I understand domestic abuse is a serious problem and really wish this book offered some groundbreaking solution to deal with it. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it over the past eight years and have not developed any good ideas. I will offer suggestions for changes that might improve things, but this book is not about reforming domestic abuse laws; I want to tell my story.
It is, of course, a noble effort to prevent domestic abuse and crime in general, just like it is a noble effort to prevent terrorism, mass shootings, and disease. The problem is that as you go from disease to terrorism to mass shootings to smaller crimes, you wind up having more and more innocent people affected. I do not see many adverse effects from trying to prevent disease, although the anti-vaxxers will argue that some of the ways we do that are worse than the diseases themselves, etc. In trying to prevent terrorism, innocent people have given up many freedoms they may or may not care about. Some innocent people have been adversely affected greatly; innocent people have been accused of being terrorists, put on no-fly lists, etc. Many more people have been inconvenienced repeatedly by restrictions on flying, travel, etc.
The problem really comes when you try to prevent violent crimes or crime in general. This requires predicting human behavior when people often cannot even predict what they themselves are going to do. I believe, as most people do that predicting future behavior is best done by looking at past behavior. However, if someone gets “labeled,” it’s tough to overcome. The behaviors that lead to this label may have been very situational, and even the most righteous person would have behaved the same way in the same situation. This is a phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error in social psychology. The Wikipedia page describes it as “…the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as ‘the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are.’” There are two great podcasts from Stuff You Should Know titled, The Fallacy of Alignment: Fundamental Attribution Error, Part I/II, that offer a great discussion of this. I bring this up because I feel much of what ails society today, the tribal and “us versus them” attitude, can be blamed on this. Ultimately, it establishes that we aren’t really all that different, but the circumstances of our lives can be extremely different.
Preventing crime and, in particular, domestic abuse and violent crimes can have some seriously adverse and unintended consequences, and systems and people can easily go too far. It’s never politically incorrect to say that you want to prevent violent crimes or domestic abuse, as it is rarely politically correct to say you want to repeal laws that have been enacted to do just that. It’s just that most people have never committed or been accused of a crime, so they think only the “bad” people will be affected by overreaching laws. I was certainly one of these people for most of my life.