Sexism and the mutilating mom
In August 2004, a Georgia woman named Samantha J. Davis perpetrated a hideous atrocity. According to an Associated Press article, she was upset that her 6-year-old son had been “talking back.†Samantha Davis heated a pair of scissors on her kitchen stove, held them to the back of the child’s neck, then cut off a piece of his tongue.
What is her punishment for committing a horror worthy of a Medieval Inquisitor? After pleading guilty to two counts of child cruelty, she has been sentenced to serve between 60 to 180 days in a detention center before going on probation for ten years. She must also attend a 25-week parenting class and a nonviolence class. She will be allowed only supervised visits with her son who has been in the custody of his father since the crime. They were separated at the time of the incident.
Judge Wade Crumbley may have been influenced to this leniency because the father, Toby Davis, filed papers with the court saying he did not want to cooperate with the prosecution and requesting that the charges be dropped. The tortured and mutilated little boy signed an affidavit asking that his cruel and warped mother not be prosecuted.
Samantha Davis’ attorney Rickey L. Richardson told the Associated Press that Toby Davis told the judge that his estranged wife “is a good woman and he doesn’t feel his son is unsafe around her.â€
It seems to this writer that the incredibly light sentence Mother Davis received for abusing her son is, at least to some extent, the result of sexism. A father who perpetrated such torture and mutilation would have been very likely to receive the appropriate punishment of years in prison.
I also believe parts of the sentence verge on an obscene joke. Parenting class? A mother or father who uses excessive corporal punishment or is emotionally abusive could rightly be ordered to attend a parenting class. No one should need a class to teach them that burning and mutilating a child is not acceptable discipline. What’s more, Samantha Davis should not be allowed any contact with the son she so grievously wronged, supervised or not. Her offense ought to have led to the termination of her parental rights.
However, that would not necessarily mean putting this poor, mistreated boy in the sole custody of his father. Toby Davis’ attitude toward his son’s abuser, his insistence that she is a “good woman,†calls into question his own competency as a parent. It could reflect a misguided chivalry but it unquestionably reflects an error in judgment.
The court is coddling a criminal. The American system is failing a child.
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August 10th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
I agree wuth Ms Noe. The woman offender received a ridiculously light sentence compared to what a man would have gotten had he tortured and mutilated his son. Anti-male sexism and misguided chivalry are at work here. Male judges, prosecutors and legislators seem to bend over backward to be lenient toward adult women, even when they commit the most horrendous family violence. But the husband’s devotion to his wife is also disturbing. We see the same thing with Rusty Yates defending his child-killing wife. It’s a recurring phenomenon. The husband feels sorry for his mentally disturbed / emotionally unstable wife and comes to her defense, as if she were a sick child.
August 11th, 2006 at 4:56 am
At least she got the blame, which is more than most female child abusers get. If the father were not supportive of the mother, then you would have warring parents. When you have warring parents, government looks for any excuse to side with the mother, and you would end up with the boy in the sole custody of his mother, where she could abuse the boy with impunity.
It may seem farfetched now that her guilt is established, but that’s the point. When a mother abuses a child, the best thing the father can do to protect the child is to be supportive of the mother, because that keeps judges and CPS from looking for ways to blame him.
No, it isn’t right, but that’s how it works. The only thing worse for a child than an abusive mother is a child with an abusive mother and a father getting the standard anti-father treatment from government.
So, the sexism premise is correct, but the level of sexism is underestimated to the point of leading to the incorrect conclusion, at least insofar as actually protecting the child, which is the most important part. A father of a child with an abusive mother who fails to recognize this will fail his child. I should know, because I failed to recognize it in time, and I failed my son accordingly.
August 11th, 2006 at 5:38 am
The same holds true for Russell Yates. Although it was too late to protect his children, by being supportive of Andrea Yates he kept the government off his back. Would you rather be the father of murdered children living in a government gay dungeon, or the father of murdered children living in “a free country”? You want “choice for men”, there you have it, but only if he recognizes those are his choices, and isn’t foolish enough to stand up for what is right and take on the sexism. Think about it. If women are so “empowered” that the life or death of a child is “her choice”, what makes anybody think that suddenly the child is actually going to matter to a “progressive” government just because the child manages to be born.