Guest Op-ed, from R. Tarpaeian
Alyce
LaViolette, domestic violence expert extraordinaire with over 30 years’
experience, is giving battered women a black eye. She is the star witness for the defense,
brought in to convince a jury that Jodi Arias, who admits to the brutal
slaughtering of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander, was actually a battered
woman—a domestic violence victim.
Bear
in mind that this murder was particularly gruesome. Arias stabbed Travis 29
times, one cut an ear-to-ear throat slashing, and for good measure shot him in
the face with a handgun.
Other
than Ms. Arias’ own testimony after the fact, there is no evidence to support
any allegation of domestic violence on the part of Mr. Alexander. There is,
however, ample evidence that Jodi Arias stalked Travis, and of course
eventually savagely butchered him.
It
should come as no surprise that Ms. LaViolette has come under severe criticism.
Feminists and “battered women’s advocates” fear that she is doing irreparable
harm to their cause. She is being criticized
as a typical defense shill, no different than one of the other expert witnesses
for the defense, psychologist Richard Samuels. He
attempted to paint Arias as a sympathetic victim who suffered an abusive
childhood. Because Arias eventually admitted to the murder only after floating
several alternate realities (including one claiming that two ninjas did the
deed), the primary goal of the defense is to avoid a murder-1 conviction that
could bring the death penalty.
Enter
domestic violence expert Ms. LaViolette.
As
everyone knows, using behavioral “scientists” of one breed or another in
criminal cases is standard operating procedure.
Everyone in the courtroom recognizes these people as hired guns. They
are hired only if their analysis bolsters the side’s case. It’s a game. After
they lend their expertise in the direct, the opposition attempts to discredit
them in the cross-examination.
But
it is a big mistake to view Ms. LaViolette through this lens. She is not
just a hired gun who, had she been hired by the prosecution would have
testified just as authoritatively on Mr. Alexander’s behalf. There is ample
evidence that Travis was afraid of Jodi. Friends warned him that she was
dangerous. The state has a much stronger case that Jodi Arias fits the “batterer
profile,” someone that could carefully plan and commit the ultimate act of
domestic violence, which after all is what this trial is about.
She
stalked him. She was obsessed with him. If she couldn’t have him, nobody would.
Her behaviors are in line with many of the classic benchmarks of “abuse”
defined by the “experts” such as LaViolette—one of which asserts that an
“abuser” will eventually kill “his” victim if there is no intervention.
But
there is no circumstance that would ever find Ms. LaViolette defending a male
victim of domestic violence. In fact, under intense cross-examination she
admitted that she had never served as an expert witness on behalf of a man.
But
rest assured Alyce LaViolette knows men very well. Most of her employment has
been counseling “batterers,” a profitable business these days. Had the
prosecutor been on the ball he could have easily discredited LaViolette at jump
street by simply asking her about the circumstances of the men in the “batterers
groups” that she runs.
Are
they all guilty of beating women? Undoubtedly some of them are—but most people
don’t understand the legal machinery involved in domestic violence allegations.
An accusation of domestic abuse, something routine in a contested divorce
involving custody of children, usually results in an “abuse protection” order.
Once in place, it requires literally nothing other than a verbal claim to haul
the man into court for a criminal prosecution of a technical violation of the
abuse protection, or “restraining,” order (which is “civil” in nature when
issued, but transforms to criminal when a violation is alleged).
Men
are prosecuted for ridiculously innocuous things, such as phoning their child
at a day or time not “allowed” by the restraining order; happening to be in the
same public place as the “victim,” or even being intentionally invited by the
“victim” for the express purpose of entrapment.
Once
accused, the punishment often results in probation to avoid a jail sentence if
the accused successfully completes a “batterers program.” Besides her forensic
career as a domestic violence expert witness, which pays her $300 an hour, this
is what LaViolette does. She runs batterer programs for men who have been
accused of domestic violence.
Another
pertinent question the prosecution could have asked is: Do the men LaViolette
treats volunteer for her counseling? Well, in the first place, if they don’t,
they go to jail, as it’s a condition for probation.
Once
wringing this admission from LaViolette, the prosecutor should have then probed
her on the issue of guilt or innocence of the men assigned to her program under
threat of jail time. Do they ever claim innocence, i.e., that they were falsely
accused?
Well,
under the rules of these batterer treatment programs, this can’t happen. In
order to be admitted into the program the men have to sign a lengthy document
that among other things requires them to confess to committing domestic
violence. And of course, if they refuse to sign they violate probation and...
go to jail.
This
then, is the captive audience for LaViolette’s treatment. If it sounds like
something out of Stalin’s Soviet Union, it should. These are, in fact,
re-education camps.
Back
to LaViolette’s defense of Jodi Arias.
Ms.
LaViolette is symptomatic of all domestic violence experts. When confronted
with a situation where a woman has abused, battered, or even killed a man, the
response is always the same: 1. Deny. 2.
Minimize. 3. Excuse.
If
this sounds familiar, it should. It’s part of the standard mantra of domestic
violence pseudo-science. It is presented
in the canonical literature as the pattern of responses by (always) male
perpetrators of domestic violence when confronted. First they deny that it
happened. Then they minimize the extent of the abuse, and/or they attempt to
excuse it by blaming the victim for doing something to provoke them.
Battered
women advocates like LaViolette at first even refused to acknowledge that
domestic violence runs both ways. Unbiased research, what little there is, has
shown going back to the late seventies that women are at least as likely to initiate
domestic violence as men. Eventually they were forced to acknowledge it, as
even LaViolette grudgingly did on the stand once or twice. But having been
forced to admit that female-on-male domestic violence exists they then resort
to... minimizing and excusing it. They claim that the frequency of women
abusing men is insignificant , and in the same breath are careful to remind us
of why women do what they do... i.e., they rationalize it by claiming that the
man was ultimately responsible because of some past actions and behaviors. They excuse it.
And
this is exactly what LaViolette attempted to do on the stand to support the murderess,
Jodi Arias. The only problem is that she
is trying to excuse an unbelievably brutal murder using testimony solely from
the murderer! Incredibly, in response to a juror’s written question directly
putting it to her if the gruesome butchery of Travis Alexander wasn’t the “greater
act of domestic violence” than those supposedly committed by Travis as
represented to her by Jodi; she actually answered “No.”
Alyce
LaViolette, with her 20-page CV, and
her 30-some-odd years in the field, is not an aberration. She is the face of victim-feminism,
of a worldview that has indoctrinated two generations of women and men into believing that
relationships between men and women are based on power and control, rather than
love and reciprocity.
It
is no secret that many of the women in this arena have evolved into lifestyles
that exclude men from their beds. It is no secret that the majority of
lesbianism is the product of learned, adaptive behavior. To believe that women
who suffer bad marriages and turn into man-hating harridans (often disguised as
compassionate, well-meaning, learned “educators”) and “discover” a latent
sexual preference for women that was actually innate, is almost as absurd as
believing that incarcerated men who turn to homosexuality were born that way
but just required the right environment to discover their true sexual appetites.
Quite
frankly, the notion that women—or men—who are incapable of having intimate
relations with the opposite sex are gainfully employed as experts presiding
over any aspect of male-female relationships
should give pause to any rational person. Surely, it’s time to recognize that
the inmates have been given the keys to the asylum.
Alyce
LaViolette defending Jodi Arias as a victim
of domestic violence is Exhibit A of the corruption of the behavioral sciences.
I won’t say that psychobabbling behavioral experts have no place in the courtroom... they do: as criminal defendants.
It’s
time to take the keys back.
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