted away from a vengeance-victim mode of enforcing law. So in this area Victimology has not introduced new ‘change’ but has actually re-introduced old and discarded elements.

And in best how-to-sell-your-product style, its supporters – Elias clearly among them – have selectively emphasized the positive while neglecting the negative and dangerous, and then he works hard to ‘spin’ the whole thing as purely-positive and a Great and Good New Thing.

And of course the final giveaway is the proud assertion that Victimology has not only provided a conceptual basis and justification for all this, but has actively “spear-headed a new political movement” – which is clear warning that there will be precious little detachment and objectivity in the ‘research’ and that there is a greatly heightened potential for partisan spin in the service of manipulation and deception of the public. But, as always, all in a ‘good cause’.

But then, immediately after those statements, Elias puts his objective hat again (halfway, at least) and lists the “drawbacks” (p.22) About the elements that have been “faulted” by outside critics he states: “Methodologically, [Victimology] has gathered data from very varied sources. Information culled from statistics, victimization and self-report surveys, case studies, archives, experimental and quasi-experimental studies, anecdotal reports, and participant observation has vastly enriched our victimological data.”

Note that this is a sly defense of some verrrry dubious ‘research’ procedures. The statistics have been extrapolated in many cases; the self-report surveys, anecdotal reports, and participant observation mean simply asking certain persons about their ‘story’; and in regard to the studies: the experimental have been conducted by ‘advocacy’ researchers (of whatever level of expertise and competence) and the quasi-experimental indicates a ‘study’ whose structure and methods did not conform to accepted professional standards in some or many ways.

And it is my personal habit nowadays never to easily-accept the use of the word “rich” in any of its grammatical forms, especially when accompanied by an exaggerated adjective or adverb (such as “vastly”).

I’d also note that much of what he describes that seems to be mere ‘story-telling’ conforms closely to the early and radical feminist “epistemology”: that women (somehow) process information with their emotions rather than the (male) mind and reason, that they are therefore not ‘abstract’ or ‘detached’ but rather emotionally involved in what they ‘report’, and that ‘narrative’ and story – rather than the male ‘argument toward facts’ is an equally valid, if not indeed much better, way to get at ‘facts’. Which ‘facts’, feminist epistemology would continue, do not exist anyway but are merely conditioned-observations stemming from a tainted, patriarchal habit of perceiving events that do not in any case participate in any ‘reality’ independent of the viewer.

Whew. What that last bit boils down to is that when dealing with the Six Blind Folks and the Elephant Problem (six folks unable to see come into tactile contact with the very different parts of the elephant: tusk, trunk, ear, legs, body, and tail) then feminist epistemology will decide that the Elephant doesn’t exist in the first place since there are such differing reports about it. Which is a colossal mistake that the ancients in the East chose not to make millennia ago and that the Greeks, with their efforts at analyzing according to the best and most proper use of their Reason and their mind, also avoided millennia ago.

Such ‘progress’.

He then neatly adds that the really substantive objections are that Victimology (in its criminal justice variant) doesn’t have enough data, when really, he insists, Victimology has far more data; but, as I have said, most of that ‘data’ is not professionally acceptable ‘data’ at all, but merely a collection of unverified and often unverifiable ‘stories’ that constitute ‘feelings’ which no outside observer can verify and that therefore constitutes that ‘spectral evidence’ that fueled and lethally deranged the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. (p.22)

Then he neatly includes objections from the Left – that Victimology has not gone far enough: there are suggestions that Victimology should “break the shackles of criminological methodology by devising new theories and by applying an open systems approach to our inquiries”. (p.22) But this suggestion really means that Victimology is still trying to be too ‘scientific’ according to ‘professional standards’ that are themselves too ‘patriarchal’ (meaning: detached, objective, insistent on careful and replicable investigation and assessment, and careful to make sure that its conclusions do not outrun its evidence and logically proceed from the evidence). The SO community is verrry familiar now with ‘science’ that has followed that ‘suggestion’. **

Other complaints – again from the Left – want to see ‘rape’ explored differently, freed from the shackles of evidence and more accepting of ‘story’, since the traditional criminological practice “favors the offender’s perspective”. Again, the SO community is familiar now with where such suggestions can lead a government and a country. ***

Indeed, the final complaint-suggestion he mentions is that Victimology “has unnecessarily constrained itself within traditional criminology’s boundaries, adopting the same conservative mentality”. (p.22) And that “conservative” means that the suggesters don’t accept the ‘old’ approach of the scientific method: formulate a hypotheses, carefully gather untainted data, assess the data objectively and carefully, and make only such conclusions as the data and the evidence will support.

This is not the way of Revolution and of Revolutionary ‘science’ where you already know what the real truth is and your job is simply to throw out a few ‘facts’ that ‘prove’ that the Revolution is right.

And again, the SO community nowadays is verrrry familiar with the results of that sort of thing.

He then neatly and subtly shifts from crime-Victimology to international-humanitarian Victimology, stating that the Soviets (this is 1986 and they are still the world’s bogeyman) have chosen to hew carefully to ‘traditional’ criminology in defining victims, so as to avoid a too-broad definition of ‘victim’ that would indict the Soviet system for humanitarian crimes. (p.23)

Placed right after Elias’s lengthy discussion of (American) crime-Victimology, a reader may well be seduced into presuming that to insist upon ‘conservative’ standards of criminology is to ‘do the same thing the Soviets are doing’ – which is a frakkulent bit of misleading manipulation. But you can see here the same type of illogical but meaty sensationalism that has been taken to stunning extremes in the SO Mania even as it masquerades as mature and professionally ‘scientific thinking and research’.

But then he mentions something a bit more objectively: “Some writers have so strongly embraced conservative, hardline criminal justice policies that a broader victimology would be a contradiction in terms”. (p.23)

What he is saying here is that already by 1986 American crime-Victimology has been embraced by the conservative-Right. BUT WHAT HE DOESN’T NOTE is that the same policies were not only embraced by, but pretty much implicit in, the (radical-)feminist thinking from the Left or putatively ‘liberal’ end of the spectrum. But in those days, and to some extent still nowadays, folks pretty much assume that if it’s coming from the Left-liberal side then it must indeed by ‘liberal’ and for ‘the individual’ (as opposed to ‘the government’) AND THIS IS NOT TRUE AND NEVER HAS BEEN.

Rather, radical-feminism has always been for the individual woman or for women as a class (there’s much argument within the Movement itself about that).

AND in the interests of the individual woman or women as a class this allegedly ‘liberal’ Movement welcomes – indeed demands – the intrusive and robust deployment of the government power, both its legislative and sovereign police power. Thus, as I have said, the National Nanny State and the National Security State both lead to the same anti-Constitutional place. And a hellish place it is indeed. As the SO community can now well attest.

He wraps up this section with the thought that “finally, several writers have suggested that victimology fills important gaps, which now allows criminology to finally establish itself as a science”. (p.23)

But those “gaps” are precisely there because Western Law had evolved beyond Medieval and caveman laws of victim-vengeance. And also because Western Science had managed to grow beyond emotionally biased and unverifiable ‘evidence’ into the realm of objective, detached, verifiable evidence that can prove to any rational analysis the accuracy and truth of its claims and assertions.

But in making this skewed claim he is proceeding from the assumption that without ‘the victim’ criminology is not a “complete science” (p.23) – and THAT is simply not true at all. It was in getting BEYOND the primacy of the victim’s age-old role that Law and Science actually matured into the actual Law and Science that fueled so much Western development and progress over the course of the past several hundred years. (And No, I will not allow a 1990-ish Multiculturalist assertion of all the West’s failures – and there have been more than a few – to trump my statement.)

He then tries to use attorney Benjamin Mendelsohn’s 1930s do-it-yourself analysis of “victimity” to justify the expanded role of the victim. Mendelsohn did raise some interesting observations – but that’s a long long way from creating a comprehensive and verifiable Theory upon which huge (and anti-historical) changes should be rapidly imposed upon a major Western nation’s legal system (which is precisely what has happened in this country in the past decades, simultaneously with the rising political influence of radical-feminism). (p.24)

Proceeding from Mendelsohn, he notes (1986) that “feminist victimologists have invoked international human rights standards in examining female victims, such as victims of sexual slavery”. (p.24) But in the American crime-Victimology setting, such a deployment of international standards is hugely fraught because America’s radical-feminism presumed without doubt that marriage, the Family, and even sexual relations themselves constituted a form of institutionalized ‘dominance’ and ‘oppression’ and for all practical purposes ‘slavery’. And the SO community can see here the clear foundations of both the Domestic Violence and SORNA regimes, as well as the foundations of the on-going assault on Marriage and Family.

“Some [thinkers]”, he notes, “argue that certain cultures, such as capitalist culture, may impose a structure of victimization”. (p.24) And you can see here not only the queasily Marxist core of much of this type of thought, but also its sensationalist yet sensationally inaccurate ‘thinking’: surely Soviet society, hardly ‘capitalist’, imposed victimizations far more glaring upon its citizens and captive peoples.

This is not to say that the ‘capitalist’ approach doesn’t require human beings to subject themselves, to some extent, to some form of systematic self-denial and self-Shaping in order to function within it. But ANY large human social system, seeking to organize itself for self-sustainment, is going to require some of that. To define victimization so broadly as to define any self-Shaping and self-denial as ‘victimization’ is a rather huge conceptual error, and would require an earthly government to assume the responsibility for (and power to deal with) perennial and built-in dynamics that have logically manifested themselves whenever the human species has tried to achieve higher-than-individual organization. (Recall, for example, how even the work or spiritual growth ‘communes’ of the Flower-Child 1960s resulted in their own types of quasi-tyrannical organization … think, for instance, of the Bhagwan).

So Elias here is setting up a self-licking ice-cream cone in best Pentagon fashion: you define a problem so fuzzy yet thus so theoretically huge and profound that just about ANY social phenomenon can qualify as part of the ‘problem’ or ‘emergency’ that you want to address, and thus that you will never ever lack for ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’ that the ‘problem’ that keeps you in business exists. And, thus, that the government – if you can get it to pay attention to your demands – must always do more, do ‘whatever it takes’, to ‘solve’ the problem … which is by definition impossible and so the government keeps trying and you keep demanding and … on and on and on. The SO community sees this now every day.

And it sounds more and more like Vietnam as you read along in this book.

And THEN he makes a remarkable suggestion: that governments as well as individuals are “victimizers” and that therefore Victimology should “study larger categories of victimization”.
(p.25)

Which gets me to thinking that the Beltway embraced radical-feminist supported crime-Victimology not only to pander politically to a group whose votes it had decided were worth the trouble, BUT ALSO to deflect any larger Victimology examination into the role of government-as-victimizer. In that sense, then, ‘men’ and then ‘the Sex Offender’ quickly became – in Leniinst-Stalinist terms – the ‘Necessary Enemy’ and – in Biblical terms – the Scapegoat who would have to be sacrificed in order to prevent worse things from happening. And you can see where THAT has gone (and is still going).

He concludes this Chapter: “At one time crime victims virtually monopolized criminal justice. Over time, law enforcement became a shared activity, and finally victims lost their role almost completely. By the mid-1900s victims had been formally excluded from criminal justice for several centuries.” (p.25)

That “one time” constituted all of the pre-Modern era in Western Law and Science. The crime victims in those pre-Modern days had “monopolized criminal justice” by seeking their own vengeance against whomever they had decided was guilty of ‘victimizing’ them – much like the Wild West in settlements before sheriffs and judges and juries had been set up; or lynch-mobs in place of or opposed to such agents of Law.

To say that the crime victims “lost their role almost completely” is to say that Al Capone and his colleagues “lost their role almost completely” when Prohibition was repealed.

Slipping back into his ‘international Victimology’ voice, he admits that “victimology’s most significant drawback might lie in confining itself almost exclusively to criminological boundaries … despite its broader origins”. (p.26)

He means two things: first, that Victimology still allows itself to be ‘confined’ by all those professional and objective standards of research and analysis that radical-feminists assert are merely oppressive and patriarchal obstructions designed to keep the ‘dominant males’ of human society on top (as it were).

Second, that international Victimology, while respecting the American (and radical-feminist) variant, should not abandon its larger analysis into entire cultures and structures of societies and of civilization, and into governments’ role in oppressing various classes, groups, races, genders, and so on.

Can you imagine any earthly government NOT wanting to head that initiative off at the pass?

Perhaps by throwing the Constitutional ‘obstructions’ aside and delivering up whatever Scapegoats are demanded in order to save itself from itself falling under the gimlet but hyper-excitable eye of international humanitarian Victimology.

“Dear Sir: The government regrets to inform you that you have been designated as a Necessary Egg in the ongoing policy of whomping up a National Omelette. This will entail your entire life prospects and your very human integrity to be impugned by the full force and authority of the national government. But rest assured it’s all in a good cause and someday – though perhaps you yourself won’t be able to participate in it – the government will be proven to have been right all along. Have a nice day.”

If you get my drift.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.

**And again I will note that in the Era of Bush the Egregious, the government – long used to accepting these suggestions in domestic affairs – then applied the gambit to foreign and military affairs, “breaking the shackles” of Truth and the Constitution to drag the country into its still-raging (and unsuccessful) wars in Southwest Asia. And that in 1999 and subsequently, by “breaking the shackles” of the old 1930s legislation designed to prevent another Great Depression and by departing from Truth and Honesty, the financial industry, with the Beltway’s essential help, led the economy into a series of Bubbles that have wrecked so much now.

***A very great deal of what began as the highly dubious but highly touted (and, by the Beltway, immediately embraced) ‘feminist epistemology’ – meaning the feminist theory of knowledge and knowing – is deployed in Victimology, especially as Elias describes it. I use a great deal of that feminist material while discussing Elias; I haven’t put footnotes in, because it would require a lot of them. But if you wish to come up to speed on these matters, I recommend this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy here, and also here, and this Wiki article here; you can always expand your research by following references and links in these articles or searching the internet via google or some other engine.

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN FROM 1993

I want to pass this along.

I just finished reading the moderate feminist* Jean Bethke Elshtain’s 1995 book “Democracy on Trial”, which is actually a collection of lectures she gave in 1993.**

As you may have noticed, although my concern is the Sex Offense Mania, I wind up mentioning ‘feminism’ a lot.

This is not because I ‘hate’ ‘women’ or because I want to see them restricted in life to Children, church, and kitchen (it works better in the original German: Kinder, Kirche, Kuche).

Nor am I trying to undermine the political efforts of the SO community’s efforts to forge alliances strong enough to roll-back SORNA.

But you can’t examine the SO Mania and Stampede without finding yourself willy-nilly in the radical-feminist ‘law’ thinking that – alas – underlies and ‘justifies’ it. It is HERE that you find the profound disregard for established Constitutional principles – on the assumption that since the Constitution and the Framers’ vision and the American ethos is so deeply ‘tainted’ by patriarchy and oppression that it not only can, but MUST, be disregarded in order to Correctly correct (sorry, couldn’t help myself) everything that’s wrong in America, as the radical-feminists see it.

So, by the way, I’ll be continuing my series on Nussbaum.

Anyhoo – and remember, all of these thoughts and observations come to her in 1993 – Elshtain has the following SO-relevant things to say – although she doesn’t specifically deal with the SO Mania (which in 1993 wasn’t quite developed enough to break the surface of national events the way it did in the 1994 Megan’s Law and the 1995 New Jersey Portiz case).

“But honoring our distinctions, as peoples of a particular heritage is far different from the current construction of ‘difference’ as a form of group homogeneity that brooks no disagreement ore distinction within [the Identity] and can maintain itself only as a redoubt against threatening “enemies” from without …” (page xiv) [italics Elshtain’s]

Here she is getting at what the SO community has seen and experienced: the absolutely fundamental and structural need for the radical-feminist Identity of Gender to have “enemies”.

And while ‘men’ and ‘the Macho-Male’ were always therefore necessary to the ‘success’ of the Gender Identity dynamic, in the 1990s that aim was sharpened (you can’t say ‘refined’) to focus on the sexually aggressive ‘man’ – in domestic relationships, in marriage, and in the Family.***

Thus the Domestic Violence legislation – fraught with lethal Constitutional erosions – and then, rapidly thereafter, the construction of the ‘Sex Offender’ and the Mania-Stampede that the SO community has experienced ‘from the inside’.

“Despite their unpopularity, policies that target [the demands of] particular groups are difficult to alter once they are in place, given the phenomenon of ‘clientele capture’. This term refers to the small number of vocal ‘clients’ of such policies … who have a vested interest in preventing change, even though, over the long run, a policy loses the support of the vast majority of citizens”. (page 4)

Now We have the SORNA regimen. Note that while the ‘policy’ involves huge deprivations of (and government-authorized assaults upon) the Constitutional tradition and the Constitutional rights of Citizens, yet the “clientele” is claimed to be ‘the public’, which allegedly (and wrongly) is imagined to benefit from the policy-regime (and the Advocates who also have now a vested interest in keeping the whole thing going; in order to both continue enjoying Status and Benefit and also – ominously – to prevent any post-Stampede examination of whatever they themselves have committed in the service of their objectives. ****

It might be claimed that the convicted SOs were the ‘clients’, but of course their opinions don’t matter, and if the regime were simply intended to ‘rehabilitate’ them, then the whole SORNA thing would be counter-productive to such a therapeutic objective. Instead, ‘therapy’ is tacked on as a fig-leaf to try to hide the genuine anti-American ethos of the whole regime. And in a remarkable demonstration of government chutzpah, ‘therapy’ is even deployed as an excuse to extend confinement of SOs beyond their judicially-imposed sentences.

But then she gets more specific, back there in 1993: “For example, fueled by claims that wildly exaggerate the extent of violence perpetrated against women – for the media’s hysteria knows no restraint in this matter – various proposals have been made based on the premise that burdensome democratic procedures , including the presumption of innocence, should be seen for what they are: bourgeois hypocrisy”. (page 22)

With the SO Mania and Stampede still formally a year in the future, I imagine it’s the Domestic Violence campaign that has caught her attention.

With the phrase “bourgeois hypocrisy” that she quotes from cutting-edge radical-feminist thought, she captures nicely – and We must not forget it – the Sixties’, Boomerish, queasily ‘revolutionary’ frame of reference which fueled much of the Attitude (anti-Constitutional and anti-democratic) that was inherent in those movements back then and which is woven into the warp and woof of subsequent policy and legislation, up to and including the SO Mania and Stampede.

She continues immediately: “We should recognize that the presumption of innocence and the need for our accusers to bear the burden of proof will protect us and our loved ones if we are ever called before the bar of justice; instead we are bombarded with arguments belittling, and even trashing, the whole idea of evidentiary requirements that are central to the ideal of equal standing before the law”. (page 23)

Again, although the national SO regime was still a year or more in the future, she – a law professor herself – had already discerned the huge anti-Constitutional dangers in the radical-feminist ethos and programme. (Recall that in the Domestic Violence scheme that Elshtain would have observed, the burden of proof is shifted TO THE DEFENDANT since ‘the proceedings are civil, not criminal’ and therefore the burden of proof is more elastic and can be shifted with more ease. And of course, nonetheless, the accused is still deprived of access to property and perhaps liberty, is liable to criminal sanction if he violates whatever court Order stems from the ‘civil’ proceeding, AND in many many States winds up on a Domestic Violence Registry no matter what the outcome of the Hearing is.)

Her use of “bombarded” is quite apt. It reminds Us that there is indeed a totalitarian-level of functional propaganda (defined as selective and not necessarily accurate official news tailored not to inform but only to motivate and emotionally arouse the citizenry)at work AGAINST US AS CITIZENS. And the military origin (from artillery usage) of the term reminds Us that We are in the midst of a ‘war’ – because that is precisely how radical-feminism envisions its agenda and objectives. And, naturally, the ‘Law’ is thus ‘the Law at war’ – that ominous and diabolic phrase that calls for Justice to be subordinated to Victory, however that is defined.

And in these Manias and Stampedes, ‘victory’ refers to the crushing by the government forces of an ‘enemy’ who are actually other (many, many other) Citizens. It is increasingly dubious not only how these policies and regimes can retain the appearance of political legitimacy, but how the government that has chosen to impose them can. I’m jus’ sayin’.

She then proceeds directly (and note that the vast bulk of this book is on political theory and not on gender-law) to single out the Violence Against Women Act. In that law, she observes, “the legislation incorporates ‘gender motivation’ into a law that presumes to see in rape – a crime of violence – a paradigmatic, indeed normative, expression of male dominancy”. (page 23)

In other words, she is concerned that an act – rape, already a crime in every State – is erected into some sort of ‘stereotypical’ act-of-domination which makes it a ‘political act’. And, of course, given that ‘gender’ was a highly-charged political term and its ‘advocates’ constituted a highly-influential political group, then any instance of ‘rape’ (and the definition began back then to expand like play-dough) is a matter of the most profound ‘political’ concern, and not simply a matter for ‘quaint’ and ‘ineffective’ and ‘slow’ criminal law and Constitutionally-bounded criminal jurisprudence.

A Federal government always looking to demonstrate its chops through the expansion of its sovereign police power needed to hear this radical-feminist ‘cutting-edge’ legal theory like a massive gorilla on the loose needs to get his paws on a big bowl of sour-mash likker.

Weirdly, “what is aberrant is suddenly re-described as normal”. (page 23) What she means here is that radical-feminist thought cast ‘rape’ (however defined) as not an isolated and aberrant criminal act of a criminal individual, BUT RATHER as the ‘natural’ behavior of ‘men’.

Which means, of course, that the country – in this nightmare vision – is faced with almost half its population normally engaging in an act that is both criminal and political. (Alarmingly, to anyone familiar with history, the concept of ‘political crimes’ instantly recalls Soviet and Nazi jurisprudence; but much of the legal profession and legislators prefer to think of it as ‘cutting-edge reform’, alas.)

AND once you assume anything close to the stunning assertion that ‘all sex is rape’, then it also assumes that almost half the population – AND the gender-determined ‘man’ half – is wired by Nature to ‘rape’. *****

And from that the SO community can clearly see that the ‘next logical step’ had to be Sex Offenses and the Mania and the Stampede necessary to lubricate the passage of the SORNA regime in all its laws and policies and half-baked ‘justifications’.

Oy.

Rather than each criminal case being looked at individually, she continues, this approach will “assume an undifferentiated class of victims (female), raising the specter that the concrete facts in a case of sexual assault will be much less important in establishing guilt or innocence than will some vague ‘animus based on a victim’s gender’”. (page 23) And thus you see where 16 years later AWA will get its idea that the ‘best’ thing to do is to ‘register’ anybody you can get your hands on, with no regard for any ‘differentiation’ as to crime or risk-level.

But that’s not all. “The motive police here rely on the platitudes of radical feminist ideology, a view of the moral and social world that, in the words of Catharine MacKinnon, ‘stresses the indistinguishablity of prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment’”. (page 24) [italics mine]

Nor is it enough to claim today that maybe that was, ummmmmmmm, a little bit of an overstatement and no longer represents ‘mainline radical-feminist thinking’. It very much represented that mainline radical-feminist thinking when the laws were passed and I’m going to bet that most pols and a whole lotta legal professionals and jurists still hold to it.

Elshtain follows this bogie like a fighter-pilot hot on its tail: “It follows that men simply are rapists” (page 24) [italics Elshtain’s]

And you don’t need a law or political science or philosophy degree to see where THAT was going to take the country. And all of Us, as Citizens and Americans.

She concludes with the thought (and look at this from the perspective now, of 2010): “One finds, then, at this moment, the distressing spectacle of an assault on civil liberties coupled with a perfervid ideology of victimization”. (page 24)

And add in that the Beltway and the State-governments have all committed themselves to this, and have for around 20 years. And the media ditto.

In a later section entitled “The Ideology of Women’s Victimization” she observes that there is now a “totalism” that deliberately seeks to lump all ‘sex’ cases together and all ‘perpetrators’ of sex together in a (dangerous and violent-by-nature) lump. And thus that it is demanded that “we must, as part of an interim strategy, expand the arrest powers of the police and promote the jurisprudential conviction that women are a special legal category requiring unique protections”.
(page 47)

Notice two things: a) this ‘totalism’ is similar to actual historical ‘totalitarian’ practice, and not simply by a grammatical similarity in the words; and b) that from the vantage point of 2010 that “interim strategy” has become semi-permanent and keeps growing like a cancer.

And she continues: “Mandated counseling, even behavioral conditioning of violent or ‘potentially violent’ men, coupled with compulsory punishment and no appeal, are common parts of the panoply of interim proposals that have been made; the potential abuses inherent in extending the therapeutic powers of the state as part of its policing function are commonly ignored”. (page 47)

And that expansion has now infected and taken-over the powers of the Federal, and not just the State, governments.

And you can see now where the SO Mania and SORNA regime were pretty much guaranteed to become actuality, just as soon as the pols could get around to it and a couple of particularly outrageous individual cases could be raised-up in truly propagandistic fashion in order to start the next logical Stampede.

And “interim” … not by a longshot.

But also note that even domestically, and in matters of huge Constitutional import, the possible and most likely probable lethally BAAAAAD Consequences were already being ignored. And then along came the Iraq War.

Elshtain observes that all of these proposals “lean heavily on the state’s policing powers” (page 48).

And then she quotes one highly influential activist of the early 1980s,whose totalist scenario envisioned as a solution for purported male violence a “total restructuring of society that is feminist, antiracist, and socialist”. (page 48)

Now nobody who has been to college – especially back in the day – can fail to recognize the type of dope-and-booze fueled bull-session ‘solving’ of the world’s ‘biggest problem’ (however the speaker conceived of it). And nobody who has ever eaten in a faculty dining room can fail to recognize the type of thinking (and thinkers) usually relegated with polite tactfulness to a table over in the corner.

But this type of thinking was not allowed to jell or mature over time, or – in the alternative – die under the weight of its own fantastical excitements. Instead, it was raised up – and by the government as well as the media – as ‘cutting edge reform and progress’.

Oy gevalt.

You probably wouldn’t be wrong to think of the Beltway as the world’s most dangerous on-going Bull-Session. Or as the world’s most dangerous Corner of the Faculty Dining Room.

Yet this is the policy that has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as enjoying the Status of being the national policy of the United States. I wonder sometimes if there aren’t more people laughing at Us around the world than are trying to blow Us up.

Although, until the Dollars run out or are demoted to just another national currency, Our honchos and honchettes will be ‘hailed’ with suitably straight faces and polite applause.

Continuing her quotation of that early 1980s activist, Elshtain notes as “most important” that the activist demands that “family life would be open for community scrutiny because the family would be part of and accountable to the community … community-based institutions could hear complaints AND DISPENSE JUSTICE [caps mine], and community networks could hold individuals accountable for their behavior and offer protection to women … if a false separation did not exist between the family and the community, women might lose their sense of isolation and gain a sense of entitlement to a violence-free life”. (page 48)

Nobody familiar with the ‘neighborhood associations’ of Imperial Japan, whose members policed the habits, thoughts (the Thought Police, kempei-tai, backed them up), and daily doings of the citizens, or the numerous local informers who pushed their ‘delations’ and accusations onto the desks of the Gestapo and the Stasi and the duty-desks of innumerable Soviet police stations and Party offices, can read this without a sense of alarmed disbelief.

And the Constitutional dangers of considering the ‘home and hearth’ as not being the sanctuary of the individuals from government intrusion, but rather as ‘public spaces’ liable to public and government policing … what were these people thinking?

I can’t see that they were thinking in any sort of Constitutional way at all.

And in a world of original sin – as the ‘quaint’ theology has it – where any human is capable of being ‘violent’ (what is Sin, really, if not a violence perpetrated upon the moral Order and moral Nature of humanity?) … how can anyone possibly expect a ‘right’ to a ‘violence-free’ life? Can anyone sanely expect a sin-free life, and as a ‘right’?

And if ‘God’ didn’t design things that way, then is the police-power of the State or Federal Government going to have any real expectation of achieving (and enforcing) such a vision?

And as the Framers well knew, no government in the history of the world would ever turn down the chance to be acknowledged as wielding the authority of ‘God’, especially if it got a chance to play with a level of power and authority equal to God’s. After all, that’s exactly what they were trying to prevent with their clanky, ‘quaint’ Constitutional vision of 1787.

Elshtain pursues the women-as-victim thread: “Eight years ago I researched the issue of women as victims of crime. I learned that, on the best available evidence, the assertion that women are the principal victims of violent crime is false. The most vulnerable body to inhabit in America today, as it was when I conducted my research, is that of a young black male”. (page 51)

This is inadmissible for Correct discourse, naturally, because it creates – or rather reveals – the incongruence between one Identity-Advocacy and another; it creates, as it were, ‘duelling victims’ or ‘duelling Identities’ or ‘duelling Advocacies’ – and the whole Idea is that there is just one great big bunch of ‘innocent victims of oppression’, a rainbow of perfectly congruent pains.

And certainly the cadres of radical-feminism, the biggest winners in the Big Pain sweepstakes, do not want to either a) lose the moral high ground (or at least the appearance of it for rhetorical purposes) by being perceived as ‘winners’ rather than ‘victims’ or b) to appear to be conniving enough to realize that they’ve won and admit that that’s what they wanted all along.

Elshtain continues: “ … violence against women is not on a precipitous upsurge compared with other crimes. Yet popular perception, fueled by the victimization narrative, holds otherwise. As a result, women tend to think of themselves as crime victims”. (page 51) (italics Elshtain’s)

Again, it can be no surprise that Elshtain was quickly labeled a gender-traitor by the cadres and the word went out to their friends and camp-followers in the media that she was not Correct: because here is a woman, and one with impeccable academic and professional credentials, saying that ‘it’s all in their mind’ – which, regardless of its accuracy or inaccuracy – raises the specter of women working themselves up in to a tizzy over something that’s mostly in their head.

It was precisely the objective of the radical-feminists to establish ‘women’ – or at least themselves – as the fearless and accurate thinkers; it was everybody else that they wanted to stampede like a mindless emotion-addled herd.

No problem – you might say. If any individual woman were to make a false accusation because of what was actually going on mostly in her head, well that would come out in any court trial … right? Ah – enter the revolutionary tactical genius: simultaneously with the weaving of the now-classic victimist Narrative was the effort to pre-empt any detached questioning of that Narrative or of any particular individual’s alleged narrative: detached, rational, objective, skeptical analysis would merely ‘re-victimize’ the victim and demonstrate the ‘historic insensitivity’ of the (male-dominated) justice system and courts and so forth and so on. Neat.

Elshtain continues: “the ideology of victimization” and the “perception” that women are special targets of “skyrocketing” crime have combined despite the fact that the most numerous class of crime victim is young males, just as the largest class of perpetrators is young males. (pages 51-2)

Worse, she sees that “the fear-of-crime syndrome has a debilitating effect on behavior, as women internalize a distorted perception of themselves [i.e. as helpless and special victims of crime]”. (page 52)

In 1991, she noted, half of the 250 made-for-TV movies made in the US involved – the heart of Lifetime! – “women undergoing abuse of one kind or another”. In the pulpy world of ‘knowledge derived from TV watching’, I would add, this supports the ‘fact’ that every woman in the country every week has a 50% chance of becoming a victim.

Oy. The 1990s.

Engaging in a bit of judgment, Elshtain concludes that “often such trashy programs are given a feminist gloss, but by portraying women in peril in the home, the workplace, and the street, they ill serve women or any feminism worthy of the name”. (page 52)

And you can quickly see where this type of sensibility would drive even putatively mature and credentialed professionals to do a bit of official stampeding themselves: the Domestic Violence and Sex Offense Stampedes and their respective regimes quickly flourished in such richly-dunged earth.

Elshtain concludes this thread with the thought: “Women are shown either as trembling wrecks or as fierce avengers with scant regard for what is usually called due process”. (page 52) And you can take your pick among those two equally whackulous civic role-options.

Congress, displaying the wisdom of Solomon in a most unwise way, chose to pander to both options.

I think – from what I can work out reading period works from a quarter-century ago – that the women’s liberation-victim types got around the problem of lower numbers of women’s victimization by creating two separate categories: on-the-streets and in-the-home. And then they proceeded to hugely demonize both Home and Family as the locus of huge amounts of violent crime (‘battering’ was the elastic term of the Domestic Violence initiatives as ‘sex abuse’ and ‘molestation’ and ‘assault’ were the elastic terms of the later Sex Offense Mania).

All the ‘vulnerable’ populations – women, children, and the old (everybody in the home, actually, except for the male – assigned the role of demonic assaulter) – were trapped under the roof of the Home, which in this scheme became the greatest crime scene venue in the country.

This line of attack would serve several purposes: it would keep up the victimization figures while simultaneously providing ‘telegenic’ victims and victimization scenarios; it would continue the attack upon male sexuality while also attacking the role of male ‘domination’; it would prepare folks for the radical-feminist Deconstruction of the Family (as well as the Father) that was essential to that view of women’s ‘equality’ and ‘liberation’; it would provide an ‘emergency’ upon which the government could invade what in the 1787 Framing vision had been the Citizen’s sacrosanct refuge from government intrusion – which promptly happened in the Domestic Violence regime legislation.

(I will go into this point at greater length in my upcoming Post on Robert Elias’s 1986 book “The Politics of Victimization”.)

Elshtain notes the oddness of a self-proclaimed oppressed class that is putatively oppressed by an oppressive society, then calling upon that same oppressive society to protect them from the oppression. (page 54)

But really, that’s not at all what the radical-feminists did: they did not try to, and never intended to, enlist the help of ‘society’ - how could they, since so many in society ‘just don’t get it’? No, their plan was always to do an end-run around any public debate or discussion or deliberation: they did not ‘debate’ the radical-feminist position in public, they did not seek to have a thorough deliberative process take place even within the halls of Congress itself.

And the SO Mania-Regime is proof of that: to this day, little if any deliberation has been done in public, nor even among the legislators themselves.

Elshtain remarks upon the queasy and ominous development of a “society of scrutiny”, in which gimlet-eyed cadres or ‘reliable observers’ are constantly watching the population to raise the alarm at the first sight of un-Correctness. This weird intrusiveness is common both to small-towns and to all sorts of Party cadres; everyone watches everyone else, and I do NOT merely mean that everyone watches out for everyone else. And the alarm is sounded at the first sight of someone who is not-Correct, who would then be shamed, disciplined, ostracized.

You can see here how SORNA would be ‘the next logical step’ in the development of a society that watched, shamed, punished, ostracized.

You can also see where this ‘shaming’ concept – coming from a small-town tradition that was also, alas, a totalitarian tradition – lulled the (already feminist-friendly) New Jersey Supreme Court when it upheld Megan’s Law in the Poritz case, and goosed the increasingly pulpy reasoning of the US Supreme Court when it overturned the Alaska Supreme Court in Smith v. Doe in 2003 (startlingly so, since a State’s Supreme Court is considered the final arbiter in interpreting that State’s own constitution).

“For those who push a strong version of identity politics, any politics that does not revolve around their identities is of no interest to them. There is no broader identification with a common good beyond that of the group of which one is a member.” (page 58)

So simply by the core working of a ‘strong’ form of identity politics (who would embrace a ‘weak’ form?) any commonality based on an identity liked ‘shared citizenship’ or both being members of The People … are undermined by necessity.

And then to take a chunk of those formerly-united-with Citizens and declare them (again, of necessity) ‘enemies’ of your Identity – and then on top of that to declare that they are not only enemies but threats – and then on top of that to declare that they are threats ‘by nature’ and cannot help themselves and therefore cannot be trusted to be rehabilitated or to exercise any self-restraint – and then on top of that they are ‘violent’ by nature as a class that happens to be their gender – and then on top of that their incorrigible violence also constitutes a violation of their (possibly constitutional?) right to live without violence … well, you see where all that can quickly lead.

Curiously, it was precisely to protect both (all?) genders’ rights to live without constant fear of government violence that the Framers so carefully constructed the Constitution in 1787.

Correlating her own thought with that of political scientist George Kateb, she mentions the “re-tribalization” inflicted by Identity Politics. On top of all the regressions – to Medieval jurisprudence, to a pre-Constitutional ethos – We must also include now The People being fragmented back down into ‘tribes’. I’m not seeing the ‘progress’ here.

So much remains to be done.

NOTES

*As best I can make out, there are a substantial number of verrrrry impressive thinkers who would call themselves ‘feminist’ but not of the radical variety. Elshtain is one. If you haven’t heard much about her, it’s primarily because only the radicals ‘organized’ themselves into a world-bending (and Constitution-corroding) Advocacy who made the Long March to the Beltway; they then labeled all feminists less radical than themselves as something akin to gender-traitors thereby neatly leaving the term ‘feminist’ to themselves.

Which, by the by, is precisely what happened as soon as Lenin took power: the first folks to get it in the neck (even before the Czar and the imperial family) were all the assorted Mensheviks and other deviationists who were Marxist and Communist … but not the way Lenin thought a Correct Marxist should be (i.e. the only Correct Marxist was a Marxist-Leninist).

**The edition I am quoting is the Basic Books paperback of 1995.

***Which dovetails nicely with what the entire feminist project has to demand, unpleasant and inconvenient as it may be to mention it in polite or unsuspecting company: the Deconstruction of the Family as a set of committed relationships which possesses a pre-existing authority to interfere with the ‘choice’ and ‘comfort’ of the ‘contracting parties’ (you can no longer simply say ‘adults’ and you can no longer assume a male-female dyad).

****I have often used the historical referent of Mussolini’s minions after the Allies started to re-take Italy in 1943: they desperately wanted to be ‘forgotten’ for their roles in the former Duce’s regime (but, nicely, wanted to receive their pensions for their ‘government service’ nonetheless).

*****Although, in a jarring illogicality, the radical-feminists who claim that men by Nature rape, are equally fanatic in their demand that women NOT be seen as being by Nature ‘nurturers’. Curiouser and curiouser do things get, as anybody familiar with fairy-tales would say.