Posted on March 16, 2013 by Ruth O’Brien
I never thought Manhattan was a bad place for women. Sure, you need a lot of energy, but that goes for both genders. And sure, it goes without saying that you have to be well educated if you are a woman trying to fit into a highly competitive, male-dominated world. But hey, in 2007 New York City women between 21 and 30 years old made 117 cents of every man’s dollar when the rest of the country’s women languished at 77 cents. That’s not bad. Yet after the NYPD’s events over the past week, I may need to rethink this.
Manhattan is no longer the place to be — as a victim of domestic violence, that is, since the NYPD had its worst week in a long time. Not only did one of their own get convicted of trying to put women on pits (as opposed to pedestals), but now the department is trying toarrest victims of domestic violence when they report the purported perps, who happen to be 92 percent men.
The NYPD couldn’t have localized this war on women at a worse time, given President Barack Obama’s big push for the Democrats to finally claim women, including all the moms who have eluded the Democrats for years — that is, soccer moms, tiger moms, and the oddest of all, mama grizzlies. So the next question is, does Mayor Bloomberg (who is trying to make it onto the national anti-violence stage by giving away loads of gun-control funds) know? Does ambitious Governor Andrew Cuomo, also trying to make it onto the national political scene, know?
If you are an anti-war-on-women politician, or (put positively) a pro-mom politician, you don’t let the moms or their children become victims of violence, or victims of being put in the criminal-justice system to stop them from complaining about domestic violence. As it is, women have the greatest chance of being murdered when they try to leave, most often after reporting domestic violence. So if Bloomberg is so anti-gun but not pro-mom, how can he think he’s shaping (with all his money) an anti-violence campaign when he’s encouraging moms to stop reporting violence?
And if Cuomo wants to join the big boys (and by that I mean Obama) down in D.C., or run in 2016 like Bloomberg, he should support gun control and support funding for women, or at the very least get behind Obama and the Obamacrats’ efforts to get the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed in Congress, and then through a conservative, and often anti-woman, Supreme Court.
Ruth Frick O'Brien 
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