lord of the blog

« Responses | Main | UN Report »

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Responses

There are so many comments I'm afraid this will have to be brief!

Foxhunting. Welcome to Charlotte it's good to see young people participating in this debate. I don't agree with you however!

I think Roger Evans draws attention to a difficult issue about slaughter houses and killing animals without stunning for the Jewish and Muslim market. But I still think the key argument against hunting is that it is essentially a sport which involves unnecessary cruelty.

The quote from Peter Bradley MP is out of context. He actually wrote an excellent article in the Sunday Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk Sunday Telegraph) on the 21st November. The paper put a spin on the story but did publish his correcting letter the following week.

Dan. I would love to attend a meeting in India. I have been to a number there and I found the views much more varied then you suggest. You still haven't answered the point about population. Britain had a population of 31 million in the mid 19th century. You can't hold down an empire of at least 500 million unless there is a degree of consent even allowing for the technological advantage that we enjoyed. Indian troops often fought for the British and they didn't have to.

India has always managed to absorb invaders not least because it is a very civilized and sophisticated society.You must read William Dalrympal's book The White Mughals. Indians and British intermarried and intermingled much more then the racists would like you to know about.

Ingrid. You can read the International Development Select Committee minutes on line. http://www.parliament.uk (I hope these links work - I usually do something wrong!)

Andrew Price. Napalm has not been used in Fallujah.

Family Courts. There is some more useful information here and I welcome that. I certainly don't want to go back to the guilty party concept and suspect we do need to move away from total secrecy in these courts. I have got all the papers and indeed many others that have been sent to me.

There has been a desire to look at this area again and reform is also referred to in the Queens speech. It is not new.

Graeme says that the courts get in the way of parents agreeing. I accept that we need to try and avoid a court based settlement but I simply observe that the parents do have to take some responsibility for the need to go to court. If they could agree the courts would not get involved. The problem is that some people can't resolve the dispute without outside help and the question is how best to deliver that help.

I think the enforcement question is very important and if we could get this right some of the angry men on this blog might feel they are getting something closer to justice.

I recall a very difficult case years ago when I was a probation officer and a nine year old child refused to see her mother. I spent a lot of time trying to find a way through but the child was very determined. I was not prepared to enforce a visit but you are always torn between respecting the child's rights and yet trying to get the shared parenting everyone wants. There are no easy answers and no perfect systems.

A final point on this issue of the women's movement. Putting right imbalances of power was and is important but it doesn't mean that men don't have disadvantages or needs that are being ignored.See my chapter on family policy on the side bar of this blog.

I haven't looked at the figures for a few years now but the last time I looked there was one woman in prison for every ten men and one man having psychiatric treatment for every ten women. It is dangerous to jump to easy conclusions about these figures but I suspect it reflects the fact that women tend to internalize their problems and men tend to externalize theirs. If so it says a lot about our respective roles in society.

Just a bedtime thought to keep you awake at night! 

"You still haven't answered the point about population. Britain had a population of 31 million in the mid 19th century. You can't hold down an empire of at least 500 million unless there is a degree of consent even allowing for the technological advantage that we enjoyed."

Firstly, the 30+ million British were not all imperialists - there was a strong anti-imperialist strand within the Liberal Party and, later, within the Labour Party. In fact, many British were sympathetic to Gandhi; crowds of East End workers flocked to support Gandhi in his visit to London. Imperialism is the project of an elite.

Secondly, how does any elite hold sway over a large population? How did a Ba'athist clique run Iraq, how is Mugabe running Zimbabwe, how did Pinochet rule Chile, how did the Nazis rule France, how did Tito rule Yugoslavia? Violence, intimidation and co-optation is necessary for any despotism. The same is true for the British empire. India is an elitist society, underpinned by the caste system which has maintained the dominance of the Aryan elite well for centuries. The British won India by co-opting the princes, vanquishing the Muslim Moghul rulers, adopting indigenous warriors (by giving them land and securing their loyalty by death threats) and completely out-gunning any who rose up against them.

You have not answered my point about the crimes of imperialism: the razing of villages, the cold-blooded murder of thousands of civilians and the starvation of millions more. Not to mention what European imperialism did to Africa, where thousands were enslaved as if they were commodities to be used and discarded.

You can't sanitise imperialism by pointing to the fact that some British bureaucrats fell in love with India, married Indian women and settled there. I am well aware that there were many British who were not indoctrinated by notions of racial supremacy - a friend of mine wrote a doctoral thesis on how meme sahibs (white women) would travel India taking Indian lovers along the way (which explodes the myth of Victorian conservatism). My wife is writing her doctoral thesis on how the British transferred agricultural technology to indigenous farmers. But I've not met any Indian who would excuse imperialism on the basis of cultural integration, trade and technological transfer. Imperialism is a crime, it's as simple as that.

I would like to invite you to Kolkata, which is my second home. In Kolkata, you can witness the positive results of DfID development aid and World Bank-funded infrastructural programmes. You can meet some of the grass-roots workers who are fighting disease and poverty - including my brother-in-law, a doctor who runs an AIDS clinic in a red light district in Kalighat. You can see the results of West Bengal's agricultural revolution. You can also meet some of the few remaining freedom fighters, who can tell you about their experience of the British empire, which built the city. Despite the pollution, oppressive heat, crumbling architecture and traffic chaos, Kolkata is the world's most dynamic, cultured, peaceful and friendly city.

Clive: You say "But I still think the key argument against hunting is that it is essentially a sport which involves unnecessary cruelty."

I would go so far as to say that that is not the key argument, that is the only argument, although a number of your colleagues seem to view it as a blow in the class war.

But does it really involve unnecessary cruelty? The Burns report says with respect to foxes "There is a lack of scientific evidence about the welfare implications of hunting," and goes on to not really come to any firm conclusions about whether hunting causes a net increase of pain and suffering to foxes.

So given that the best statement about whether hunting is cruel to foxes is "we don't really know", how can you possibly justify wielding the might of legislation? Perhaps you could tell us on what basis you were persuaded that foxhunting causes significantly more pain and suffering to the fox than it experiences "naturally"?

Dear Clive,

Thanks for replying to comments posted by myself and others regarding the Family Courts at http://clivesoleymp.typepad.com/clive_soley_mp/2004/11/family_courts.html).

A few points I would like to make in response to your comments:

You state: "There has been a desire to look at this area again and reform is also referred to in the Queens speech. It is not new."

This is correct, but it is also the case that reforms have been promised for years, particularly since the publication of the Children Act Sub-Committee (CASC) report 'Making Contact Work' in February 2002. Not only has NO concrete action been taken, but the situation has continued to deteriorate (the key indicator of this being the substantial year-on-year rises in the numbers of contact orders issued by the courts).

You state: "I think the enforcement question is very important and if we could get this right some of the angry men on this blog might feel they are getting something closer to justice."

You sorely underestimate the depth of principle and strength of conviction which underlie the campaign by Fathers 4 Justice. We don't want 'something closer to justice'. We don't want 'reasonable contact' (an oxymoron, as Bob Geldof has observed) with our children. We want equality, and we want the legislative and - probably more importantly - the institutional reforms which guarantee that equality. There is no scope for compromise over this: like Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, we are no longer prepared to move to the back of the bus.

Fathers like myself are condemned to the oblivion of 'non-resident' parenthood by a Family Court apparatus which systematically discriminates on the basis of gender. The non-resident parent - branded 'absent' - lives in a ghetto, subjectively and objectively: marginalised from their child's life, and consigned to CSA-enforced wage slavery to the state or to the resident parent. Even where they manage to secure and maintain some degree of regular 'contact' with their child, they live with the Damoclean threat that that relationship, impoverished as it is, remains provisional - subject to the needs, wants and whims of the resident parent.

I am, indeed, a very angry man, Clive. The kind of person who will not be placated with palliative measures such as 'enforcement'. I wasn't a second-class parent before separation, and I am not prepared to be treated as one now. To this extent I think I am typical of the parents (including many women) I have come to know in F4J, and this is the reason why Fathers 4 Justice is a juggernaut that your government will not stop by tinkering at the margins of a fundamentally flawed, corrupt, and discredited system.

The hourglass is running out on our children's lives. Day in, day out, their childhood is impoverished by the exclusion of a decent, loving parent. This is happening unnecessarily and, as I sought to explain in my previous post, it is a function of the way the family justice system currently operates.

It is disingenuous of your government and the family court judiciary to blame parents for the current mess, as Hodge and Filkin have done in recent interviews, and as Butler-Sloss, Wall and Munby did - all singing from the same songsheet - when they gave evidence before the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee on 9th November. This is putting the cart before the horse.

Your own observation that 'some people can't resolve the dispute without outside help' seems to echo this, and rather side-steps the point I made that the reason the family courts are clogged up with warring parents is not because they can't agree, but because the system so abundantly rewards one of them - the mother - for their recalcitrance and obstruction.

You and your colleagues need to rethink radically your terms of reference when it comes to these issues, and I think that you also need to ask some very searching questions about your own assumptions and attitudes towards gender and parenting.

While I appreciate that your weblog calls for responses on a wide range of issues, I had rather hoped that your membership of the committee currently inquiring into the family courts might have led you to engage more thoroughly with the arguments put to you on this particular topic.

Best Regards,

Graeme Cook
F4J Wales Web Co-ordinator (and Ellen's daddy)

--------------------------------------------------------
FATHERS-4-JUSTICE www.fathers-4-justice.org
Fighting for Truth, Justice & Equality in Family Law

** F4J Christmas Protest 2004 **
** Saturday 18th June 2004 in London **

See Tom Wontner's 'Super Hero Dads', a short movie
portrait of F4J, at: http://www.ukscreen.com/screen/95
--------------------------------------------------------

Hi Clive,

'Andrew Price. Napalm has not been used in Fallujah.'

Further,

'US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah...... Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh....Since the American assault on Fallujah there have been reports of "melted" corpses, which appeared to have napalm injuries......America, which didn't ratify the treaty, is the only country in the world still using the weapon.'
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14920109&method=full&siteid=106694&headline=fallujah-napalmed-name_page.html

Oops, sorry, not 'napalm' per se, the US has improved the 'napalm' formula so it can't be called that now, lets call it napalm-like:

'The denial [that napalm was used] by the US DOD was issued on the technical basis that the incendiaries used consisted primarily of kerosene-based jet fuel (which has a smaller concentration of benzene), rather than the traditional mixture of gasoline and benzene used for napalm, and that these therefore did not qualify as napalm.'

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/incendiary.htm

From last year:

'San Diego Union-Tribune August 05, 2003
Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops
Results are 'remarkably similar' to using napalm

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030805-firebombs01.htm

"You can call it something other than napalm, but it's napalm," said John Pike, defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a nonpartisan research group in Alexandria, Va.

Although many human rights groups consider incendiary bombs to be inhumane, international law does not prohibit their use against military forces. The United States has not agreed to a ban against possible civilian targets.

Also:

A Pentagon-speaker told MONITOR :

" I can confirm , that MK 77 bombs were dropped at the Kuwaiti-Iraqi-border." And on the question , if the MK 77 bombs are indeed Napalm-firebombs , the speaker said : " MK 77 is called
Napalm due to the fact , that their impact on targets resembles remarkable to the use of Napalm."'
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4395.htm

There is apparently a 1980 UN convention banning the use of napalm in civilian areas, but the US didn't sign this treaty: http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030810-napalm-iraq01.htm

'Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
Protocol III
Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons.
Geneva, 10 October 1980

..2. Concentration of civilians" means any concentration of civilians, be it permanent or temporary, such as in inhabited parts of cities, or inhabited towns or villages, or as in camps or columns of refugees or evacuees, or groups of nomads.

Article 2
Protection of civilians and civilian objects
.. 2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.'
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/int/convention_conventional-wpns_prot-iii.htm

Now, to my mind, the US is using napalm-like substances in civilian areas, most recently, Fallujah, can you look into it.

Also while your looking in that, can you advise me if it is safe for my grandmother to send a donation off to an Afghan orphanage in the knowledge that she will be considered a terrorist if any of said monies find their way into a terrorist organization, and if she took a shopping trip to the US, she could be arrested and sent to Guantanimo Bay where she may be tortured into signing a confession to terrorist deeds, and held until she is dead ?

Kind regards,

Andrew Price

Clive, thank you for pointing out International Development Select Committee minutes on line. The links worked fine but there are no minutes posted re latest meeting on Darfur and I've seen no other news reports on it either.

Ahhh. I feel a socialist piece of misdirection coming up: "I haven't looked at the figures for a few years now but the last time I looked there was one woman in prison for every ten men and one man having psychiatric treatment for every ten women. It is dangerous to jump to easy conclusions about these figures but I suspect it reflects the fact that women tend to internalize their problems and men tend to externalize theirs. If so it says a lot about our respective roles in society.

Just a bedtime thought to keep you awake at night!"

Yep, there it is.

Clive, who claims not to have been cowed by the womens movement seems to have bought into everything they have to say. Take a look at this article Clive. I cant wait to hear your evasions and refusal to answer with the truth!

³Women are at least as violent as men but the evidence is being dismissed or
ignored²

By Melanie Phillips

The Sunday Times, 24 October 1999

NEWS REVIEW

Mention feminism to most people and the reaction will probably be one of
faintly amused indifference. Some men may be irritated by feminist rhetoric;
some women might feel their agenda is a little extreme.

But the extent to which feminism in its most extreme form has embedded
itself within the institutions and thinking of Britain has simply not been
grasped.

Feminism has become the unchallengeable orthodoxy in even the most
apparently conservative institutions, and drives forward the whole programme
of domestic social policy.

Yet this orthodoxy is not based on concepts of fairness or justice or social
solidarity.

It is based on hostility towards men.

The idea that men oppress women, who therefore have every interest in
avoiding the marriage trap and must achieve independence from men at all
costs, may strike many as having little to do with everyday life.

Yet it is now the galvanic principle behind social, economic and legal
policy-making.

Buried within this doctrine, though, is an even deeper assumption.

Male oppression of women is only made possible by the fact that men are
intrinsically predatory and violent, threatening both women and children
with rape or assault.

Men are therefore the enemy - not just of women but of humanity, the proper
objects of fear and scorn.

This assumption runs through feminist thinking as a given. "Most violence,
most crime . . . is not committed by human beings in general. It is
committed by men," wrote Jill Tweedie.

According to Marilyn French, men used violence to threaten and control, as
well as actually harm: "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate
females, all men need not.

The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women."

Moreover, it is marriage and family life that expose women most to male
violence.

According to Gloria Steinem, "patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal
threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous
situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy
in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home".

All this has been enough to turn the stomachs of some feminists,
particularly those who love husbands or sons.

Novelist Maggie Gee said she once thought the sex war was exciting, but had
now concluded it went too far. "Women are giving up on their relationships
too quickly. Living with a man I love very much, I keep thinking that all
the generalisations about men just aren't true."

These generalisations, however, are now the stuff of public policy.

Male violence against women, said the government in June 1999, was no longer
going to be "swept under the carpet".

Virtually nobody questioned the premise that men were invariably victimisers
and women always their victims.

There is no doubt that some men are violent towards women; the evidence of
women's injuries is real enough.

However, this is one side of the story only.

There is another side: the extent of women's violence against men and
children.

That, though, is a story that almost every official body in Britain and
America has successfully suppressed.

There are now dozens of studies which show that women are as violent towards
their partners, if not more so, than men.

Unlike most feminist research, these studies ask men as well as women
whether they have ever been on the receiving end of violence from their
partners.

They are therefore not only more balanced than studies which only ask about
violence against women, but are more reliable indicators than official
statistics which can be distorted by factors affecting the reporting rate -
women using claims of violence as a weapon in custody cases, for example, or
men who are too ashamed or embarrassed to reveal they have been abused.

Many people are likely to be astonished and sceptical about the conclusion
drawn by these reports.

The idea that women are as violent as men is counter-intuitive and simply
disbelieved.

So it is important to provide a flavour of the scope and significance of
their findings.

A 1994 British study by Michelle Carrado and others, for example,
interviewed 1,800 men and women with heterosexual partners.

Some 11% of the men but only 5% of the women said their current partner had
committed acts of violence towards them, ranging from pushing, through
hitting, to stabbing.

Five per cent of married or cohabiting men reported two or more acts of
violence against them in a current relationship, compared with only 1% of
women.

A further 10% of men but 11% of women said they had committed one of these
violent acts.

Study after study shows women are not merely violent in self-defence but
strike the first blow in about half of all disputes.

The American social scientists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles reported
from two large national surveys that husbands and wives had assaulted each
other at approximately equal rates, with women engaging in minor acts of
violence more frequently.

Elsewhere, they found more wives than husbands were severely violent towards
their spouses.

Moreover, there is now considerable evidence that women initiate severe
violence more frequently than men.

A survey of 1,037 young adults born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New
Zealand, found that 18.6% of young women said they had perpetrated severe
physical violence against their partners, compared with 5.7% of young men.

Three times more women than men said they had kicked or bitten their
partners, or hit them with their fists or with an object.

In any event, the idea that women are never the instigators of violence is
demolished by the evidence about lesbians.

According to Claire Renzetti, violence in lesbian relationships occurs with
about the same frequency as in heterosexual relationships.

Lesbian batterers "display a terrifying ingenuity in their selection of
abusive tactics, frequently tailoring the abuse to the specific
vulnerabilities of their partners".

Such abuse can be extremely violent, with women bitten, kicked, punched,
thrown down stairs, and assaulted with weapons including guns, knives, whips
and broken bottles.

It is true that most women who are the victims of violence suffer domestic
assaults.

Yet the 1996 British Crime Survey reported that nearly one third of the
victims of domestic violence were men, and that nearly half of these male
victims were attacked by women.

Moreover, if a woman starts a physical fight with a man, even a mild slap
might provoke him into retaliating, with far worse consequences.

Women who murder violent husbands may be treated leniently because they were
provoked; yet men who are violent against women are never granted the same
understanding.

Provocation, it appears, is a feminist issue.

Moreover, given the greater strength of men, it is particularly noteworthy
that so many women initiate violence against them. The fact is that men hold
back.

The psychologist John Archer has noted that, among female college students,
29% admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. Of those women, half
said they had no fear of retaliation or, since men could easily defend
themselves, they did not see their own physical aggression as a problem. In
other words, far from assuming that men are violent, women take men's
non-aggression for granted.

Archer went on to remark on the apparent restraint shown by many men in
western cultures.

"We might speculate that to some extent a strong norm of men not hitting
women enables women to engage in physical aggression which might otherwise
not have occurred," he wrote.

Male aggression, he suggested, was a kind of default value associated with
patriarchal structures.

When these are overridden, as they have been by modern secular liberal
values and by the emancipation of women, female aggression increases

"These values will have greatest impact in a relationship that can be ended
by the woman at little cost, and where the rate of male aggression is low.

"We can speculate that these represent specific instances of a more general
set of circumstances entailing a relative change in the balance of power
between men and women."

In other words, as women have become independent of men, they have also
become more violent towards them - because men have become dispensable.

This unpalatable conclusion, however, has been completely overlooked in a
culture that believes infamy is the prerogative of the male.

Much to everyone's astonishment, the Home Office recently produced its own
evidence that domestic violence was not a male disease.

In January 1999, it reported that 4.2% of women and 4.2% of men aged 16 to
59 said they had been physically assaulted by a current or former partner in
the past year.

Women separated from their partners were most likely to be victims, with
22% assaulted at least once in 1995.

The public reaction to the Home Office research was almost complete silence.

The government, too, appeared impervious to its implications.

Shortly after it was published, the Home Secretary opened a domestic
violence court in Leeds that was founded on the explicit assumption that
only men were violent.

In June this year, the Cabinet Office women's unit launched a campaign to
"change the culture" that presented domestic violence as almost exclusively
a problem of male crime.

It managed to omit another under-reported fact: that most violence against
children is committed by their mothers, not their fathers.

A study by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
revealed a few years ago that natural mothers, not fathers, are most
frequently the perpetrators of physical injury, emotional abuse and neglect.

This is not particularly surprising, since mothers generally have much more
daily contact than fathers with their children.

There was yet another notable omission: the women's unit material did not
differentiate between couples who were married and people who were living
together or had irregular lovers.

It therefore omitted a key fact: that the risk of violence increases
significantly for unmarried couples.

The Home Office study itself observed that marital separation was a "key
risk factor".

Only 12.6 in every 1,000 married women are victims of violence, compared
with 43.9 in every 1,000 never-married women and 66.5 in every 1,000
divorced or separated women.

As husbands are replaced by partners and lovers, therefore, violence
against women increases.

Marriage is a strong safety factor for women.

Yet this is not said. Instead, the opposite idea is fostered, that violence
against women typically takes place within marriage.

In November 1998, the women's unit announced a new initiative.

Children were urged to report violence against mothers and sisters.

There was no mention of abuse against fathers. Instead, a television
advertisement showed a husband berating his wife when she told him dinner
would be late.

That was the violence. It was followed by a helpline number for children to
call if a woman in their house had been abused.

This fictional scenario illuminated some remarkable thinking by civil
servants and ministers.

It had become acceptable; it thus appeared, for children to inform on their
fathers to teachers or "helplines" simply for shouting at their mothers.

Shouting was now to be classified as domestic violence.

If that is the case, then violence happens with enormous frequency in
families.

Don't women sometimes shout at men?

There was another telling aspect of this advertisement. It featured an "Oxo"
middle-class nuclear family.

The thinking behind this, according to the then Scottish Office minister
Helen Liddell, was that "domestic abuse knows no boundaries of social class
or social group".

However, not only was this scenario not violence, but the nuclear family is
the least likely setting for abuse of women or children.

It was no accident, however, that it was chosen.

The married nuclear family has to be demonised because it is said to be the
vehicle for the oppression of women.

The outcome of all this is that it is now generally accepted that violence
is intrinsically male.

This is a gravely distorted picture. It is true that most recorded crime is
committed by men.

It does not follow, however, that most men commit crime. Yet this is the
false conclusion that has been drawn, as the result of the suppression or
distortion of the facts about violence as well as the message that is
constantly promulgated that violence is a problem of masculinity.

The evidence suggests that a quite different conclusion should be drawn.

This is surely that both women and men are capable of aggression and
violence, but that violent men, like violent women, are not typical of their
sex.

COPYRIGHT 1999©
Extracted from The Sex Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered
Male, by Melanie Phillips
ENDS-C-630 13
December 2004

Oh look Clive and other brainwashed left wing feminist supporters. Another one has been discovered. Ha Ha.
Also, check out the survey underneath this story.

http://desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/read/947273.htm

Homesafe employee in court on domestic violence charges
« H » Domestic Violence

-The Star Beacon

Article Publication Date: 2004-12-07

By MARK TUSCANO

Staff Writer

mtuscano@starbeacon.com

PLYMOUTH TOWNSHIP — An Ashtabula woman who works for Homesafe was arrested Sunday on charges of domestic violence, criminal damage and aggravated disorderly conduct after an alleged confrontation with her estranged husband and a sheriff’s deputy.

Heidi S. Balcomb, 35, of 1116 E. 23 St., reportedly taunted the arresting officer, Deputy Tony Mino, saying she knew Sheriff William Johnson and would be giving him a report from the incident. She also reportedly told Mino her friend, City Solicitor Tom Simon, would drop the charges against her.

Balcomb’s familiarity was founded, she works at Homesafe, the county’s shelter for women victims of domestic violence. But apparently her claimed friendships did not get her off the hook before her arraignment on criminal charges Monday in Ashtabula Municipal Court, where she pleaded not guilty to the charges.

According to the sheriff’s report, an officer was dispatched to the State Road home of Balcomb’s husband for a reported theft. At the residence the deputy was informed that Balcomb had entered the home and allegedly took cash from her husband’s bedroom.

When the deputy contacted Balcomb at Homesafe to get her side of the story, he reported that she was very angry and would not listen to anything. She also reportedly told the deputy she knows her rights and he didn’t know what he was doing.

Shortly afterward Mino was again dispatched to the State Road home where Balcomb was reportedly pounding on the door demanding her husband answer. The caller said Balcomb’s husband was not home at the time and she wanted Balcomb to stop pounding.

Mino was recalled to the home minutes after leaving when it was reported Balcomb’s husband had returned they were arguing.

She was walking around the car in a fit of rage, Mino reported of Balcomb. Mino separated the couple to conduct an interview with the husband. He said when he arrived home Balcomb attacked him before he even got out of the car, punching and choking him, then she went after the neighbor.

Another family member reportedly told Mino of Balcomb entering the house and taking $1,000 from her estranged husband’s dresser drawer. The husband asked Mino to look in her car which was to be left in his driveway while Balcomb was in jail. Inside the vehicle Mino found a pipe suspected of having been used to smoke crack cocaine. Additional charges against Balcomb may be under review.

She pleaded not guilty to charges in Ashtabula Municipal Court Monday. Her case was assigned to a public defender and she was released on a $4,500 personal recognizance bond under the condition that she has no contact with the victim, court records show.

Staff Writer Shelly Terry contributed to this story.

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/139/139613_women_lie_cheat_and_steal.html?ref=emtaf&archive=archive

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: