Stand Your Ground Was Built for Men. It’s Time to Rewrite It for REAL Victims: ALL Women

Part Two: When the law believes men by default and women only if they’re dead, we must change it to protect and defend women BEFORE the autopsy

America already has a doctrine that says you don’t have to run when your life is in danger. It’s called stand your ground. But let’s stop pretending this law is neutral. It isn’t. It was built by men, interpreted by men, enforced by men, and overwhelmingly benefits men; specifically men who know how to weaponize calm voices, authority, and plausible deniability.

Women don’t seem to ever get that luxury. Women get cross-examined. Women get doubted. Women get told they misunderstood, overreacted, provoked it, stayed too long, left too late, trusted the wrong person, or “should have known better.”

And for some women, trafficked women, sex workers, undocumented women, Native American women on reservations, trans women, the system doesn’t just doubt them. It barely even acknowledges they exist.

Abuse Is Not a Moment, It Is a System, and This System Protects Abusers

The law still pretends violence is a single, simple event: a flash of danger, a sudden choice, spirit the moment decisions, a nice clean narrative.

That fiction collapses immediately when you look at how abuse actually works.

Abuse is ongoing.

It is predictive.

It is designed to trap, and blend in.

And one of its most ignored and most lethal forms is stalking.

As previously discussed, stalking is NOT awkward persistence or unwanted attention.

It is pre-violence.

It is surveillance.

It is rehearsal.

It is a warning shot that says: I know where you are, and I can reach you whenever I want, and currently, the law says yes sir, you absolutely can.

For women who are stalked, especially by partners, pimps, traffickers, or former clients, the threat is not hypothetical. It is not “potential.” It is active.

Yet the law insists they all wait for the final act to at least be attempted, before it can even begin to think about acting to defend them.

Vulnerability Is Not Random. It Is Engineered.

Let’s be clear about who the current system fails the hardest.

Trafficked women

Trafficked women are already living under coercion, violence, debt bondage, and constant surveillance. Yet when they defend themselves against traffickers or buyers, they are almost never treated as survivors. They are treated as criminals who “chose” their circumstances. In other words, you should have known better.

Self-defense laws must explicitly recognize trafficking and coercive control as ongoing, life-threatening conditions, not isolated incidents.

Sex workers

Prostitutes are among the most assaulted, stalked, raped, and murdered women in America. And yet the law treats them as inherently unreliable, inherently guilty, and inherently disposable. In other words, she was asking for it.

If a woman cannot rely on police for protection, because calling them might get her arrested, then the law has already abdicated its role. In that vacuum, self-defense must be absolute.

Undocumented women

Illegal immigrants are uniquely vulnerable to abuse because their abusers know exactly how to silence them: deportation threats, custody threats, financial threats. Because let’s face it, calling the cops for these women just simply isn’t an option. In other words, you don’t belong here anyway.

A woman who knows calling 911 could destroy her life is still entitled to survive it. Her immigration status should never be used to question the legitimacy of her fear or her right to defend herself.

Native American women on reservations

Native American women experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault and domestic violence in the country, often at the hands of non-Native men who know jurisdictional loopholes will protect them. In other words, no one cares about you.

When the law refuses to act because it “doesn’t have jurisdiction,” then it forfeits the moral authority to punish those women who act to save their own lives.

Trans women

Trans women, and especially trans women of color, are among the most violently targeted people in the country. They face disproportionate rates of assault, sexual violence, stalking, and murder, while simultaneously being treated by police, courts, and juries as deceptive, unstable, or inherently suspect. When trans women defend themselves, their gender is often put on trial before their attacker ever is. In other words, you shouldn’t even exist.

Many trans women avoid police entirely because contact with law enforcement runs the risk of escalating danger rather than reducing it; misgendering, harassment, arrest, or outright dismissal are common outcomes. In prisons and jails, “protective custody” often means solitary confinement or placement with male populations, creating further opportunities for violence. The message is crystal clear here: the system will not protect you, and it may actively harm you, because the system is not here for you or your kind.

Men Are Given All Sorts of Leeway and Benefits of the Doubt. Women Are Given Nothing But Suspicion and Dismissal.

This is the core imbalance. Men are allowed to:

• claim fear without proof,

• escalate without consequence,

• frame themselves as victims even when history says otherwise.

Women, meanwhile, are expected to:

• meticulously document their terror,

• endure escalating harm,

• survive long enough with proof to convince someone else it was all real.

A man can kill a stranger in a parking lot and tell everyone he felt threatened, and *BOOM*, the law says “you were free to stand your ground, sir!”

A woman can survive years of abuse, stalking, trafficking, or confinement and still be asked “why, if you was so scared, did you not just walk away honey?”

That is NOT justice, or fair. It’s gendered leniency dressed up as neutrality, and it’s beyond time it’s expanded to cover the real victims.

Police Must Stop Treating Abuse as a “Both Sides” Dispute

Nowhere is this failure more obvious than in law enforcement.

By the time police are called and arrive on the scene, abusers are calm, cool, and collected. They joke around with the male officers, express bewilderment to any officers that are women, and maintain innocence. Survivors, on the other hand, are often traumatized, incoherent, panicked, or in any other state of shock, and understandably so. But far too often, police see the calm, cool, collected man, and believe him.

Officers must be trained, and legally required to:

• recognize coercive control,

• understand trauma responses,

• and defer to women’s accounts in domestic, stalking, and exploitation cases, even when the man claims to be the victim.

Especially when the woman belongs to a group the system already marginalizes. Because “neutrality” in an unequal system is just bias with extra frosting.

Rewrite the Law. Explicitly. Unapologetically.

If stand your ground laws can presume a man’s fear is reasonable, simply because he feels it, then the law can, and must, presume a woman’s fear is reasonable, whether there is evidence of abuse, stalking, trafficking, coercive control, or just because she feels it.

That means statutes must explicitly include:

• Stalking as a qualifying imminent threat

• Patterns of abuse, not just single incidents

• Trafficking, prostitution, and coercion as non-consensual ongoing danger

• A presumption of reasonableness for women acting against documented abusers out of fear

• Immunity from prosecution when force is used to end a credible, ongoing threat; including lethal force.

Yes. Including that.

Because when the state fails to protect women, it does not get to punish them for surviving.

Abuse Should Trigger Immediate Legal Escape

The law must also give all women a guaranteed, lawful exit:

• Immediate divorce upon credible evidence of abuse or stalking

• No waiting periods

• No forced mediation

• No confrontation requirements

• No ineffective restraining orders

• Full financial, housing, and custody protections

A woman should not need permission to leave someone who has already proven they are dangerous. And that proof needs the be believed when it’s reported, or none of this matters.

This Only Sounds Radical, Because It’s Overdue.

This is not about encouraging violence. It’s about acknowledging reality, and protecting those who do what needs to be done, when no one else will act.

The system already decides whose fear matters. It already decides whose life is expendable. It already decides who gets grace and who gets a cold cell.

Right now, those decisions favor men, including violent ones, and abandon the women most at risk, who need the protection more than anyone else.

If America can understand a man standing his ground in a parking lot, it can understand a woman standing her ground against an abuser, a stalker, a trafficker, or a system that refuses to protect her.

And if it can’t? Then the law isn’t about justice.

It’s about control, and women, all women, have paid that price long enough. In 2026, things need to change.