What Lies Beneath the Surface
The wolf came just before closing He wanted to speak on her behalf But no translator was available And he could only gnash his teeth So the abuse went unanswered And once home she became as silent As the helpless wolf rendered speechless Who only wanted to help her heal To protect her From a system with no options But to release the criminals Leaving the victims invisible - The offenders invincible - Until the wolf comes to show his long teeth And growl his insistence
This poem resulted from the outrage I think many of us feel at the inability of our current legal system to prosecute and convict many who are guilty for reasons that seem senseless and irrational. I heard from a friend of mine recently that a woman we both know had been brutally assaulted a while back by an ex-boyfriend everyone knew was violent. Although she’d had the courage to accuse her attacker in open court, the case was thrown. The outrageous defense was that since she had a history with this monster, she should have known what he was capable of and taken appropriate precautions.
They pointed out she’d never taken out a restraining order, ignoring the fact she’d quit her job and moved to a different state. They said she opened the door to him, despite the fact that he’d tricked someone else into knocking, telling them he wanted to surprise his girlfriend, while he stayed out of sight until she opened the door and he forced his way in.
It didn’t matter that the person he’d tricked into helping testified as to what had happened. It didn’t help that she was beaten within an inch of her life and immediately named her attacker when the police came. It didn’t matter that the woman he had married had been in the ER with injuries consistent with domestic abuse three times in the nine months since their wedding because she refused to say he’d hurt her. It didn’t matter that another ex-girlfriend testified that he’d hit her on several occasions including one time she’d needed 37 stitches also ending up with a concussion because she said at the time that she didn’t know who had done it for fear he’d come after her again.
What do you do when you know that someone like that is out there and could come after even if you move across the country? What do you do if you know a restraining order isn’t going to stop him, especially once the courts seemed to give him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted or that a restraining order wouldn’t help if he killed you even if he went to jail? What do you do? Though this may be thought by some to be a controversial statement, this situation is the kind of thing that makes me think that vigilante justice isn’t always necessarily bad if it prevents innocent people from being terrorized, attacked and possibly killed. While some will argue this is a slippery slope, sometimes the law just can’t protects us. So, what do you do?
Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had her poetry featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost. Her fiction has been published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found on Amazon under her pen name, Taye Carrol.
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