Words fail me—Domestic abuse goes unpunished

Executive who branded wife with iron freed with a £2,000 fine:

A report recommended a community service order, but Recorder William Featherby questioned how Read would fit it in around his long working hours.

He said he was concerned that Read had denied the offences despite overwhelming evidence and he called the iron attack "appalling".

But the judge said it was the circumstances of the marriage that had provoked Read and that now those circumstances had gone, sending him to prison would "help no one".

So branding your wife with a hot iron isn't worthy of punishment in and of itself? A £2K fine (about a weeks pay for this guy) is going to sort it all out?

Prison has three functions: Punish, protect and rehabilitate. This guy seems barely able to acknowledge he's done wrong, but because he has a busy job he can just pay it off?

Judith Stephenson, of Women's Aid, said: "This case is extremely worrying. It takes an enormous amount of courage for a woman to go to court and this sentence may deter other women from doing so."

That people (predominantly but not exclusively women) become trapped in abusive relationships and feel they can't get out is something I can't relate to, can't understand. But I know it happens, and it has happened to people I like and respect. To have the court system then effectively dismiss it out of hand is horrifying.

Via Katy at The Devil's Kitchen.

My Early Muir Owl

OK, snapesbabe proposed to me by dropping a fairly big hint in an email and then saying yes when I rang and said are you asking me to marry you? This guy? Might just possibly have planned it a little bit too much. Incredibly well done though; metro_weird has the full story or alternately you could just watch the YouTube.

Hmm, on a different note, worth observing. When we met in February, we had two mutual friends on LJ (ginasketch and freddiefraggles. Now, through us meeting each others friends and simply talking about each other and to each others friends, we have 60 mutual friends. Since we announced the engagement just under two weeks ago, I've been added by 13 more people (which is quite scary). As I've always tried to keep the total accounts I read (including feeds and communities) below 500, in order to keep up with actual, RL friends and friends of friends, I've removed a chunk of feeds and some actual LJs; I believe most of these to be dormant, but others are simply people I've not really connected with or even heard from much recently. I still have too many accounts friended, but I don't read the blog feeds and similar on my default--for those wondering, every LJ account I've got on my list is on my default, and is also on one of my three main filters, but only those people I've met in person are on my "always going to backread unles impossible" filter; also, all my viewing filters are public and linked from my sidebar. Some people set great store by these things, so just thought I'd say.

Oh--I haven't added back a few accounts that I believe to be spammers or serial adders, if that's not the case? Well, my userinfo does say to say hello. I'm still busy with various things, and not feeling 100%, my system is rebelling against me currently. Ah well. A few other posts to follow next few days about various projects (I hope).