Following my blog means you have seen me go from understanding how to accept a coerced police confession to processing a trauma and rewriting the narrative to be kinder to myself but also more honest to the true events. I urge you to follow the chronicling of my journey recovering from a psychotic break during which my boyfriend self-harmed, and a neigbor accused me of beating him, called the police, and the police forced me to assume blame because no matter how hard I tried, they didn’t believe I was hurt.

My lawyer (good man, honest fellow, decent lawyer, just a shitty court municipality) was expressing a lot of things to my parents at the time but not to me. I never knew any of this and honestly I’m kind of glad I didn’t. It was easier to process a gender biased court proceeding thinking that maybe someone had messed up their job helping me.

The truth is, I’ve seen this case in reverse. I’ve lived it, in fact.

I was so much worse, he actually was the one harming me, and the guy claimed that his mental health caused him to lose all contact with reality. The courts dropped everything immediately. He lied about it, maybe, but the cops bereated me for scaring him.

My lawer posed the argument from the court was that you can’t throw out a coerced confession because the cops were doing their job and were compassionate.

I fail to agree, honestly.

I spent a decent chunk of time panicked, confused, sobbing, and explaining in beautiful clinical language the symptoms of my psychosis. The cops all rolled their eyes and I stopped breathing very well, to which they looked even less concerned. And when I said I needed to stand up and breathe better, the cop held out her arms to push me back, as if hovering over an active panic attack was proper protocol and not a civil rights violation.

If I were a man, it would have been thrown out immediately.

I just knew it in my heart of hearts.

More recently, trying to explain to my parents that I was harmed by police and the court system has been challenging but ultimately rewarding. I’ve had to play the “I took clinical counseling and psychology classes on this” card to be heard, but that’s fine. I’ll play my cards if it means I’m being validated by my family.

The argument from a legal stance is that men’s mental health isn’t violent while women’s mental health always is. I don’t think this is a commonly held social view, though, but it’s one that holds up in courts. It’s why women are frequently accused of lying when coming forward about being abused, raped, or in otherwise horrible situations.

There’s so many reasons for this:

One: Courts look at a hysterical woman as violent.

Yes, the mental health issue could mean there are communication issues that can result in harmful dynamics and unhealthy conflict resolution. But those are things that take two people. A hysterical woman isn’t getting to the point of being hysterical just because she thinks it’s a fun time. I’d beg to say she’s scared and feeling unheard.

Two: Courts play the abuser’s game of “you reacted wrong, so you’re at fault”.

I think I made a post about reactive abuse and why that’s a misnomer. If not, I’ll defintely have to get on that. But really, reactive abuse is just a congruent response to someone abusing you that gets flipped around as being called abusive behavior to gaslight you so that you feel guilty for standing up for yourself or even responding.

Three: Police are trained to believe anyone except for women.

We’re taught otherwise, but in practice, police brutalize women who step forward, and taunt them, berating them for provoking their partner. They’ll cite mental illness as a reason a woman deserved abuse, and they’ll even go so far as to suggest that they can file a report but that there’s a low chance anyone will believe them. Police hate women.

Four: Courts attack the person of the victim and highlight the perpetrator.

In a legal proceeding, a court will try to prove that the victim deserved abuse through proving her personhood or character was so flawed that anyone would abuse her, and so she has no business calling out her abuser. Yet, the courts mock victims for presenting evidence of abuse, as the perpetrator had great relationships. It becomes a game of slander rather than getting justice for someone in distress who’s been hurt.

But here’s the thing:

I remember being nineteen and having been brutally raped. My friend asked me if I wanted to report it and she even offered to go to the station with me. I knew then that the police were going to blame me for being raped.

When I went inpatient about a year later from the trauma of the rape being too much to handle, a doctor dismissed my trauma completely. It was exactly as I’d feared.

Not all systems meant to protect women are kind.

I hope the arguments for us in the future are better.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.