thenation--2020-10-07--A Reckoning Inside the Domestic-Violence Movement

On a Friday night in July , two police officers in Rollinsford , a small town in eastern New Hampshire , responded to a report of a domestic disturbance at the home of RJ and Sarah Letendre .
RJ Letendre , who at the time worked as a police officer in the nearby city of Dover , told the responding officers that during a conversation about a divorce , she attacked him , scratching and biting him.1 The officers arrested Sarah Letendre , a stay-at-home mother of two young children , and charged her with domestic violence simple assault .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a psychiatric evaluation .
In an affidavit , police said they “ did not observe any obvious injuries on her , ” though they noted that “ she was complaining of pain in her left rib area.
” Afterward , police dropped her off at her home , which she was not allowed to enter because of a no-contact order triggered by the assault charge .
According to her sister Jessica Newman , Sarah Letendre was wearing a tank top , shorts , and hospital slippers when the police left her outside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she went inside to get her purse so she could leave , Newman said , RJ Letendre called the police again .
They pulled over Sarah Letendre as she was driving away , around 4:30 am , and tried to arrest her .
She fled.2 The story she told about that night to her sister and in court documents was quite different from her husband ’ s .
In a domestic-violence petition filed later , Sarah Letendre said that during the argument , RJ Letendre , a former mixed-martial arts fighter , had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her with a knee on her sternum , and elbowed her hard in the ribs .
This wasn ’ t the first time he ’ d attacked her , she claimed .
In other alleged incidents dating back to 2018 , he picked her up by her neck , put her in a choke hold , and pushed her into a bathroom door .
She said she found a tracker on her car and that he threatened to kick her out of the house and to take their children if she tried to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use his status as a police officer to arrest me , ” she wrote in her petition .
“ Recently those threats are more frequent.
” ( He also filed a domestic violence petition against her , claiming , “ I had to physically restrain her until police arrived on scene.
” ) 3 Although Sarah Letendre was taken to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation , her discharge papers list no concerns with her mental state .
Instead , her diagnosis was broken bones : “ Closed fracture of multiple ribs of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four decades , a dominant project for American feminists has been getting the police and the legal system to respond seriously to the crisis of domestic violence .
More than 10 million people in the US are abused by their partners each year .
One in four women will be pushed , slapped , beaten , burned , strangled , or otherwise harmed by an intimate partner during her lifetime .
Nearly half of the women who are murdered in the US each year are killed by a romantic partner .
Until the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ largely treated this kind of violence as a family issue best resolved quietly at home .
As feminists worked to bring the problem into the public sphere , many advocates focused on toughening penalties for abusers and standardizing the way law enforcement responded to complaints .
Jurisdictions around the country now have laws intended to ensure an aggressive law enforcement response , including laws that require police to make an arrest in response to a credible allegation and no-drop policies that force prosecutors to continue a case even without cooperation from witnesses.5 Today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a painful reckoning with the collateral damage of this approach .
Stricter criminal penalties have protected some survivors , but they ’ ve also led to the arrest and prosecution of others and contributed to a ballooning prison population that is disproportionately made up of men and women of color .
“ Anti-violence programs have their hands deeply inside of carceral processes , which leads not only to the arrest of men but also of women , ” said Beth Richie , an anti-violence activist during the movement ’ s early years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and justice department at the University of Illinois at Chicago .
At particular risk are those who don ’ t present as the perfect victim : They aren ’ t cooperative with the legal system , they have a criminal record or substance-use issues , or they fought back .
In Sarah Letendre ’ s case , her arrest initially left her without custody of her children and homeless , though she has gained partial custody and , according to Newman , found an apartment .
In September , the Merrimack County @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her but is still pursuing other criminal charges , including resisting arrest .
The Dover Police Department said in August that it fired RJ Letendre , whose attorney did not return a request for comment , for “ multiple violations of departmental policy.
” 6 Some advocates credit improvements in the criminal-legal system for a sharp drop in domestic violence rates over the past three decades .
But as Leigh Goodmark , who directs the Gender Violence Clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law , notes in her book Decriminalizing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decline in crime rates generally .
In recent years , domestic violence rates have fallen more slowly than crime overall , while domestic homicides rose .
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in improving the ways police , prosecutors , and judges respond to abuse , more than half of victims of nonfatal abuse never report it to the police .
A 2015 survey found that survivors often feel dismissed or blamed by police and said they feared reprisal or consequences such as losing housing or custody of their children .
Others @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be arrested .
Calling the police sets in motion a process that victims have little control over .
And although there is little recent data available , two studies in the 1990s indicated that police have their own domestic violence problems , with as many as 40 percent of officers ’ families experiencing domestic violence , compared with 10 percent of families in the general population.7 Conversations about what Nan Stoops , a 40-year veteran of anti-violence work , calls the “ unholy alliance ” between the anti-violence movement and criminal-legal system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the isolation provoked by Covid-19 intensified concerns about domestic violence and as the Black Lives Matter movement advanced discussion about police reform .
“ We are having really hard conversations about what this means for us and how it ’ s going to change our work , ” said Stoops , who is a strategic adviser to the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence .
In June , domestic violence coalitions from more than 30 states released a remarkable letter accounting for the ways in which their movement invested in the criminal-legal system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities and other people of color and calling for “ divestment and reallocation ” of resources.8 Domestic abuse presents a deadly threat to millions of people across America , in part thanks to the nation ’ s glut of guns , and it ’ s often invoked to make the case for policing and prisons .
But as concerns about police misconduct grow , feminist activists who have been building alternative systems for emergency intervention and longer-term accountability are finding new allies and new attention .
These community-based projects are still embryonic , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question , “ If the police can ’ t keep everyone safe , what else can ?
” 9 As feminists launched public campaigns against battering in the early 1970s , they also established a community-based safety and support infrastructure for women fleeing abuse in the form of rape crisis centers and temporary shelters .
Law enforcement began to play a larger role after lawsuits against police departments for failing to protect abused women resulted in new laws and practices standardizing their response .
In 1981 , Minneapolis pioneered a mandatory arrest policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ early research linked the law to reduced recidivism , cities around the country adopted that approach .
In 1984 a federal task force released a report cementing the notion of family violence as a criminal problem that could be addressed through arrest , prosecution , and prison time.10 Thus began what longtime activist Mimi Kim has described as “ the carceral creep.
” Feminists were fighting for attention and resources at the same time that tough-on-crime politics came into vogue .
“ Because crime and criminal justice reform were sort of the only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the only way to get [ funding ] , ” said Donna Coker , a professor at the University of Miami School of Law .
What had been a grassroots movement morphed into a professionalized field that largely saw gender violence through a unifying any-woman lens .
In reality , intimate partner violence is more common and usually more serious for low-income women , and low-income women of color bear an even greater risk.11 Then came the 1994 crime bill , which dumped billions of dollars into a ballooning prison system and included @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Joe Biden , who championed the legislation , has described as his “ proudest ” accomplishment from his time in the Senate .
VAWA committed significant federal resources to law enforcement , victim ’ s services , and the National Domestic Violence Hotline , and it helped to reframe gender violence as a civil rights issue and drew massive public attention to a crisis often hidden behind closed doors.12 But some feminists , particularly women of color , were deeply skeptical of the marriage between the anti-violence movement and the criminal-legal system .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the Asian Women ’ s Shelter in San Francisco .
“ I recall someone telling us that VAWA passed—that we all needed to applaud .
And I felt sick , ” she wrote to me .
“ I understood that VAWA did help some of the immigrant women experiencing domestic violence… .
But at what cost ?
” 13 VAWA directed the bulk of its funding toward criminal responses ; as of 2013 , only about 15 percent of the grant money allocated by VAWA was going to social services .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two largest grant programs provided $ 266 million to the criminal-legal system but just $ 30 million to housing , writes Goodmark , “ despite repeated studies showing that housing is the single greatest need identified by people subjected to abuse.
” 14 Twenty-six years after VAWA ’ s passage , there is little consistent evidence of the effectiveness of criminalization .
Although initial research indicated that mandatory arrest policies—now in effect in nearly half the states—reduced future violence , some follow-up studies found that arrests may increase recidivism .
Studies on prison @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Meanwhile , there has been a marked increase in the rate of women arrested for intimate partner violence .
The case of Marissa Alexander , a Black mother of three who faced 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to defend herself against her husband in 2010 , sparked national organizing not just to free her but also to draw attention to the many other survivors facing similar prosecutions.15 “ Certainly if you arrest someone and hold them , they ’ re not committing violence against their partner during that time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it has a deterrent effect once they ’ re released , ” said Goodmark .
Trauma and economic insecurity have been linked to intimate partner violence .
Male unemployment is the “ most important demographic risk factor ” in intimate partner femicides , a 2003 study found .
Prosecution and imprisonment don ’ t fix these factors and often aren ’ t what survivors want , either .
The criminal-legal system generally doesn ’ t have an answer for those women or for those who can ’ t afford to leave .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ leading causes of homelessness for women.16 Of all the cases that Laurie Schipper has been involved in during her nearly four-decade career , none haunt her like Ruthie ’ s .
Schipper , the executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence , met Ruthie in a parking lot in Iowa ’ s Story County after receiving a call from the woman ’ s landlady .
There was very little of Ruthie ’ s body that wasn ’ t covered in bruises .
Schipper spoke to Ruthie through a car window for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ partner had been abusing her for years , leaving her with serious physical and psychological damage .
Every time Schipper moved , Ruthie flinched.17 Schipper felt paralyzed .
Ruthie had alcohol and drug-use disorders .
She didn ’ t want the police to get involved , and it was clear that the effects of her trauma were so immense that she wouldn ’ t be stable in a shelter .
“ I remember thinking in the parking lot that I had nothing to offer that woman , ” Schipper told me .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ damaging effects from the violence that often don ’ t fit into our boxes of who ’ s appropriate for services .
They are angry .
They may have a violent record themselves .
They may be using substance abuse to self-medicate.
” Eventually she gave Ruthie her card and left.18 Schipper didn ’ t hear from Ruthie for a few years .
Then , during a meeting with a county sheriff , he opened a file and asked Schipper if she could identify the woman in a photo .
It was Ruthie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Her partner had held her captive and battered her for 10 days .
Nobody knew anything about her identity when her body was taken to the morgue , but Schipper ’ s card was in her pocket.19 Ruthie ’ s case was one of many that sent Schipper in search of new ideas .
In 2013 the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence began to pivot from the emergency shelter model ; instead , the coalition prioritized securing immediate and long-term private housing for people fleeing harm , as well as financial assistance and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ met women wherever they were .
Schipper also began to look for ways to help people who didn ’ t want the police involved in their cases.20 What was happening in Iowa was part of a gradual shift among mainstream anti-violence programs .
The groundwork for this turn was laid in large part by a group of feminists of color , including Kim , who in 2000 formed Incite !
The organization seeded on-the-ground experiments in responses to violence that did not involve law enforcement .
One of those projects , founded by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generated a nearly 600-page tool kit for community-based violence interventions that did not rely on police , crisis centers , or social services.21 Schipper used it to set up pilot projects around Iowa , working with organizations in communities of color and rural areas to offer alternatives to people who didn ’ t want police involvement in their cases .
One of the partner organizations was Crisis Intervention Service , which operates in 15 counties in the state ’ s rural north .
Mary Ingham , the group ’ s executive director , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the key to ending abuse was getting law enforcement “ on our side , ” making more arrests and getting the cases into the courtroom .
Instead she observed that mandatory arrest laws and other codified procedures often ended up limiting survivors ’ options or discouraging them from seeking help in the first place .
After the pilot started , one of its first referrals came from a police chief in a small town who ’ d been called by the neighbor of an undocumented immigrant couple .
“ He realized that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ able to keep the woman safe , ” Ingham said.22 Iowa ’ s statewide domestic violence coalition is one of a handful across the country that have started to reconsider the emphasis on tightening criminal penalties .
Nationally , the trend within the domestic violence advocacy community has been “ a shift not only to move away from criminal justice as a focus for activism , as a focus for policy reform , as a focus for collaboration , but…also a shift to invest in changing the social conditions that create and foster @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Now , said Kim , because of the uprising sparked by George Floyd ’ s killing , “ there has been forward movement in work that has been glacial over the past 20 years.
” 23 Looking back , Bonnie Hansen can see the red flags : the jealousy , the aggression .
She met S at a social event in her apartment complex last year , a few months after she moved to Idaho Falls , Idaho , from Chicago , where she ’ d spent her whole life .
( Hansen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
She was 29 and wanted to do something new.24 Things got worse this spring after the couple moved together to Boise .
Hansen , a therapist , was pregnant .
The coronavirus hit , and then S was out of work .
Stuck at home , they fought about money .
She asked him to go to counseling , which he did for a while but stopped after his therapist switched to sessions by video.25 On May 19 , when Hansen was five months pregnant , an argument about money escalated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instead he charged at her , hit her in the face , pushed her to the ground , and began to strangle her .
Then he took off in her car.26 Hansen wasn ’ t sure she wanted to report the incident , but she wanted her car back , so she called police dispatch .
In trying to explain what happened to her car , Hansen admitted there had been a fight .
Soon two police officers showed up at her house .
She recalled telling them that she didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just wanted S to be away from her for the night .
They told her they would arrest him for felony assault.27 According to Hansen , what happened next was a “ nightmare.
” She felt pressured and belittled by prosecutors , who served her with subpoenas , forcing her to testify against S. They sought a plea deal that would put him in prison for at least two years , though she felt strongly that incarceration would do little to change his behavior or give her a sense of closure .
Because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couldn ’ t speak with him about her pregnancy , which she ultimately decided to terminate .
Unable to get an abortion in Idaho , she had to travel to Seattle for the procedure , alone .
“ I wish I could have talked to him about it , ” she told me .
“ I had an idea of what my future might look like with this person , and I was just told to move on.
” ( S ’ s attorney declined to comment on the pending case . )
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ even more powerless and unheard , ” Hansen wrote to the Ada County Prosecutor ’ s Office in August .
( A spokesperson for the prosecutor ’ s office said she was unable to comment on pending litigation but sent a statement reading , in part , “ Our primary missions as prosecutors are to help ensure public safety , to guide victims through the system and to prevent future crime by suggesting effective rehabilitation for the defendant .
We take each of those goals very seriously.
” ) Hansen started taking medications @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be a better way to handle abuse cases , she began to research .
“ I became kind of obsessive , ” she told me .
When she read about an approach known as restorative justice , she felt immediately drawn to the concept .
“ Yes , yes , I need that , ” she remembered thinking.29 The term “ restorative justice ” generally refers to dialogue-based methods of addressing harm , in which a person who ’ s been hurt identifies avenues for accountability in pursuit of healing and lasting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ justice have roots in Indigenous traditions , including peacemaking circles .
Another form is group conferencing , in which victim , offender , and members of their community agree to a plan for repairing harm .
Using restorative justice for domestic violence cases has long been controversial among anti-violence advocates , in part because of fears that it places too much responsibility on victims .
But that is slowly changing , as the limitations of the criminal-legal system become more apparent .
In the United States many existing restorative justice processes applied in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ criminal-legal system rather than as an alternative to it , operating in jails and prisons or serving as diversion programs .
Some anti-violence advocates see this linkage as a limitation .
“ If advocates work with law enforcement , law enforcement invariably wins , ” said Kim .
Last year , she and attorney sujatha baliga developed a restorative justice pilot program in California ’ s Contra Costa County serving people who do not want law enforcement involved in their cases .
For now , the pilot is working with only a handful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ driven by their needs .
“ We ’ re trying to see what works , what doesn ’ t , what ’ s safe , ” said baliga.30 Advocates are also crafting non-police-intervention mechanisms for situations of imminent violence .
Oakland recently established a nonpolice hotline for domestic violence .
In Milwaukee and other cities , teams of local violence interrupters sometimes intervene in domestic violence cases .
Mia Mingus , a founding member of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective , developed a tool called pod mapping to help people identify a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ With Nowhere to Go School Reopenings Are Only Going to Get More Chaotic Why Portland Became the Test Case for Trump ’ s Secret Police One of the core assumptions of restorative approaches is that people who use violence can change .
How change happens is a fraught question within the anti-violence community , but it ’ s clear that the criminal-legal system hasn ’ t effectively answered it .
Recidivism is common .
A Washington Post analysis of men in five cities who killed their partners found that at least a third @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violent crime .
Research has shown little evidence that typical batterer intervention programs work.32 Even as mainstream domestic violence advocates have begun to consider alternatives to the criminal-legal system , others argue that law enforcement still has a role to play .
“ I am persuaded by people who say , ‘ Who you going to call ?
Ghostbusters ?
’ ” said Caroline Bettinger-López , who served as the White House adviser on violence against women during the Obama administration .
“ We need to focus on ways in which we can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violence contexts , but we should not pretend [ the police are ] going to go away .
For those survivors who seek to engage with the criminal-legal system , we should make an effort to improve that system and make it more responsive to their needs…and for those survivors who do not seek to engage , we need to create alternative pathways so that they can access safety.
” 33 Restorative justice advocates are clear-eyed about what they don ’ t know .
“ It ’ s not like we ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resourced , ” baliga said .
While there is some data showing restorative justice to be effective in juvenile cases , there is very little recent research on its application to intimate partner violence , though a 2019 study comparing a traditional batterer intervention program to one involving elements of a restorative process found that the hybrid model significantly reduced new arrests.34 As restorative justice becomes more popular , baliga worried that the practice could be implemented poorly .
“ If you do this wrong , you will get bad outcomes , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and addiction need to be addressed , and forcing people to participate as a condition of a plea deal could undermine the process .
She and other critics of the criminal-legal system that I spoke with emphasized that there is no alternative that , on its own , can paper over the deep social and economic fractures associated with abuse .
“ Will a survivor who participated in restorative justice be murdered ?
Absolutely , because we haven ’ t solved the root causes that underlie intimate partner violence , ” baliga said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the anti-violence movement in disentangling itself from the criminal-legal system is to find ways of doing both .
“ We have to make sure that if someone is being hurt , that that changes and that she has opportunities to heal , her kids are safe , and there ’ s food and all of those things , ” said the University of Illinois ’ s Beth Richie .
“ And we have to understand that the expression of violence is…an expression of something larger.
” 35 In early September , Hansen was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first time since he was arrested .
“ It felt so good to hear him take responsibility , ” she said .
“ If I could have heard that four months ago—oh , my gosh—I wouldn ’ t have gone through such trauma.
” Her friends have had a hard time understanding why she would want anything to do with him .
“ I understand that there are some victims who think , ‘ Yeah , what I want to keep myself safe and to make this right is for this person to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she said .
But she wanted something else .
“ Why can ’ t we say , ‘ Let ’ s help this person who is violent .
Let ’ s help this person not do this again ’ ?
” She added , “ I do care that we change as a whole .
We can ’ t just keep this going.
” 36

This article appears in the October 19/26, 2020 issue.
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On a Friday night in July, two police officers in Rollinsford, a small town in eastern New Hampshire, responded to a report of a domestic disturbance at the home of RJ and Sarah Letendre. RJ Letendre, who at the time worked as a police officer in the nearby city of Dover, told the responding officers that during a conversation about a divorce, she attacked him, scratching and biting him.1
The officers arrested Sarah Letendre, a stay-at-home mother of two young children, and charged her with domestic violence simple assault. Then they took her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. In an affidavit, police said they “did not observe any obvious injuries on her,” though they noted that “she was complaining of pain in her left rib area.” Afterward, police dropped her off at her home, which she was not allowed to enter because of a no-contact order triggered by the assault charge. According to her sister Jessica Newman, Sarah Letendre was wearing a tank top, shorts, and hospital slippers when the police left her outside her house in the dark. When she went inside to get her purse so she could leave, Newman said, RJ Letendre called the police again. They pulled over Sarah Letendre as she was driving away, around 4:30 am, and tried to arrest her. She fled.2
The story she told about that night to her sister and in court documents was quite different from her husband’s. In a domestic-violence petition filed later, Sarah Letendre said that during the argument, RJ Letendre, a former mixed-martial arts fighter, had forced her to the ground, held her with a knee on her sternum, and elbowed her hard in the ribs. This wasn’t the first time he’d attacked her, she claimed. In other alleged incidents dating back to 2018, he picked her up by her neck, put her in a choke hold, and pushed her into a bathroom door. She said she found a tracker on her car and that he threatened to kick her out of the house and to take their children if she tried to leave him. “He threatens to use his status as a police officer to arrest me,” she wrote in her petition. “Recently those threats are more frequent.” (He also filed a domestic violence petition against her, claiming, “I had to physically restrain her until police arrived on scene.”)3
Although Sarah Letendre was taken to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, her discharge papers list no concerns with her mental state. Instead, her diagnosis was broken bones: “Closed fracture of multiple ribs of left side.”4 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
For the past four decades, a dominant project for American feminists has been getting the police and the legal system to respond seriously to the crisis of domestic violence. More than 10 million people in the US are abused by their partners each year. One in four women will be pushed, slapped, beaten, burned, strangled, or otherwise harmed by an intimate partner during her lifetime. Nearly half of the women who are murdered in the US each year are killed by a romantic partner. Until the 1970s, police and the legal system largely treated this kind of violence as a family issue best resolved quietly at home. As feminists worked to bring the problem into the public sphere, many advocates focused on toughening penalties for abusers and standardizing the way law enforcement responded to complaints. Jurisdictions around the country now have laws intended to ensure an aggressive law enforcement response, including laws that require police to make an arrest in response to a credible allegation and no-drop policies that force prosecutors to continue a case even without cooperation from witnesses.5
Today the anti-violence movement is in the midst of a painful reckoning with the collateral damage of this approach. Stricter criminal penalties have protected some survivors, but they’ve also led to the arrest and prosecution of others and contributed to a ballooning prison population that is disproportionately made up of men and women of color. “Anti-violence programs have their hands deeply inside of carceral processes, which leads not only to the arrest of men but also of women,” said Beth Richie, an anti-violence activist during the movement’s early years who now directs the criminology, law, and justice department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At particular risk are those who don’t present as the perfect victim: They aren’t cooperative with the legal system, they have a criminal record or substance-use issues, or they fought back. In Sarah Letendre’s case, her arrest initially left her without custody of her children and homeless, though she has gained partial custody and, according to Newman, found an apartment. In September, the Merrimack County prosecutor dropped the felony assault charge against her but is still pursuing other criminal charges, including resisting arrest. The Dover Police Department said in August that it fired RJ Letendre, whose attorney did not return a request for comment, for “multiple violations of departmental policy.”6
Some advocates credit improvements in the criminal-legal system for a sharp drop in domestic violence rates over the past three decades. But as Leigh Goodmark, who directs the Gender Violence Clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, notes in her book Decriminalizing Domestic Violence, that dip mirrors a decline in crime rates generally. In recent years, domestic violence rates have fallen more slowly than crime overall, while domestic homicides rose. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in improving the ways police, prosecutors, and judges respond to abuse, more than half of victims of nonfatal abuse never report it to the police. A 2015 survey found that survivors often feel dismissed or blamed by police and said they feared reprisal or consequences such as losing housing or custody of their children. Others simply don’t want their partner to be arrested. Calling the police sets in motion a process that victims have little control over. And although there is little recent data available, two studies in the 1990s indicated that police have their own domestic violence problems, with as many as 40 percent of officers’ families experiencing domestic violence, compared with 10 percent of families in the general population.7 Current Issue View our current issue
Conversations about what Nan Stoops, a 40-year veteran of anti-violence work, calls the “unholy alliance” between the anti-violence movement and criminal-legal system gained particular urgency this year, as the isolation provoked by Covid-19 intensified concerns about domestic violence and as the Black Lives Matter movement advanced discussion about police reform. “We are having really hard conversations about what this means for us and how it’s going to change our work,” said Stoops, who is a strategic adviser to the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In June, domestic violence coalitions from more than 30 states released a remarkable letter accounting for the ways in which their movement invested in the criminal-legal system at the expense of Black and Indigenous communities and other people of color and calling for “divestment and reallocation” of resources.8
Domestic abuse presents a deadly threat to millions of people across America, in part thanks to the nation’s glut of guns, and it’s often invoked to make the case for policing and prisons. But as concerns about police misconduct grow, feminist activists who have been building alternative systems for emergency intervention and longer-term accountability are finding new allies and new attention. These community-based projects are still embryonic, but they are beginning to answer the question, “If the police can’t keep everyone safe, what else can?”9
As feminists launched public campaigns against battering in the early 1970s, they also established a community-based safety and support infrastructure for women fleeing abuse in the form of rape crisis centers and temporary shelters. Law enforcement began to play a larger role after lawsuits against police departments for failing to protect abused women resulted in new laws and practices standardizing their response. In 1981, Minneapolis pioneered a mandatory arrest policy in domestic abuse cases, and after early research linked the law to reduced recidivism, cities around the country adopted that approach. In 1984 a federal task force released a report cementing the notion of family violence as a criminal problem that could be addressed through arrest, prosecution, and prison time.10
Thus began what longtime activist Mimi Kim has described as “the carceral creep.” Feminists were fighting for attention and resources at the same time that tough-on-crime politics came into vogue. “Because crime and criminal justice reform were sort of the only political game in town, they were the only way to get [funding],” said Donna Coker, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. What had been a grassroots movement morphed into a professionalized field that largely saw gender violence through a unifying any-woman lens. In reality, intimate partner violence is more common and usually more serious for low-income women, and low-income women of color bear an even greater risk.11
Then came the 1994 crime bill, which dumped billions of dollars into a ballooning prison system and included the Violence Against Women Act, which Joe Biden, who championed the legislation, has described as his “proudest” accomplishment from his time in the Senate. VAWA committed significant federal resources to law enforcement, victim’s services, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and it helped to reframe gender violence as a civil rights issue and drew massive public attention to a crisis often hidden behind closed doors.12
But some feminists, particularly women of color, were deeply skeptical of the marriage between the anti-violence movement and the criminal-legal system. At the time, Kim was working at the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco. “I recall someone telling us that VAWA passed—that we all needed to applaud. And I felt sick,” she wrote to me. “I understood that VAWA did help some of the immigrant women experiencing domestic violence…. But at what cost?”13
VAWA directed the bulk of its funding toward criminal responses; as of 2013, only about 15 percent of the grant money allocated by VAWA was going to social services. In fiscal year 2017 the act’s two largest grant programs provided $266 million to the criminal-legal system but just $30 million to housing, writes Goodmark, “despite repeated studies showing that housing is the single greatest need identified by people subjected to abuse.”14
Twenty-six years after VAWA’s passage, there is little consistent evidence of the effectiveness of criminalization. Although initial research indicated that mandatory arrest policies—now in effect in nearly half the states—reduced future violence, some follow-up studies found that arrests may increase recidivism. Studies on prison time and recidivism are similarly mixed. Meanwhile, there has been a marked increase in the rate of women arrested for intimate partner violence. The case of Marissa Alexander, a Black mother of three who faced 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to defend herself against her husband in 2010, sparked national organizing not just to free her but also to draw attention to the many other survivors facing similar prosecutions.15
“Certainly if you arrest someone and hold them, they’re not committing violence against their partner during that time, but there’s no evidence that it has a deterrent effect once they’re released,” said Goodmark. Trauma and economic insecurity have been linked to intimate partner violence. Male unemployment is the “most important demographic risk factor” in intimate partner femicides, a 2003 study found. Prosecution and imprisonment don’t fix these factors and often aren’t what survivors want, either. The criminal-legal system generally doesn’t have an answer for those women or for those who can’t afford to leave. Nationally, domestic abuse is among the leading causes of homelessness for women.16
Of all the cases that Laurie Schipper has been involved in during her nearly four-decade career, none haunt her like Ruthie’s. Schipper, the executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, met Ruthie in a parking lot in Iowa’s Story County after receiving a call from the woman’s landlady. There was very little of Ruthie’s body that wasn’t covered in bruises. Schipper spoke to Ruthie through a car window for hours and learned that Ruthie’s partner had been abusing her for years, leaving her with serious physical and psychological damage. Every time Schipper moved, Ruthie flinched.17
Schipper felt paralyzed. Ruthie had alcohol and drug-use disorders. She didn’t want the police to get involved, and it was clear that the effects of her trauma were so immense that she wouldn’t be stable in a shelter. “I remember thinking in the parking lot that I had nothing to offer that woman,” Schipper told me. “Those most traumatized often have long-lasting, damaging effects from the violence that often don’t fit into our boxes of who’s appropriate for services. They are angry. They may have a violent record themselves. They may be using substance abuse to self-medicate.” Eventually she gave Ruthie her card and left.18
Schipper didn’t hear from Ruthie for a few years. Then, during a meeting with a county sheriff, he opened a file and asked Schipper if she could identify the woman in a photo. It was Ruthie, lying on a morgue slab. Her partner had held her captive and battered her for 10 days. Nobody knew anything about her identity when her body was taken to the morgue, but Schipper’s card was in her pocket.19
Ruthie’s case was one of many that sent Schipper in search of new ideas. In 2013 the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence began to pivot from the emergency shelter model; instead, the coalition prioritized securing immediate and long-term private housing for people fleeing harm, as well as financial assistance and the deployment of mobile outreach workers who met women wherever they were. Schipper also began to look for ways to help people who didn’t want the police involved in their cases.20
What was happening in Iowa was part of a gradual shift among mainstream anti-violence programs. The groundwork for this turn was laid in large part by a group of feminists of color, including Kim, who in 2000 formed Incite! The organization seeded on-the-ground experiments in responses to violence that did not involve law enforcement. One of those projects, founded by Kim, was Creative Interventions, which generated a nearly 600-page tool kit for community-based violence interventions that did not rely on police, crisis centers, or social services.21
Schipper used it to set up pilot projects around Iowa, working with organizations in communities of color and rural areas to offer alternatives to people who didn’t want police involvement in their cases. One of the partner organizations was Crisis Intervention Service, which operates in 15 counties in the state’s rural north. Mary Ingham, the group’s executive director, told me that for years she believed the key to ending abuse was getting law enforcement “on our side,” making more arrests and getting the cases into the courtroom. Instead she observed that mandatory arrest laws and other codified procedures often ended up limiting survivors’ options or discouraging them from seeking help in the first place. After the pilot started, one of its first referrals came from a police chief in a small town who’d been called by the neighbor of an undocumented immigrant couple. “He realized that the system wasn’t going to be able to keep the woman safe,” Ingham said.22
Iowa’s statewide domestic violence coalition is one of a handful across the country that have started to reconsider the emphasis on tightening criminal penalties. Nationally, the trend within the domestic violence advocacy community has been “a shift not only to move away from criminal justice as a focus for activism, as a focus for policy reform, as a focus for collaboration, but…also a shift to invest in changing the social conditions that create and foster violence,” said Donna Coker. Now, said Kim, because of the uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing, “there has been forward movement in work that has been glacial over the past 20 years.”23
Looking back, Bonnie Hansen can see the red flags: the jealousy, the aggression. She met S at a social event in her apartment complex last year, a few months after she moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, from Chicago, where she’d spent her whole life. (Hansen asked me not to use his name.) She was 29 and wanted to do something new.24
Things got worse this spring after the couple moved together to Boise. Hansen, a therapist, was pregnant. The coronavirus hit, and then S was out of work. Stuck at home, they fought about money. She asked him to go to counseling, which he did for a while but stopped after his therapist switched to sessions by video.25
On May 19, when Hansen was five months pregnant, an argument about money escalated. She asked S to leave. Instead he charged at her, hit her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and began to strangle her. Then he took off in her car.26
Hansen wasn’t sure she wanted to report the incident, but she wanted her car back, so she called police dispatch. In trying to explain what happened to her car, Hansen admitted there had been a fight. Soon two police officers showed up at her house. She recalled telling them that she didn’t want to press charges, that she just wanted S to be away from her for the night. They told her they would arrest him for felony assault.27
According to Hansen, what happened next was a “nightmare.” She felt pressured and belittled by prosecutors, who served her with subpoenas, forcing her to testify against S. They sought a plea deal that would put him in prison for at least two years, though she felt strongly that incarceration would do little to change his behavior or give her a sense of closure. Because of an automatic no-contact order, she couldn’t speak with him about her pregnancy, which she ultimately decided to terminate. Unable to get an abortion in Idaho, she had to travel to Seattle for the procedure, alone. “I wish I could have talked to him about it,” she told me. “I had an idea of what my future might look like with this person, and I was just told to move on.” (S’s attorney declined to comment on the pending case.)28
“Your office makes me feel even more powerless and unheard,” Hansen wrote to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office in August. (A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said she was unable to comment on pending litigation but sent a statement reading, in part, “Our primary missions as prosecutors are to help ensure public safety, to guide victims through the system and to prevent future crime by suggesting effective rehabilitation for the defendant. We take each of those goals very seriously.”) Hansen started taking medications for panic attacks. Convinced there had to be a better way to handle abuse cases, she began to research. “I became kind of obsessive,” she told me. When she read about an approach known as restorative justice, she felt immediately drawn to the concept. “Yes, yes, I need that,” she remembered thinking.29
The term “restorative justice” generally refers to dialogue-based methods of addressing harm, in which a person who’s been hurt identifies avenues for accountability in pursuit of healing and lasting change. Some practices associated with restorative justice have roots in Indigenous traditions, including peacemaking circles. Another form is group conferencing, in which victim, offender, and members of their community agree to a plan for repairing harm. Using restorative justice for domestic violence cases has long been controversial among anti-violence advocates, in part because of fears that it places too much responsibility on victims. But that is slowly changing, as the limitations of the criminal-legal system become more apparent. In the United States many existing restorative justice processes applied in domestic violence cases take place within the criminal-legal system rather than as an alternative to it, operating in jails and prisons or serving as diversion programs. Some anti-violence advocates see this linkage as a limitation. “If advocates work with law enforcement, law enforcement invariably wins,” said Kim. Last year, she and attorney sujatha baliga developed a restorative justice pilot program in California’s Contra Costa County serving people who do not want law enforcement involved in their cases. For now, the pilot is working with only a handful of people, and the interventions are driven by their needs. “We’re trying to see what works, what doesn’t, what’s safe,” said baliga.30
Advocates are also crafting non-police-intervention mechanisms for situations of imminent violence. Oakland recently established a nonpolice hotline for domestic violence. In Milwaukee and other cities, teams of local violence interrupters sometimes intervene in domestic violence cases. Mia Mingus, a founding member of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, developed a tool called pod mapping to help people identify a safety network.31 More From Zoë Carpenter The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next? October 5, 2021 Sexual Assault in the Military Is Still Going Unchecked. Will Congress Finally Act? July 27, 2021 Extreme Heat in Portland Is an ‘Acute Disaster on Chronic Disaster’ June 30, 2021
One of the core assumptions of restorative approaches is that people who use violence can change. How change happens is a fraught question within the anti-violence community, but it’s clear that the criminal-legal system hasn’t effectively answered it. Recidivism is common. A Washington Post analysis of men in five cities who killed their partners found that at least a third had restraining orders or prior convictions for violent crime. Research has shown little evidence that typical batterer intervention programs work.32
Even as mainstream domestic violence advocates have begun to consider alternatives to the criminal-legal system, others argue that law enforcement still has a role to play. “I am persuaded by people who say, ‘Who you going to call? Ghostbusters?’” said Caroline Bettinger-López, who served as the White House adviser on violence against women during the Obama administration. “We need to focus on ways in which we can reduce the police footprint in many domestic violence contexts, but we should not pretend [the police are] going to go away. For those survivors who seek to engage with the criminal-legal system, we should make an effort to improve that system and make it more responsive to their needs…and for those survivors who do not seek to engage, we need to create alternative pathways so that they can access safety.”33
Restorative justice advocates are clear-eyed about what they don’t know. “It’s not like we’ve gotten a chance to do this properly resourced,” baliga said. While there is some data showing restorative justice to be effective in juvenile cases, there is very little recent research on its application to intimate partner violence, though a 2019 study comparing a traditional batterer intervention program to one involving elements of a restorative process found that the hybrid model significantly reduced new arrests.34
As restorative justice becomes more popular, baliga worried that the practice could be implemented poorly. “If you do this wrong, you will get bad outcomes,” she said. Factors like mental illness and addiction need to be addressed, and forcing people to participate as a condition of a plea deal could undermine the process. She and other critics of the criminal-legal system that I spoke with emphasized that there is no alternative that, on its own, can paper over the deep social and economic fractures associated with abuse. “Will a survivor who participated in restorative justice be murdered? Absolutely, because we haven’t solved the root causes that underlie intimate partner violence,” baliga said. The challenge, then, for the anti-violence movement in disentangling itself from the criminal-legal system is to find ways of doing both. “We have to make sure that if someone is being hurt, that that changes and that she has opportunities to heal, her kids are safe, and there’s food and all of those things,” said the University of Illinois’s Beth Richie. “And we have to understand that the expression of violence is…an expression of something larger.”35
In early September, Hansen was able to speak to S for the first time since he was arrested. “It felt so good to hear him take responsibility,” she said. “If I could have heard that four months ago—oh, my gosh—I wouldn’t have gone through such trauma.” Her friends have had a hard time understanding why she would want anything to do with him. “I understand that there are some victims who think, ‘Yeah, what I want to keep myself safe and to make this right is for this person to have the harshest punishment,’” she said. But she wanted something else. “Why can’t we say, ‘Let’s help this person who is violent. Let’s help this person not do this again’?” She added, “I do care that we change as a whole. We can’t just keep this going.”36


thenation--2020-10-07--How to Cope With Daily Life During a Pandemic

After all these months and 210,000 deaths , you ’ d think I ’ d be used to it all , but I ’ m not .
It doesn ’ t seem even a little normal yet .
I ’ m still full of absences , missing so much I used to take for granted : hugs and handshakes , rooms crowded for funerals and weddings , potluck dinners and house parties .
I miss browsing the stacks at the library and the racks at the thrift shop .
I miss going to our Unitarian Universalist congregation and the robust @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I should count myself lucky , of course , that such human encounters and quotidian pleasures are all that I miss .
I have yet to lose friends or family to Covid-19 , I haven ’ t lost my job , and our home is not in danger of foreclosure .
Still , I ’ m at a loss to figure out how to go on .
But that ’ s the work , isn ’ t it ?
Going on somehow because , if the experts are on target—and they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bombast and threats of carnage coming out of Washington—they say that things won ’ t get back to normal for a year or longer .
They say this is the new normal : masks , distance , existential dread over every sore throat .
Another year… at least .
How do I pace myself and my family for the long haul of the pandemic ?
How do we figure out how to mitigate our risks and still live lives of some sort ?
Who do we trust ?
Who do we listen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if a spiking fall or winter pandemic hits us directly ?
I ’ m full of missing and longing , but the thing I miss most poignantly and sharply isn ’ t something ( or someone ) you could see or touch .
What I miss is the privileged ( and ultimately false ) notion , almost an article of faith for white , middle-class people like me , that the future is predictable , that there is a “ normal.
” I miss good old-fashioned American optimism , that “ aw shucks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says with a twang or lilt : It ’ ll be okay .
They ’ ll figure it out .
Things will get back to normal .
This is only temporary .
While most of the developed world has been dealing with the impact of the pandemic in a reasonable fashion—caring for the sick , burying the dead , enforcing lockdowns and the sort of distancing and masking that seems so necessary—it ’ s played out differently here in the good old US of A .
Here , we have a pandemic-plus—plus a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health care system , a war of disinformation , and that ’ s just to start down a list of add-on disasters .
In addition , parts of the United States have been beset by record wildfires , hurricanes , and deadly storms .
So add on the impact of catastrophic climate change .
Here in the land of the fearful and the home of the riven , it ’ s been a pandemic plus poverty , plus staggering economic inequality , plus police violence , plus protest , plus white supremacy .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ other words , and , despite those more than 210,000 dead Americans , it ’ s not slowing down .
And no matter the facts on the ground , and the bodies below the ground , the president ’ s supporters regularly deny there ’ s the slightest need for masks , social distancing , shutdowns , or much of anything else .
So , it ’ s a pandemic plus lunacy , too—a politically manipulated lunacy spiced with violence and the threat of violence heading into an increasingly fraught election , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a chaotic American version of fascism .
In other words , it ’ s a lot .
Still , it ’ s also the fall and , after this endless summer , my three kids have started school again—sort of .
They are in first , third , and eighth grade .
Right now , there ’ s more coaching around masks and distancing than instruction in math and the ABCs .
Still , the teachers are working hard to make this happen and my kids are so happy to be away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even seem to mind those masks , or the shields around their desks , or the regimented way lunch and recess have to happen .
Over the whole experiment , of course , hangs an unnerving reality ( or do I mean unreality ? )
: that in-person schooling could dissolve in an errant cough , a spiking fever , and a few microscopic germs catapulting through the air .
In fact , that ’ s already been happening in other areas of Connecticut where I live .
After all these months of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wear masks everywhere , arranging the odd outdoor gathering of a handful of friends and trying to imagine how any of this will work in winter , no less long-term .
Still , bit by bit , we ’ re doing our best to quilt together an understanding of how to live in the midst of such a pandemic—and that ’ s important because it ’ s so obvious that there ’ s going to be no quick fix in the chaotic new world we ’ ve been plunged into .
Seven months @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what so many marginalized people have always known : We ’ re on our own .
It came to me like a klaxon call , a scream from the depths of my own body , all at once .
I still whisper it , with sorrow and wonder : We are on our own .
It ’ s as if our small city of New London and the state of Connecticut had been untethered from the federal government and , despite the crazy game of telephone that passes for federal public health policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a mixture of our state ’ s reputation as the “ Land of Steady Habits , ” our small-city web of mutual aid , and our own family ’ s blend of abundance and austerity .
Still , the fact that , relatively speaking , we ’ re doing OK doesn ’ t make the realization that we ’ re on our own any less stark or troubling .
It ’ s not complicated , really .
You can ’ t beat a pandemic with a mixture of personal responsibility and family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a national plan are what ’ s needed .
My own vision for such a plan in response to Covid-19 would be the passage of a universal basic income , robust worker protections , and Medicare for All .
But that ’ s just me… well , actually , it ’ s probably the secret dream of the majority of Americans , and it ’ s certainly the opposite of the position of Trump and his ilk .
It says that we really all are in this together and we better start acting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care of one another to survive .
In spite of it all , I ’ m doing my best to manage this new normal by focusing on what I actually can do .
At least I can feed people .
Our city was poor even before the state ordered a lockdown in mid-March and few had the extra money to panic-buy .
So the food justice organization I work for started planting extra carrots , peas , and collards back in March .
We built public garden boxes and painted signs telling people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soil and seeds to people all over the city and gave them some gardening 101 guidance .
And now , as October begins , we ’ re still finishing harvesting all that food and distributing it every week .
On Fridays , I also help pack boxes of milk and eggs , meat and vegetables , which we then deliver to more than 100 families .
The rhythm involved in harvesting the produce and packing the boxes , each an immersive physical task , helps banish my darker thoughts , at least for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Be in Very Good Shape ” The president held a news conference on March 30 .
Of course , that ’ s ancient history now , separated as it is from the present by long months of deaths and hospitalizations , layoffs and political infighting .
The CEOs of Honeywell , Jockey , MyPillow , United Technologies , and other companies were gathered alongside administration officials that day .
It should have been a briefing on where we Americans were a month into what was clearly going to be a long slog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ honored those who had already died .
Instead—no surprise looking back from our present nightmarish vantage point—it proved to be an extended advertisement for those companies and a chance for their CEOs to spout patriotic pablum and trade compliments with the commander in chief .
I was crying a lot then .
When the president said , “ We have to get our country back to where it was and maybe beyond , ” I began to sob and dry heave .
After I finally wiped away the tears and blew my nose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a company that makes homeopathic remedies .
A friend had sent me a list of ones doctors were supposedly using to treat coronavirus symptoms in Germany , Italy , and China .
“ Get these if you can , ” she texted .
It wasn ’ t science .
I admit it .
It was desperation .
As one of millions of Americans on state insurance with no primary-care doctor or bespoke concierge service , I feared the worst .
As the CEO from MyPillow was telling the American people to use the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back in the Word , read our Bibles , ” I made my own faith gesture and pressed the buy button .
When the order arrived , it was full of tiny , archaic vials labeled with names like Belladonna and Drosera .
Even now , when I feel anxious and cloudy , I rummage through that box of vials and read the names like incantations .
Better that than heeding the president ’ s assertion on that long-gone day that “ we are going to be in very good shape.
” We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s getting worse every day .
As the November election looms and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death ( as well as the grim Republican response to it ) casts an ever more massive shadow over the country , the subtext of the administration ’ s message—however convoluted its delivery—is simple enough : You ’ re on your own .
Over the last half-year , whether discussing the pandemic or the vote to come , Donald Trump has made one bizarre , bombastic , patently untrue assertion after another .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between a caricature of a dictator from some long-lost Isabel Allende novel and of an insecure middle manager ( The Office ’ s Michael Scott on steroids ) .
Critical medical information , public health guidelines , and the disbursement of necessary protective equipment have all been thoroughly messed up and politicized in ways that are harmful today and could be devastating for years to come .
As Peter Baker of The New York Times reported in September , so many of us are indeed confused : “ With Mr. Trump saying one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , many Americans have been left to figure out on their own whom to believe , with past polls sharing that they have more faith in the experts than their president.
” That ’ s me !
I do have faith in the experts .
I ’ m wearing a mask and digging into the idea that mask wearing is going to be a part of our lives for at least the next year or so .
In other words , the new normal will be ever more of the same , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a wildly unpredictable world full of pathogens and unmasked “ patriots.
” The new normal will mean trading in the old sock masks my mother-in-law fashioned for us and investing in more high-tech and effective masks .
Beyond that , my answer to all this couldn ’ t be more feeble .
It ’ s taking care of my backyard chickens and my front-yard garden and adding strands to our small web of mutual aid .
This spring and summer , I dug up more of my lawn to plant carrots , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever larger garden , while learning how to store rainwater from the gutters of our roof in big barrels .
I joked with my friends about growing rice—and might even try it next year .
I acquired a chicken coop , built a rudimentary run , and ordered six beautiful chickens from a farm in a quiet corner of Connecticut : two Golden Copper Marans , two Black Marans , and two Easter Eggers .
The kids named them after characters in the Harry Potter series , which they ’ ve all but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ran away and one died , but I love everything about taking care of them and harvesting the perfect magical protein orbs they produce with religious regularity .
These things bring me pleasure and a feeling of accomplishment , while leaving me with a set of tasks that I have to complete even when I feel despondent and overwhelmed .
That ’ s all to the good , but a handful of chickens and a few collard plants don ’ t add up to self-sufficiency .
They are not a bulwark against national @ @ @ @ @ @ @ solve the problem of Donald Trump and Company .
Still , in bad , bad times , at least they keep me going and let ’ s face it , all of us—at least those of us who survive Covid-19—are in it for the long haul .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
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After all these months and 210,000 deaths, you’d think I’d be used to it all, but I’m not. It doesn’t seem even a little normal yet. I’m still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties. I miss browsing the stacks at the library and the racks at the thrift shop. I miss going to our Unitarian Universalist congregation and the robust community connection we enjoyed every Sunday.
I should count myself lucky, of course, that such human encounters and quotidian pleasures are all that I miss. I have yet to lose friends or family to Covid-19, I haven’t lost my job, and our home is not in danger of foreclosure. Still, I’m at a loss to figure out how to go on.
But that’s the work, isn’t it? Going on somehow because, if the experts are on target—and they’re hard to hear above the din of the bombast and threats of carnage coming out of Washington—they say that things won’t get back to normal for a year or longer. They say this is the new normal: masks, distance, existential dread over every sore throat.
Another year… at least. How do I pace myself and my family for the long haul of the pandemic? How do we figure out how to mitigate our risks and still live lives of some sort? Who do we trust? Who do we listen to? And who do we call if a spiking fall or winter pandemic hits us directly?
I’m full of missing and longing, but the thing I miss most poignantly and sharply isn’t something (or someone) you could see or touch. What I miss is the privileged (and ultimately false) notion, almost an article of faith for white, middle-class people like me, that the future is predictable, that there is a “normal.” I miss good old-fashioned American optimism, that “aw shucks” sentiment that absolves and salves and says with a twang or lilt: It’ll be okay. They’ll figure it out. Things will get back to normal. This is only temporary.
Pandemic Plus
While most of the developed world has been dealing with the impact of the pandemic in a reasonable fashion—caring for the sick, burying the dead, enforcing lockdowns and the sort of distancing and masking that seems so necessary—it’s played out differently here in the good old US of A. Here, we have a pandemic-plus—plus a broken social safety net, a for-profit health care system, a war of disinformation, and that’s just to start down a list of add-on disasters. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
In addition, parts of the United States have been beset by record wildfires, hurricanes, and deadly storms. So add on the impact of catastrophic climate change. Current Issue View our current issue
Here in the land of the fearful and the home of the riven, it’s been a pandemic plus poverty, plus staggering economic inequality, plus police violence, plus protest, plus white supremacy. It’s a nightmare, in other words, and, despite those more than 210,000 dead Americans, it’s not slowing down. And no matter the facts on the ground, and the bodies below the ground, the president’s supporters regularly deny there’s the slightest need for masks, social distancing, shutdowns, or much of anything else. So, it’s a pandemic plus lunacy, too—a politically manipulated lunacy spiced with violence and the threat of violence heading into an increasingly fraught election, which could even mean a pandemic plus autocracy or a chaotic American version of fascism. In other words, it’s a lot.
Still, it’s also the fall and, after this endless summer, my three kids have started school again—sort of. They are in first, third, and eighth grade. Right now, there’s more coaching around masks and distancing than instruction in math and the ABCs. Still, the teachers are working hard to make this happen and my kids are so happy to be away from us that they don’t even seem to mind those masks, or the shields around their desks, or the regimented way lunch and recess have to happen. Over the whole experiment, of course, hangs an unnerving reality (or do I mean unreality?): that in-person schooling could dissolve in an errant cough, a spiking fever, and a few microscopic germs catapulting through the air. In fact, that’s already been happening in other areas of Connecticut where I live.
After all these months of lockdown, my husband and I automatically wear masks everywhere, arranging the odd outdoor gathering of a handful of friends and trying to imagine how any of this will work in winter, no less long-term. Still, bit by bit, we’re doing our best to quilt together an understanding of how to live in the midst of such a pandemic—and that’s important because it’s so obvious that there’s going to be no quick fix in the chaotic new world we’ve been plunged into.
Seven months in, I’m finally realizing what so many marginalized people have always known: We’re on our own. It came to me like a klaxon call, a scream from the depths of my own body, all at once. I still whisper it, with sorrow and wonder: We are on our own.
It’s as if our small city of New London and the state of Connecticut had been untethered from the federal government and, despite the crazy game of telephone that passes for federal public health policy, are faring better than most because of a mixture of our state’s reputation as the “Land of Steady Habits,” our small-city web of mutual aid, and our own family’s blend of abundance and austerity. Still, the fact that, relatively speaking, we’re doing OK doesn’t make the realization that we’re on our own any less stark or troubling.
It’s not complicated, really. You can’t beat a pandemic with a mixture of personal responsibility and family creativity. Science, policy, and a national plan are what’s needed. My own vision for such a plan in response to Covid-19 would be the passage of a universal basic income, robust worker protections, and Medicare for All. But that’s just me… well, actually, it’s probably the secret dream of the majority of Americans, and it’s certainly the opposite of the position of Trump and his ilk. It says that we really all are in this together and we better start acting like it. We need to take care of one another to survive.
In spite of it all, I’m doing my best to manage this new normal by focusing on what I actually can do. At least I can feed people.
Our city was poor even before the state ordered a lockdown in mid-March and few had the extra money to panic-buy. So the food justice organization I work for started planting extra carrots, peas, and collards back in March. We built public garden boxes and painted signs telling people to harvest for free. We distributed soil and seeds to people all over the city and gave them some gardening 101 guidance.
And now, as October begins, we’re still finishing harvesting all that food and distributing it every week. On Fridays, I also help pack boxes of milk and eggs, meat and vegetables, which we then deliver to more than 100 families. The rhythm involved in harvesting the produce and packing the boxes, each an immersive physical task, helps banish my darker thoughts, at least for a while.
“We Are Going to Be in Very Good Shape”
The president held a news conference on March 30. Of course, that’s ancient history now, separated as it is from the present by long months of deaths and hospitalizations, layoffs and political infighting. The CEOs of Honeywell, Jockey, MyPillow, United Technologies, and other companies were gathered alongside administration officials that day. It should have been a briefing on where we Americans were a month into what was clearly going to be a long slog. Above all, it should have honored those who had already died. Instead—no surprise looking back from our present nightmarish vantage point—it proved to be an extended advertisement for those companies and a chance for their CEOs to spout patriotic pablum and trade compliments with the commander in chief.
I was crying a lot then. When the president said, “We have to get our country back to where it was and maybe beyond,” I began to sob and dry heave. After I finally wiped away the tears and blew my nose, I checked out the website of a company that makes homeopathic remedies. A friend had sent me a list of ones doctors were supposedly using to treat coronavirus symptoms in Germany, Italy, and China.
“Get these if you can,” she texted. It wasn’t science. I admit it. It was desperation. As one of millions of Americans on state insurance with no primary-care doctor or bespoke concierge service, I feared the worst.
As the CEO from MyPillow was telling the American people to use the time of the shutdown to “get back in the Word, read our Bibles,” I made my own faith gesture and pressed the buy button. When the order arrived, it was full of tiny, archaic vials labeled with names like Belladonna and Drosera. Even now, when I feel anxious and cloudy, I rummage through that box of vials and read the names like incantations. Better that than heeding the president’s assertion on that long-gone day that “we are going to be in very good shape.”
A Handful of Chickens
We are not in very good shape and it’s getting worse every day. As the November election looms and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death (as well as the grim Republican response to it) casts an ever more massive shadow over the country, the subtext of the administration’s message—however convoluted its delivery—is simple enough: You’re on your own. Over the last half-year, whether discussing the pandemic or the vote to come, Donald Trump has made one bizarre, bombastic, patently untrue assertion after another. In the process, he’s vacillated between a caricature of a dictator from some long-lost Isabel Allende novel and of an insecure middle manager (The Office’s Michael Scott on steroids).
Critical medical information, public health guidelines, and the disbursement of necessary protective equipment have all been thoroughly messed up and politicized in ways that are harmful today and could be devastating for years to come. As Peter Baker of The New York Times reported in September, so many of us are indeed confused: “With Mr. Trump saying one thing and his health advisors saying another, many Americans have been left to figure out on their own whom to believe, with past polls sharing that they have more faith in the experts than their president.”
That’s me! I do have faith in the experts. I’m wearing a mask and digging into the idea that mask wearing is going to be a part of our lives for at least the next year or so. In other words, the new normal will be ever more of the same, which means careful, awkward, tentative engagement with a wildly unpredictable world full of pathogens and unmasked “patriots.” The new normal will mean trading in the old sock masks my mother-in-law fashioned for us and investing in more high-tech and effective masks. Beyond that, my answer to all this couldn’t be more feeble. It’s taking care of my backyard chickens and my front-yard garden and adding strands to our small web of mutual aid.
This spring and summer, I dug up more of my lawn to plant carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash in an ever larger garden, while learning how to store rainwater from the gutters of our roof in big barrels. I joked with my friends about growing rice—and might even try it next year. I acquired a chicken coop, built a rudimentary run, and ordered six beautiful chickens from a farm in a quiet corner of Connecticut: two Golden Copper Marans, two Black Marans, and two Easter Eggers. The kids named them after characters in the Harry Potter series, which they’ve all but memorized during the shutdown. One chicken ran away and one died, but I love everything about taking care of them and harvesting the perfect magical protein orbs they produce with religious regularity.
These things bring me pleasure and a feeling of accomplishment, while leaving me with a set of tasks that I have to complete even when I feel despondent and overwhelmed. That’s all to the good, but a handful of chickens and a few collard plants don’t add up to self-sufficiency. They are not a bulwark against national insanity and ineptitude. They will not solve the problem of Donald Trump and Company.
Still, in bad, bad times, at least they keep me going and let’s face it, all of us—at least those of us who survive Covid-19—are in it for the long haul.


thenation--2020-10-07--On the Road During a Pandemic, From Austin, Texas, to Metro D.C.

Before .
“ Nope .
You ’ ve now just infected your other clean hand with germs , ” my wife ’ s OB/GYN dryly instructed .
She then put on her own latex gloves and demonstrated how to put them on and take them off while keeping your hands sterile .
We were in my wife and newborn son ’ s hospital room the day after his birth , on Leap Day , February 29 .
CNN , muted on the TV above us , was showing the same three b-roll shots of ambulances in front of a nursing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside of Seattle ; over and over again .
My wife had given birth to our son a week before all hospitals in Austin closed to visitors .
I had been able to be in the delivery room and attempt to sleep in their room with them .
Our doctors were on daily calls about the pandemic and preparing for it : Get ready .
This is going to be serious .
“ Yeah , you should probably just stay home and not leave the house , ” the OB/GYN recommended in her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had always been reassuring .
‘ We Are Civilization ’ s Anchor .
We Are the Compass for Humanity and Conscience.
’ More in this series Three days later , people at the supermarket glanced at my purple latex gloves , not wanting to make eye contact afterward .
He ’ s brought the germs .
Or maybe my hands were simply another reminder that unforeseen change was coming .
Ordinary life was unraveling .
Or fleeting .
There were no reported cases yet in Austin .
Yet the sense was It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the grocery store was busier than a Saturday afternoon .
Going to the store at that hour had always been so relaxing for me .
I had been able to take my time , getting stoned beforehand and going slowly through the aisles .
This night carts were everywhere .
Family members and college roommates yelled at one another across other carts .
Freshly printed signs from the customer service desk were Scotch-taped to some shelves : Limit 2 .
I had a detached perspective , still ecstatic over the healthy birth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had entered a nurturing and joyous bubble that was about to overlap with a global and collective bubble of sickness , hundreds of thousands of deaths , a foreseeable yet unstoppable economic depression , disruption , and anxiety .
I strolled down the aisles away from the shelves that formerly held canned goods and pasta and toilet paper , and tried out the produce section .
I crossed paths with a fellow bemused middle-aged man , and we shared a smile .
“ Time to get creative , ” I said as we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nothing but cucumbers .
“ The composting toilet got here !
” Another brown box had arrived on our porch .
Months into the pandemic now , I felt I should be getting an honorary mention from Jeff Bezos for doing my part to get him to $ 200 billion in wealth .
( I know he ’ s been busy , so a Christmas card would be fine . )
I opened the Luggable Loo ® box and put the portable toilet in our “ Front of moving truck ” pile in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a plastic bin with gloves , hand sanitizer , wipes , and granola bars , so it wouldn ’ t get mixed up with our stuff that would be packed into the back of the moving truck .
We were leaving Austin after 15 years , moving outside Washington , D.C. , to be close to family who could help with our domestic chaos , which had yet to become normalized .
To minimize “ sharing germs ” ( as our oldest son , a 4-year old , understood this new world ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ avoid going inside , anywhere .
Well , there are some unintended benefits to this now .
Somewhere between Texarkana and Little Rock , this crossed my mind as I sat with my pants down at my ankles , using our new toilet in an empty parking lot behind a permanently closed Mexican restaurant : There are a lot of closed businesses now to privately take a shit outside of .
I am not alone in finding time on the john to be one of the more relaxing and thought-provoking daily activities .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a seat on a bucket , with a bag , which you seal and then keep in the bucket until it can be disposed . )
It was an unseasonably cool afternoon .
A thunderstorm had passed , and I watched as a portly raccoon stumbled out of the dumpster across the lot from me .
Maybe the place had just closed… The swirl of recent events went through my head again on that toilet outside the restaurant .
A new healthy son , a global pandemic , shutdowns , working from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oldest son , a cross-country move with no one helping , so my wife and I could try to stay healthy and be able to take care of young children .
After I had my turn on the toilet , it was my wife ’ s turn , and I took over holding the baby .
I thought of the people we knew and worked with in Austin who had had Covid-19 already .
A young woman with two children had just come out of a fever that kept her on the couch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 12 , and had been taking care of the baby while the mom lay prostrate .
He kissed his mother on her forehead when she got up for the first time .
“ I thought you were dying , ” he told her through tears .
I kissed my son ’ s forehead , then his cheeks , knees , and belly , I said to him , “ Well , I knew we were heading for interesting times , ” before handing him back , packing up the Luggable Loo® , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind , a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind , who from 1982–94 was the magazine ’ s chief political writer and analyst .
This series of dispatches from Kopkind ’ s far-flung network of participants , advisers , guests , and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski , and appears weekly on thenation.com and kopkind.org .

Before. “Nope. You’ve now just infected your other clean hand with germs,” my wife’s OB/GYN dryly instructed. She then put on her own latex gloves and demonstrated how to put them on and take them off while keeping your hands sterile.
We were in my wife and newborn son’s hospital room the day after his birth, on Leap Day, February 29. CNN, muted on the TV above us, was showing the same three b-roll shots of ambulances in front of a nursing home in King County, Wash., outside of Seattle; over and over again.
My wife had given birth to our son a week before all hospitals in Austin closed to visitors. I had been able to be in the delivery room and attempt to sleep in their room with them. Our doctors were on daily calls about the pandemic and preparing for it: Get ready. This is going to be serious.
“Yeah, you should probably just stay home and not leave the house,” the OB/GYN recommended in her usual inconclusively sarcastic tone, which previously had always been reassuring. Scenes From a Pandemic Untethered, or The Year of Living Virtually Patricia J. Williams The Art of the Meal Mary Lewis Maybe We Shouldn’t Go Back to Normal Bri M.
Three days later, people at the supermarket glanced at my purple latex gloves, not wanting to make eye contact afterward. He’s brought the germs. Or maybe my hands were simply another reminder that unforeseen change was coming. Ordinary life was unraveling. Or fleeting.
There were no reported cases yet in Austin. Yet the sense was It’s coming…
It was 3 am, and the grocery store was busier than a Saturday afternoon. Going to the store at that hour had always been so relaxing for me. I had been able to take my time, getting stoned beforehand and going slowly through the aisles. This night carts were everywhere. Family members and college roommates yelled at one another across other carts.
“They got baked beans.”
“Yeah! Get ’em all.”
Freshly printed signs from the customer service desk were Scotch-taped to some shelves: Limit 2.
I had a detached perspective, still ecstatic over the healthy birth of our second son.
No diapers. OK.
No wipes. OK.
My family had entered a nurturing and joyous bubble that was about to overlap with a global and collective bubble of sickness, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a foreseeable yet unstoppable economic depression, disruption, and anxiety.
I strolled down the aisles away from the shelves that formerly held canned goods and pasta and toilet paper, and tried out the produce section. I crossed paths with a fellow bemused middle-aged man, and we shared a smile.
“Time to get creative,” I said as we both looked on a large shelf with nothing but cucumbers.
“The composting toilet got here!” Another brown box had arrived on our porch. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Months into the pandemic now, I felt I should be getting an honorary mention from Jeff Bezos for doing my part to get him to $200 billion in wealth. (I know he’s been busy, so a Christmas card would be fine.)
I opened the Luggable Loo ® box and put the portable toilet in our “Front of moving truck” pile in our moving staging area. It shared a plastic bin with gloves, hand sanitizer, wipes, and granola bars, so it wouldn’t get mixed up with our stuff that would be packed into the back of the moving truck.
We were leaving Austin after 15 years, moving outside Washington, D.C., to be close to family who could help with our domestic chaos, which had yet to become normalized. To minimize “sharing germs” (as our oldest son, a 4-year old, understood this new world), we planned our driving route to avoid going inside, anywhere.
Well, there are some unintended benefits to this now. Somewhere between Texarkana and Little Rock, this crossed my mind as I sat with my pants down at my ankles, using our new toilet in an empty parking lot behind a permanently closed Mexican restaurant: There are a lot of closed businesses now to privately take a shit outside of. Current Issue View our current issue
I am not alone in finding time on the john to be one of the more relaxing and thought-provoking daily activities. (In this case, the john is a seat on a bucket, with a bag, which you seal and then keep in the bucket until it can be disposed.) It was an unseasonably cool afternoon. A thunderstorm had passed, and I watched as a portly raccoon stumbled out of the dumpster across the lot from me. Maybe the place had just closed…
The swirl of recent events went through my head again on that toilet outside the restaurant. A new healthy son, a global pandemic, shutdowns, working from home with no day care for our oldest son, a cross-country move with no one helping, so my wife and I could try to stay healthy and be able to take care of young children.
After I had my turn on the toilet, it was my wife’s turn, and I took over holding the baby. I thought of the people we knew and worked with in Austin who had had Covid-19 already. A young woman with two children had just come out of a fever that kept her on the couch for days. Her oldest son is 12, and had been taking care of the baby while the mom lay prostrate. He kissed his mother on her forehead when she got up for the first time. “I thought you were dying,” he told her through tears.
I kissed my son’s forehead, then his cheeks, knees, and belly, I said to him, “Well, I knew we were heading for interesting times,” before handing him back, packing up the Luggable Loo®, and buckling up for the drive.
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind, a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who from 1982–94 was the magazine’s chief political writer and analyst. This series of dispatches from Kopkind’s far-flung network of participants, advisers, guests, and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski, and appears weekly on thenation.com and kopkind.org.