ATTENTON ALL FEMALES! LGBTQIA ! STATEMENT ON DEFENDING OUR LIVES A DOCUMENTARY WHO WERE BATTERED 2/27/10 7PM‏ BY CLEVELAND ANARCHIST BLACK CROSS

 The Cleveland Anarchist Black Cross is dedicated to the abolition of
 the prison system and to the struggle for justice for all people and
 against oppression of all forms. We support political prisoners, but
 also want to understand issues related to prisons and other violent
 tools of control in our society. We aim to educate about the flaws of
 the prison industrial complex whether it be the mass imprisonment of
 blacks and latinos, and youth, or the paramilitary policing of these
 communities, the drug war aka chemical warfare by the government done
 onto communities of color in the US and abroad in Colombia, Nicaragua
 etc.
 
 As a group that takes a stand against domination in our society, we
 join the calls for the end to the prison system. The system of
 prisons in this country as we know them was created as a means of
 controlling and criminalizing freed black men and women and co-opting
 their labor for the service of wealthy whites. The very roots of
 prisons were to normalize poor people and women as workers for
 industry. The movement to eliminate this system and to address the
 real sources of violence in our society, supported by people ranging
 from Christians to anarchists, is widespread and ever growing.
 
 Why talk about domestic violence? To ignore a facet of the violence
 and oppression in our society as pervasive and wide-reaching as men's
 violence against women and men in the home would be impossible for us.
 None of us escape the effects of this violence. Furthermore,
 understanding the mentality and drive behind male domination of people
 they profess to love provides insight and understanding into the
 domination of indigenous and other people of color by white people,
 into the violence and devastation of other living creatures and
 ecosystems by humans, into the obsession with control and the master
 race phenomenon in our society. So domestic violence, while itself a
 horrific and critical pattern of atrocities, also gives us a lens to
 look at other aspects of our society.
 
 Upon examination, the prison system bears more than superficial
 resemblance to the individual prisons men create through domestic
 violence. The abuser/abusive system cannot rely on physical force
 alone to control their prisoners, so psychological manipulation and
 violence is employed as well. The specific techniques of isolation,
 monopolizing perception, inducing debility and exhaustion, threats,
 demonstrations of power and "omnipotence," making trivial demands, and
 degrading prisoners (described in Biderman's Chart of Coercion) are
 used extensively in prisons to break down incarcerated people and
 enforce compliance. These abhorrent techniques, coupled with the high
 incarceration rates of latino and black people, and the jailing of
 people for political dissent, reveal another aspect of a system that
 is bent on social control by any means.
 
 Further, it's important to recognize how the prison system supports
 the violence of abusers. As the film Defending Our Lives portrays,
 police trivializing of domestic violence reports often enables abusers
 by sending a message that the victims are alone and that the violence
 they're experiencing is unimportant. The extensive penalization of
 self-defense, where women are convicted for killing their abusers,
 sends a clear message that victims of domestic violence must not stand
 up for themselves. Many victims, disempowered and psychologically
 traumatized from abusive relationships, end up criminalized for drug
 crimes, sex work, or other non-violent crimes, and their abuse is
 replicated by prisons. Instead of seeking to end cycles and patterns
 of abuse, the prison system reinforces this violence.
 
 Looking for solutions to violence from the police or the prison
 system, it is essential to recognize the marginalization of the
 primary victims of this violence politically, economically and
 socially, and to be aware of the way that people experience this
 violence differently depending on whether they're male, female or
 transgendered; white or of color; straight or gay; rich or poor.
 Likewise, marginalization and other forms of oppression must be taken
 into account when considering domestic violence. Approaches that
 ignore these differences of power have consistently left out or even
 negatively impacted poor people, people of color, people who deviate
 from gender norms, and so on.
 
 As a group looking for solutions to state violence, we think it's
 essential to also focus on the pervasive violence in our communities.
 We must understand and address the underlying dynamics of sexism,
 racism, economic violence and classism, homophobia, speciesism, and
 other forms of domination that create and perpetuate this violence.
 These systems cannot be looked at in isolation, as they all influence
 and support each other and must be considered as a whole. While
 reforms to any of these systems may have some benefits, we must always
 keep in sight that these systems are inherently violent.