"The consequences will be tragic": Experts on the decriminalization of beatings
Today in the State Duma in the first reading a bill was passed, amending Article 116 of the Criminal Code "Beatings", which implies the decriminalization of beatings against relatives. In July last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law that appropriated crimes in a number of articles, including beatings, the status of administrative offenses. The beatings inflicted on non-close people, if they were committed for the first time, began to be regarded as an administrative offense. If, however, beatings were inflicted on close persons, criminal responsibility for them also came at the first time the crime was committed.
The current amendments translate into the field of administrative law and beatings against close persons. United Russia deputy Olga Batalina, one of the authors of the initiative, explained this by the fact that "people were objectively puzzled why conflicts within the family, beating relatives are a crime, and the same actions committed on the street are an administrative offense."
Ahead of the second and third reading of the bill. We asked the experts — Anna Rivina, head of the Violent Internet project, Anna Sinelnikova, deputy director of the Center for Women and Children’s Help, Anna Sinelnikova, and Ella Panei, associate professor at the HSE Department of Sociology in St. Petersburg — about the reasons for adopting the law and its possible consequences.
Obviously, this is a very dangerous trend: at the level of legislation in our society, the use of violence is perceived as the norm. Here we must understand that we are talking not only about the legal framework, but also about the socio-cultural model, about the permissibility that still exists in our society. Deputies do not hesitate to say that you can not forbid slapping children. This, of course, monstrous and scary.
While it was the first reading of the bill. The Communist Party faction did not support this legislative initiative and announced that various amendments would be made. As for "Fair Russia", despite the fact that they, unfortunately (but not surprisingly), supported the bill, they were rightly noticed that it was necessary to separate the juvenile justice system and those beatings and acts of aggression and violence that are directed on adults and do not affect the rights of children. It must be remembered that, to date, United Russia constitutes a constitutional majority in our parliament, and the initiators of this bill have just been made by United Russia deputies and members of the Federation Council from United Russia. Later, the United Russia party announced that it would support this initiative.
It should be noted that in our country there is no law against domestic violence, which exists in 143 countries of the world. And instead of passing the law, which is necessary, we, on the contrary, take a step back. If we take the legislation in the form in which it existed since August (I’m talking about beatings against close people - Article 116 of the Criminal Code), then the state at least somehow undertakes the task of protecting the affected family members, since is private-public in nature. That is, not only the victim can initiate the accusation - the state could also do this. Now, if all this is removed, a very simple story will turn out: there will be some act of aggression, a beating, there will be a fine, which, most likely, will hang on the family budget. If we are talking about low-income families, for example, 15 thousand rubles, 5-10 thousand of them will be taken out to pay off this very fine. This can be both an additional incentive for subsequent aggression, and to keep victims from submitting an application.
But the worst thing is that these changes do not imply protection from the state if there is a repeated act of aggression. That is, a woman who has found herself in such a situation for the second time will then have to independently collect all the evidence, go to a world court and prove what happened to her, prove the guilt of the one who did this to her. We know that in our country the absolute majority of women do not appeal to the courts and the police. We are absolutely sure that this is a very, very inefficient mechanism, and even those who protect their interests with the help of lawyers are not always able to pass this way worthily. Therefore, we can say that, in principle, our violence will be fixed as the norm of behavior.
I think this event will respond in the future with even more tragedies that occur because of domestic violence, because the main thing that does not stop men who beat their wives, girlfriends is impunity. The decriminalization of violence against loved ones will lead to even greater impunity, which, unfortunately and no doubt, will push people to such acts of violence and aggression against loved ones.
The main reason for the adoption of this law in the first reading is the work of the conservative forces of our society, the personification of which can be called Elena Mizulina, who manipulate the opinions of people, including deputies. I am sure that most of them have no idea what they voted for - this bill was submitted as the so-called slapping law: he spanked the child - he went to prison. Although in the first place, I think, this amendment was aimed specifically at protecting adult family members - wives or, for example, mothers, because situations when a man beats his elderly mother are not uncommon. The second reason is the strengthening of conservative sentiments, including in relation to the distribution of roles in the family: it seems to supporters of the law that this is our national tradition. I can not explain this to anyone else.
The main possible negative consequence concerns the affected women, who are deprived of at least some hope of assistance from law enforcement agencies. Now, when the amendments will be canceled, they will be completely defenseless against the offenders, who are often forced to live in the same apartment because of our Russian situation. It seems to me that the consequences for Russian women will be very tragic. As for the consequences for the country, of course, its image at the international level, the abolition of this amendment is very spoil.
I think that people who support the law hide behind the pseudo-traditionalist slogans of “non-interference in the affairs of the family”, but in fact are guided by the realization that our law enforcement system is decomposed to such an extent that it is not able to deal with such complex types crime Some time ago, an attempt was made to force the police to address the issue of domestic violence. For this, the article “Beating” in the Criminal Code excluded the punishment for beatings that people of approximately equal strength inflicted on each other: a fight between two men without serious consequences ceased to be a criminal offense, but became administrative. It was hoped that the police would stop doing the indicators for this article in clashes between a couple of drunken friends - they would only have to deal with the very serious problem of beatings in the family. The police have disgracefully failed to cope with this task, and now we have to decriminalize this article entirely from the realization that we in Russia do not have such a police force that can deal with the problem of domestic violence.
This is one of the few such crimes that really need to be stopped in the early stages. The fact is that domestic violence is a serial crime, something that rarely happens only once. Moreover, it is unwound, it goes through an escalation cycle: if the violence in the house starts, it will increase, the rapist will lose the shore, the victim will be isolated, and in the next stages this could be serious injury, it could be a killing.
This is the last thing that makes sense to decriminalize. Moreover, generally speaking, decriminalizing light crime can be very sensible: not to put a person in jail for minor offenses is often a "lesser evil" than to put him in prison. But in the case of beatings in the family, this is categorically not the case. This allows the problem to grow, develop, traumatize the victim for many years (and if it is a child, it is guaranteed for life) - and the police will deal with it when something really terrible happens.
The police did not cope with the problem of domestic violence so badly that I didn’t think that much would actually change. Here you can speculate that, of course, all evil husbands will be told on TV that they are no longer imprisoned for beatings in the house, and someone decides that it was impossible before, but now it is possible. But in essence, this type of crime remained so unpunished in Russia even earlier that nothing would change in fact.
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