Survivors’ Act would give women a chance
If there’s anything we have learned from working to pass Senate Bill 1470, it’s that as a woman there’s no winning. For women in Oklahoma, it’s a fine line between being another true crime headline — “Dead Woman Found on Side of the Road” — and being locked in an orange jumpsuit for life.
Over 49.1% of women in Oklahoma will experience domestic abuse in their lives. You can essentially look across the grocery store here and do “eeney, meany, miney, mo” on who might be being abused. Every other woman here has or is experiencing domestic abuse. But God forbid she fight back.
If you’ve spent any time in Oklahoma, you know that Oklahomans were bred with a certain grit in our veins. If I had to guess, I would say it’s from the type of person who would come to this former “territory” in the first place … people without much to lose, but came here knowing they would face many obstacles — wind, blazing prairie summers, and the Wild West of it all. They faced this, unafraid, and that grit has been handed down through the generations. We often take pride in this stoic determination. And women here, too, have that grit. They do fight back. But at what cost?
Probably since before our state’s inception in 1907, women have been fighting back against abusers. Social media comments I have gotten on domestic violence read: “Just get a gun! That’ll fix it.” If only it were that simple. Statistics show that if a woman gets a gun to defend herself, it is far more likely to be used against her. According to the Violence Policy Center, studies show that for every one time a woman used her handgun to protect herself, there were 101 times where her handgun was used by someone else to harm her. The idea of defending yourself as a woman is a myth.
And here’s what makes it even more mythical — in the rare instances where self-defense is employed, women are often still blamed. Shamed. Every chink in their armor exposed and every skeleton in her closet pulled to the fore. As if she did this to herself. Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice has compiled over 100 names of women currently incarcerated that self-identify as women who committed crimes out of desperation caused by an abuser.
SB 1470, otherwise known as the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, has cleared House committee hearings and likely will head to the House floor for a vote soon. This bill is a rare opportunity to bring Oklahoma law a bit more in line with these shocking statistics we see our home state riddled with. We have learned so much in recent years, about the power and pervasiveness of coercive control, and how abusers operate. Under this law, survivors will still do time for their crimes — it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. But if the victim has evidence of domestic abuse, she can receive a lesser sentence if the crime stemmed directly from that documented abuse.
If passed, this law will certainly reunite families. A 2014 study produced by the state of Oklahoma showed that two-thirds of women incarcerated here are mothers, and many of the incarcerated survivors we speak to, cite their children as a reason for either fighting back, or going along with abusers; they were doing everything they could to shield their little ones, and now spend painful nights staring at prison walls, trying to remember their wispy baby hairs, the gentle rise and fall of their little bellies, and pray they don’t have to miss a moment more of their children’s childhoods.
These children, separated from their mothers by bars, are blameless victims to the systems that punishes survivors, and protects abusers. They will grow up without a mother, because she fought to survive. In many cases, they do not understand why their mother has been taken from them and will be emotionally scarred forevermore, if they were not already damaged enough by witnessing her abuse. There is no giving a mother back those years with a child, but there is also no child who will get those years back either. They are entirely innocent, and yet robbed by the system intent on punishing their parent for surviving.
But the part of this bill that gives me the most hope for the future is that we are seeing not only women from all over the country rallying support, but also our courageous Republican authors standing tall in the face of political threats from elected district attorneys who would rather see the system keep its flaws; who prefer business-as-usual to genuine justice.
The numbers prove that Oklahoma is broken. But these DAs are shaking in their boots to make a change. We know that doing the same things will produce the same, flawed outcomes. But regardless of the forces trying to hold us back, this is not only a bill Oklahoma desperately needs, but also a bill that Oklahomans can agree on. It passed the Senate vote without a single nay: 45-0. This is a rare instance in today’s political climate where we see support across the spectrum… And that is because the language of this bill makes sense. It provides accountability, without undue punishment for survivors who never deserved to be in the position of being prosecuted in the first place.
Annie Bowles, of Oklahoma City, is the founder at Sugarfree Media and host of News Du Jour, a SiriusXM podcast.