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The Sex and Colour of Justice

Chapter 4.

By Ryan O'BryanPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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The Sex and Colour of Justice
Photo by Tyrell James on Unsplash

Quietly ensconced in a bottom rung, no star hotel, I had time to reflect a little about what had brought me to this. Out on my ear, but not out for the count, not by a long chalk. Looking back I wondered why I had ever put up with half of what I did. My life felt like a slow motion plane crash with everything in ruins. Now I had to eat the elephant to discover, if I could, what exactly had gone wrong.

I am the kind of person who will put up with almost anything for a peaceful life. I intensely dislike any sort of conflict and will do whatever it takes to appease my assailant. This, I have learned the hard way, is not a good modus operandi with which to conduct your relationships, let alone your life. Appeasement almost never works, it simply gives the other side carte blanch to push you as far as they like. It is far better to show a red light and say ok, this stops right here, right now. Oh that I had learned this earlier on in life.

During the seven years I had been with my wife, I had seen more than enough signs that this woman was positively unbalanced. She had demonstrated many times that she was on the wrong side of borderline psychopathic.

I had on all too numerous occasions been subject to lies and false accusations of infidelity, to insults, humiliation, emotional abuse and injurious physical violence. In short, the woman was stark raving bonkers. And I was not the only one to have suffered her appalling behaviour. I had witnessed her attack her own sister with a hot iron and a very large kitchen knife for no good reason at all, not that there is ever any good reason nor extenuating circumstances for such ugly and dangerous violent behaviour.

Of one thing I was sure, any love I had previously felt for the woman had long since vanished into thin air. The only reason I put up with so much was for the love of our son. In the end, even that was not something I could use to justify tolerating any more being treated worse than a dog.

I think the best description of my wife's character would have to be something like a psychopathic prima donna, a highly histrionic drama queen, a venomous bag of negative emotions, if you like, who seemed to get her kicks from terrorising those closest to her. Still, I was out of it now, in one piece, just about, battered and bruised, but still alive and kicking. And for that I thanked the lord. I hoped that from this point on I would be able to put my life back together and enjoy some degree of peace and tranquility. I hadn't reckoned on what was to come next, a campaign of terror that endured some fifteen years. And this is how it all began.

One day I was driving to the coast to go surfing on an ocean going kayak at our nearest beach. En-route I was arrested by the police via a mobile phone call. I was ordered back into town for an interrogation by a judge. In this particular country it is often the judge rather than the police who do the investigating by demanding the accused attend a closed meeting to answer the charges being made. After the declaration of the accused person's version of events, the judge can then decide whether or not to go to trial.

At the police headquarters I found myself in some sort of Kafkaesqu, legally oppressive, bureaucratic nightmare. All I was told by the presiding administrator was that I had been accused of gender violence, whatever that meant, and that I was to go to the courts on the other side of town to be interviewed by a judge. I was given no explanation as to the nature of the exact crime I was supposed to have committed.

Gender violence. Sometime in the early 2000's the government had introduced a new law for the protection of abused women. That law was called Gender Violence. After my interrogation with the judge I decided to try to find out a bit more about Gender Violence and was quite frankly appalled to discover that the legal definition was so loose and broad that it literally invited any unhappy woman to denounce her other half for the most trivial supposed wrong doings.

For example, "Ignoring a woman's feelings." Really? So should a man forget to put the rubbish out, or even worse forget to buy his woman a birthday card, then he has theoretically broken the law! Of course, this opened the flood gates for just about every woman in the land having a bad hair day to go running to the law with whatever jumped up accusation of some sort of domestic infraction she could muster, in an attempt to get the law to give her husband a damn good kick in the nuts for her.

In my case the accusations were as follows.

That I had eighteen months previously called my wife stupid. Yes, that was the time she attacked me and kicked me in the knee so hard she almost broke it and crippled me for a week.

That I had accused my wife of having multiple affairs. Wrong, I accused her of having one affair, which I had more than enough reason to believe. I had caught her and him en flagrant as it were.

That I had threatened to kill her and our son.Bullshit. I had told her that she could not hurt me without hurting herself and our son after she had threatened to destroy me.

How little did I know what weight would be given to her fanciful story. My jaw dropped with incredulity when the judge decided to go ahead with a trial the following week. My lawyer told me to deny all and expect to be found guilty and be punished.

"Here's your problem. One, you're man, two you're a person of colour, three you're Johhny Foreigner. Ergo, you are presumed guilty until you are declared to be innocent. It gets worse. You are going to be tried in a special court for the protection of vulnerable women. The judge has most likely already decided you're guilty and is just going through the motions of a trial. On the other hand, maybe he is just covering his arse. For all he knows you might be a danger to your wife. Plus, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a witch hunt going on in this country, and men are the witches. It is debatable if this new law has been brought in to protect vulnerable women or just to catch the female vote. Whichever way you slice it, it's a crock of shit for decent men like you. My advice to you is to get this over with and then just skip the country. You will never enjoy any peace as long as you stay. You're a sitting duck. I'll see you here in court next week. In the meantime, my best advice to you is to just try to stay away from her and do not under any circumstances have any contact with her. She'll not stop until she has driven you to suicide, ground you to dust or put you in jail under false pretences. She will use the full force of her lies and a misguided legal system to destroy you." And with that he was gone.

As I sat in a local coffee bar opposite the court building I began to realise that rather than being guilty of anything, I was victim of cognitive dissonance, bias confirmation and guilt projection. That little cocktail of mental and psychological infirmities was to be the complete destruction of almost everything I had ever believed in. Justice is not what you might naively think it is. Justice has a colour and a gender, and I was the wrong sort of candidate on all counts to enjoy its protection.

Even realising that I had an uphill battle on my hands, I decided that I would fight it. Fight or flight? I have never ever run away from any grave injustice visited upon me in my entire life, and I wasn't about to start down that road any time soon.

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Ryan O'Bryan

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