Free Us Now Women Rights Radio

NYS Assemblywoman Patricia Eddington & Marcia Pappas President NOW-NYS Topic: New legislation proposed by Assemblywoman Eddington (see their statements below) According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence "One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year. The majority (73%) of family violence victims are female. Females are 84% of spousal abuse victims and 86% of abuse victims at the hands of a boyfriend." NYS Assemblymember Patricia Eddington states, "We believe that these vicious, violent crimes against women, including rape, murder and the recent beheading of a woman in Buffalo, are because they are women. Therefore, I am introducing a bill that will require authorities to first apply the standard of "hate crime" to offenses committed by men against women before seeking lesser charges under the penal code." Pappas further states, "All too often judges and police enforcement shrug their shoulders and look the other way. These cases should be regarded as "hate crimes," with no talk of "he only did it once, or it's a crime of passion." Such excuses are not acceptable. And since men are taught from day one that women do not deserve respect, this deliberately-cultivated mindset actually constitutes premeditation." In a 1998 article titled "Rethinking Violence Against Women as Hate Crime" by Ann Noel she states "Domestic violence is often viewed as an individual dispute between a man and a woman, or the pathological problem of a particular man. Yet domestic violence reveals deep historical, cultural and legal roots to subordinate women. Men who assault their wives are living up to cherished Western cultural prescriptions -- aggressiveness, male dominance, and female subordination and they are using physical force as a means to enforce that dominance. Taking these crimes out of the realm of the individual and into the co