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Charlie Baker makes one final push for passage of domestic violence legislation

Boston Herald - 3/6/2022

Mar. 6—Gov. Charlie Baker has been making a full-court press to pass two bills to address domestic violence before he leaves office, initiatives he's been pushing since 2017 — but advocates have varying concerns.

Baker has tweeted several times about these bills and embarked on a listening tour in cities throughout the state to hear survivors' stories as he makes the push during his last year in office.

One bill would expand the offenses that would qualify someone for a dangerousness hearing to hold them without bail, allow police to detain people who are in violation of certain court-ordered conditions and bring the state in line with federal guidelines to include someone's entire criminal history when determining whether to hold them without bail, instead of just the immediate offense at hand.

The other bill would send a minor who possesses or distributes child pornography through a diversion program instead of through the juvenile justice system. It would also criminalize the unauthorized distribution of a sexually explicit image, even if it was taken consensually, bringing the state in line with 48 others.

"If my abuser was held because of dangerousness, then he would've never gotten the opportunity to repeatedly stalk me, break into my home, strangle me, kidnap me and my baby," one survivor said during a recent roundtable hosted by Baker's administration.

"(People) don't understand why the scales of justice tip so hard against them, why they're the ones that have to put themselves, their children and their families at risk to 'do the right thing,'" Baker said at another roundtable on the subject. "We are failing victims here in the commonwealth over and over and over again, and we've been doing it for years."

Although the bills have been endorsed by organizations like the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance, they have faced stark opposition. In 2019, over 30 organizations wrote a letter to the General Court raising "grave concerns" about the dangerousness bill, noting that it would eliminate the time requirement to hold a dangerousness trial, and would allow judges to base dangerousness decisions on sometimes decades-old crimes.

Baker has noted, though, that victims fear the release of perpetrators when the time requirement has passed.

Although Toni Troop, spokeswoman for Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, said she appreciates the Baker administration's commitment to issues of sexual and domestic violence, she said that the bill as is could have a "disproportionate impact on marginalized communities."

"We are interested in pursuing and considering a civil remedy here, and not jumping exclusively to a criminal," she said. "We're trying to adopt a more holistic perspective about what accountability looks like."

Carlos Cuevas, the co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Laboratory at Northeastern's School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and a practicing clinical psychologist, said Baker's approach was grounded in research.

"The ability to use the defendant's history of criminal convictions as part of the dangerousness hearing, from a research standpoint, makes sense, because prior criminal justice history, and certainly prior offenses are factors that have been associated with recidivism and violence risk," he said. He added that enhancing protections for survivors in the period immediately after a perpetrator has been removed "is probably a good idea," he said, though, "whether this will do that or not is unclear."

He would like to see "a more robust victim-support mechanism within the criminal justice system," including economic support and child care, which he argued "would go much further in terms of helping survivors get out of abusive relationships."

The Baker administration notes that its Fiscal Year 2023 budget includes over $120 million for these initiatives.

On the explicit images bill, Cuevas praised Baker's move to separate juvenile offenses from adult ones, because "retrofitting" adult punishments to juvenile crimes "generally doesn't work," he said, noting that most juvenile offenders don't fully comprehend the consequences of their actions, and don't often become adult offenders.

Sarah Sobieraj, the chair of the Tufts Sociology Department who has studied attacks against women online, said several roadblocks impede the ability to implement the adult unauthorized distribution of explicit images portion of the bill, including the provision that would allow judges to order images to be permanently destroyed. If the images are stored on a server in a different state or country, it's difficult to ensure removal. She added that bills that tackle the online realm have been historically difficult to enforce.

"It symbolically says this is a crime, this is not OK, you're not able to do this, and that is important and shouldn't be discounted," she said. "For it to have some teeth, there needs to be a real commitment to making folks in law enforcement knowledgeable about it, and to have the tools they need to try to enforce the law if it's passed."

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