Britney Spears is our wake-up call?
My Facebook feed is flooded with OMG BRITNEY’s, and how could this be happening?!, and so many flabbergasted responses to Britney Spears’ current legal battle.
And I’m over here screaming “Y’ALL THIS IS NORMAL.” Britney Spears is honestly our wake-up call!? Have we all just not noticed Jennifer Dulos’s battle, or what about Laura Beebe, and the many other thousands of murdered domestic violence moms failed by the American judicial system?
But no, 90’s pop star, Britney Spears is somehow the wake-up call that our judicial system is fucked.
I started to write out a comment on another post about how much it pisses me off to see people so shocked, especially people that have been subjected to my timeline the past 5 years. For the past 5 years, I have been screaming about how my rights as a person and as a parent have been eroded away by a domestic violence perpetrator and complicity family court system.
And yet, yet, Britney Spears is the wake-up call?
First of all, she’s alive. The system complicit in abusing her hasn’t aided in her murder. So we’re going to call that lucky. Yeah, I know, shocking. But accurate. Annually 75% of divorce cases filed are due to domestic violence — yet hundreds of thousands end up embroiled and entangled in messy court battles where women's rights are just slowly eroded away to nothing. Or they’re murdered. It’s kind of a crapshoot as to which you’ll end up as. Dead, or facing the fall out of chronic abuse from your ex-husband/children’s father and the system that exists supposedly to protect you.
It just makes me angry at this point. It’s so heartbreaking that Britney has lost so many rights, it’s so awful, I’m so devastated, this is horrific. So many woo is Britney. She has so much spotlight that I’m not particularly worried about how she’s going to turn out — and she has her voice, very clearly. It may be horrific but she’s capable of speaking up and she’s holding a lot of privilege.
There are thousands of women in this country who don’t hold that same privilege, courage, ability, and means— and they’re getting murdered at astronomical rates that should be alarming.
Each month 57 women are shot and killed by their partners — that doesn’t take into account any other kind of violence, just shot and killed. The number of women from that number involved in Family Court or have presented to police, Criminal Court, Juvenile Court, or DCF is embarrassing. These are systems set up to protect victims, and it’s like they almost endorse the killings of women.
And yet so often I and other folks embroiled in this system get phone calls from other women begging for help. Help that they couldn’t get from local police, domestic violence organizations, Family Court, women’s organizations, Criminal Court, DCF, and so many more.
But yes, Britney Spears is somehow our wake-up call that the US has a “women don’t matter” issue.
At some point, we are all socially responsible to care for the welfare of one another. DV and the lack of adequate resources for chronic abuse victims (most statewide agencies do not have services for chronic abuse victims), and the lack of adequate response by systems like Family Court, DCF, and Criminal Court have resulted in thousands of murders nationwide. …literally thousands in the last few years.
And if this isn’t something you’re already aware to you aren’t paying attention to your own community and the people around you. It’s inevitable to meet a mom facing chronic abuse in Family Court — there’s too many to not meet one of us. Hell, Britney IS one of us.
At this point, in 2021, where so many women are facing this and being murdered as a result of inadequate system response, if you aren’t already aware of the same issues that put Britney in an abusive relationship with the courts & her conservatorship, you’re just not paying attention.
