CW: Domestic violence
Prosecutors Dennis Watkins and Stanley Elkins:
When I reach for some of my earliest memories I can recall being taught in school that the country where I live stands for justice, equality, and fairness. What’s happening to Bresha Meadows is the antithesis of all those things.
The entitlement that many men throughout our society feel often translates into violence against their own families, particularly women and girls. This much has been true since some of the earliest moments in recorded history. If we are going to make any progress societally, much of it will be measured by how we these treat women and girls who have largely beared the brunt of domestic violence. Being born a girl should not be a possible death sentence, nor should it be tortuous to grow up as one. The brutality of these predicaments and more is what truly threatens any fragile peace and safety we hope to maintain around us, not Bresha Meadows.
Bresha should be given the counseling, love, and help that she needs after surviving the insidious violence that many around us sadly see as acceptable. This inexplicable effort to punish her says more about our shortcomings than it does about her. Where is the refuge of a Bresha Meadows, because she is one of many experiencing everyday horror. What is to be done for the girls who have nowhere to run and choose to fight for their right to live a peaceful life? It’s not their fault that the world around them has been callous and relentless in its desire to inflict pain.
Bresha ran, Bresha pleaded, and Bresha struggled to resolve the conflict around her through means that ended up showing no real result. After she had exhausted those means, we have this situation we’re in. No one was able to defend Bresha, so she took matters into her own hands. Whether or not you agree with her last resort isn’t the question we should be asking, instead wonder why she was forced to have a last resort to begin with.
I’m grateful I didn’t grow up in a home with domestic violence, but it’s lurked in close proximity to the families around me for quite some time. This untamed tragedy is continuously allowed to wreak havoc on those who never asked to be part of its violent production. What I have been allowed me to witness in families around me and cases like this is a pervasive form of inaction. As my own 6 nieces, whom I love dearly, age and seek out family lives of their home; I assure you I would like to see some change to avoid this world’s overwhelming negligence to this problem.
In a case like this, what’s happening to Bresha Meadows operates completely outside the peripheries of reason and compassion. This should be addressed where the problem began, and not where it ended. If we don’t change our methods of prevention as well as our response, we’ll keep repeating this cycle to the detriment of any change waiting for us to make it happen. Please, for the sake of us all, drop the charges against Bresha Meadows.
Sincerely,
William C. Anderson
#FreeBresha 
The letter is so sympathetic, I thought it was written by a woman. I’ve thought many of these points, but would never have been able to write them so thoroughly and coherently as Mr. Anderson did.
Every day that Bresha Meadows is detained is torture for her. How can she ever reconcile her “punishment” with her right to self defense? Did she have a right to defend herself? Then why was she thrown into jail? Was she wrong to defend herself? That’s not the way Americans are brought up, to believe they must endure abuse and keep their mouths shut. It’s not the way people should interact, no more than the way governments should interact.
We should all stand together against aggressors. And unfortunately, in this case, one of the aggressors is the American Justice System. There are people in power who feel that the only answer, apparently to ANYTHING, is to throw people into jail. As a result of the officials that threw Bresha Meadows into jail, I think those officials should be seen by Bresha being thrown into jail as she is being released.
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