Rights and democracy

What exactly gives Oxfam a mandate to campaign to change the laws of the countries that it is working in and what expertise does it have in the area of criminal justice reform?

I’m not exactly sure how the word “mandate” is being used in that sentence, but the “what we do” page on Oxfam’s website includes a link to an Advocacy page that is tagged “We press decision-makers to change policies and practices that reinforce poverty and injustice.” I don’t know much about Oxfam, but I hope an organization that includes such a goal in its mission has some expertise in the area of criminal justic reform.

she is promoting a proposal which is not based in empircal research by her own organisation

But India and South Africa are positive examples of ‘putting economic and social rights into constitutions’ – they didn’t have those rights in their constitutions, and now they do. Job done.

All sarcasm aside, this is a really interesting (and troubling) line of enquiry – what are the actual effects of measures taken by national governments in the name of protecting, dignifying, empowering etc? Maybe there isn’t any substitute for building from the street level up.

I’m quite sympathetic to the views you’ve presented here on humanitarian intervention and NGOs, but unfortunately this post makes a lefty male move that needs to be called out. Maybe the domestic violence laws passed in Malawi and Brazil are going to overburden their prison systems in ways they are not prepared to deal with. That logically follows, cause A – consequence B, concerned discussion around the connection, fair enough.

But the rest of it suggest that somehow there is a causal link between “too much attention to women’s issues” and “but what about poverty and inequality and pensions and why are we paying attention to women’s “rights” when there is so much poverty in the world? Hey rich Western feminists have you stopped beating old people with no pensions?”

effing eff to the tenth power. It’s not like every scrap of social and political energy spent on women’s issues is illegitimately stolen from the sum total of positive social and political energy that could be expended to improve the world generally. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not like we could make a deal that as long as women could just put up with battering a couple more years we could finally crack this whole poverty thing once and for all — if only we could all stop being so *distracted* and focus on what is really important.

This rhetorical move — it just — gaaaaah. Since the commentariat at CT is 85% male, have at it, whatevs, but I can’t just let this pass.

“Enacting new legislation costs money and money spent on a prison can obviously not be spent on a school or hospital.”

The zero sum approach to women’s issues. Every dime spent on them, every moment spent thinking about them, is stolen from hungry orphans. Apply at will to race, sexuality, etc. Conor Foley — if you have a plan that will solve world poverty in 10 years, at the price of shutting up about “women’s rights”, hey, sign me up. Somehow, though, I don’t think you do.

“you are not pro-women you are pro-prison”.

also “pro-kicking-defenseless-puppies”. All feminists are, obvy.

I think it’s the pro-prison puppy kicker who “thinks she personally owns the concept of feminism”. She’s just awful.

What’s wrong with *that* comment? It doesn’t object to the phrase ‘social networks’, surely?

I have a couple of questions because I don’t know where you’ve limited the debate.

How does one compare costs (how does one price the suffering of women)? How should one see one’s own responsibility in maximizing all humans’ freedom of expression in this equation? Should that responsibility be only within the hands of the country’s legislators without being lobbied at all in all cases no matter how patriarchal they are?

What if the state becomes wealthy from a natural resource and further imposes its patriarchal doctrines on its people, a.l.a. Saudi Arabia, should one not carry a bad conscience for not imposing one’s will when one had the authority?

That last comment is condescending and lazy; I think you need to stay here and read Conor’s post properly. Conor isn’t doing anything so schematic as “ranking women’s rights against poor people’s rights”. He’s suggesting that implementing justiciable rights – for any group – in a poor country is a complex and costly process which is highly likely to have adverse consequences, both direct and indirect. More incarceration is generally a bad thing in itself; it also means less money to spend on social services. See also my comment at 22 about the effects of incarceration, most of which bear rather heavily on women.

If they could make the more reasonable assertion that women’s rights are everywhere violated, and everywhere that is a bad thing, it would make it easier for them to say “we deplore the violations of women’s rights everywhere we work, including in our home nations, but that doesn’t stop us from working in all kind of places around the world—if it did, we’d stop everywhere”.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find that sort of statement to be particularly meaningless? I mean, of course women’s rights are being violated everywhere. So are men’s rights, children’s rights and the rights of all sorts of other people. It just smacks of moral equivalency to me – saying that America, Britain, Europe, etc. are just as bad as Malawi, India, Brazil, etc. because in both categories you’ve got at least one person whose rights are being violated.

The meaningful question isn’t “Are rights being violated?” Of course rights are being violated. Violations of rights exist whenever you’ve got a non-trivial number of people in the same area. The question is, “Are there effective and just means of redress when rights are violated?” And, there you can draw a difference between countries. Countries like Afghanistan under Taliban rules did not have effective and just means of redress for violations of women’s rights. Countries like Britain (and now Malawi) do. Given that means of making a distinction, both the decisions by Oxfam make more sense.

To play Devil’s Advocate Phil, crime in Britain has risen 4700% since its trough. Crime in the U.S is still substantially higher than it was in the 50s. Those were crime rates people lived under and thought normal. If you had a time machine and brought someone from then to the present they’d be absolutely shocked that we tolerate as much crime as we do. A lower crime rate certainly seems possible and imprisonment contributes to it. Mark Kleiman thinks we can halve both imprisonment and crime. He’d lock more people up more frequently, but trading off certainty for duration as behavioral economics would suggest. Personally I think prison mostly works due to incapacitation rather than deterrence or rehabilitation, but Kleiman claims the Hawaii HOPE program has given such results and scaled well. I think there are other policies we could pursue that would lower the crime rate without any creepy Orwellian overtones, like ending the War on Some Drugs, which Kleiman would not go along with.

Conor Foley — the fact that your go-to reaction when challenged by any critical female commenter is to become drippingly condescending isn’t helping your case (nor is your repeated invocation of your wife and how she TOTALLY AGREES WITH YOU so take that! You are actually earning points in a game created by feminist bloggers called troll bingo, which describes the several stereotyped rhetorical moves commenters hostile to feminism consistently make.)

It also does not help that you seem achingly unaware of how exactly your description of what you see as problematic about the new laws — that they over-react to ambiguous situations — plays exactly into the whole “he said / she said / who’s really to say” complex around rape and domestic violence prosecution that are at the heart of what this kind of legislation is meant to address.

The (exclusively male, one cannot help but note) concern expressed here with the independently vast problem of the prison-industrial complex, suddenly brought heart-rendingly to the fore by the prospect of guys being hauled off to the pokey just cause some dame got a little excitable and called the cops — well, it’s sickening. Addressing women’s rights does not cause poverty. Addressing women’s rights is not what has built shameful, soul-crushing prison systems around the world. But this exact rhetorical move to connect them causally — oh, women’s rights? But what about poor people and prisons and don’t you even care about social justice at all you privileged witch? It’s numbingly familiar, yet equally stomach-turning every time.

Conor, reposting because for some reason part of this text came with strike through…. you are right; most folks Amnesty is recruiting – at the international secretariat or at section-level, to work on ESC rights, are those with an expertise on ESC rights advocacy – they’re not necessarily economists, sociologists, or cultural experts. This division of CP/ESCR is a cold war relic; advocating the rights of the poor is one thing; advocating for legal solutions to problems that can be addressed in other ways is a different issue altogether. And as the Sachs/Easterly debate shows, even among economists, there’s a division on how the ESC rights challenges can be addressed. Budget analysis, and advocating for “greater resources to be given” to a specific cause, don’t really help address the problem. Disclosure: I worked for seven years at Amnesty on business and human rights, and continue to be associated with that fine organisation in informal ways, but Conor’s analysis here is provocative as usual, and he is right on questioning the “mission creep” many NGOs face a point Jagdish Bhagwati notes in his book, In Defense of Globalisation. And yes, I notice someone earlier praised Indian and South African achievements in the ESCR arena. Yes, the courts passed some pathbreaking judgments in the 1980s in India, and in South Africa post-apartheid, but the lack of implementation of subsequent rulings has shown up the relative hollowness of those verdicts (and there’s even some backlash against public interest litigation in India), and undermines the argument that legal remedies are sufficient to secure rights. Many NGO activists don’t like the phrase “economic growth” because it implies recognition of the virtues of market-based, private-sector oriented economics, but unless there’s wealth, what can one distribute? But I should stop there; the discussion goes away from the original theme of Oxfam believing it has achieved something by passing a law in Malawi. In India we used to say you can’t feed people statistics of economic growth. Likewise, you can’t provide remedies by passing laws alone. Thanks, Conor, for continuing to challenge thinking in the NGO-dom.

One other thing, if I recall correctly, the PT before Lula became President fought Cardoso tooth and nail to keep from changing the pension system. It is one of the delicious irnoies of politics, I suppose, that Lula was the one to change this when he moved into the Palacio de Planalto . . .

I don’t know enough about aid, etc. to generalize but what I would wonder is whether Oxfam is working with local political groups to help them develop and advance their own agendas. Does the problem end at ‘not knowing enough’ or does it go deeper into the fact they are not plugged in to local politics? Maybe there are countries where there are no local organizations, no grassroots, no groups and no people (women) with views about what is needed. Some organizations behave as if this is the case in countries where it isn’t. Is Malawi completely bereft of local activists, reformers, lawyers, etc.? I’ve never been to Malawi but somehow I’m sure it is not. (Obviously, not every Malwian lawyer is going to be a sage on legal reform, not every women’s group is going to have an agenda Oxfam is interested in advancing perhaps.)

Martin I think your argument may imply that all criminal law should be abolished. Do we know that there is widespread imprisonment of the innocent there? Don’t these issues apply to punishment more generally?

As long as everyone is willing to let go of any law protecting one person from being beaten and abused by another then I see a basic consistency in the arguments raised here. If not, I am wondering why these arguments do not apply to other cases, since the general worries over the harms of imprisonment seem to apply. Otherwise, don’t we have to swallow the idea that once a woman marries, she’s fair game for beating as far as her husband is concerned? And that this is a special case of bodily harm to another person we must protect people from being unjustly prosecuted for? It is only natural to ask why this is to be the special exemption.

Lisa, the following principles, I would say, do indeed apply generally to criminal law in democratic societies and should in all societies. What is different is how this particular law operates, not that the crime concerned is battery against women:

1) People can only be imprisoned for crimes that have occurred, not for crimes the authorities believe may occur. For the latter, restraining orders are as far as we go. The cops can’t say “look at these gang-bangers! Most have long criminal records. Bet most couldn’t pass a drug test. Let’s lock them up before they cause trouble”. That’s what “preventative detention” means, and it is a deep offense against justice. Note that personal history does not change the situation. If two gangs have a history of fighting, it may indeed be reasonable to suppose they are likely to fight again, but that doesn’t justify sending people to jail to prevent it. According to Conor, the Brazilian law allows this.

2) If the victim does not seek incarceration, and is mentally competent, in whose name is it being sought? This gets a little more murky in that Western Law recognizes victimless crimes (a debatable position, though), but battery is not one of those. There is clearly a victim to any crime of battery.

3) An accusation of guilt cannot be taken, in itself, as proof of guilt. Accusations can be mistaken and can be made in bad faith. This is presumptive innocence. In this case, we are often dealing with accusations that have been withdrawn in any case. As for how widespread imprisonment of the innocent is, before people are tried, we have no estimate, but, more basically, part of the reason for trail is to evaluate cases individually. Also, the law should be biased towards innocence, because if the state is as willing to impose injustice as it is to defend against it, it has no moral authority to claim a monopoly of violence: most anyone could meet that moral standard.

I don’t think anything I’m saying here is particularly radical or anarchistic: no preventive detention, innocent until proven guilty, pretty basic stuff. Criminal law has long functioned on the basis of these principles, and it has not led to the collapse of the state.

Lisa, you and some others seem to think that we should only be concerned with these matters if there is proof of widespread lying among the accusers. First of all, “widespread” matters not at all. The government’s moral authority relies on it doing all it can to never convict the innocent. Realistically, there will probably always be some innocent people convicted, but the obligation of the government to prevent this is stronger than its obligation to punish people for offenses. First of all, punishment for an offense is always a balancing of harms: the rights being taken from the prisoner must be balanced against the greater good achieved by imprisonment. But it is a balance: imprisonment is a deep violation of human rights and therefore can never be considered a good thing in itself. Imprisoning the innocent, though, is a pure harm; there is no countervailing good that comes of it. And asking for proof of widespread false accusations gets the case backward: you’re demanding proof of innocence rather than proof of guilt.

Note that none of this means what you and Thomas seem to think it does: that the state must never incarcerate. Simply that incarceration is a harm, not a good or neutral act, and it therefore must be affirmatively justified.

Finally, part of the whole point of courtroom procedures is to evaluate cases individually. Under this law, woman who know a great deal about their own situations and their own minds are having their choices overridden by people half a world away, who with perfect confidence make categorical judgments.

I am very encouraged that ngo mission creep is being questioned here in provocative ways, and that the 80s and 90s anti-violence against women agenda that dominated American feminism can be questioned. The anti-violence position of feminism during the American culture wars eclipsed the problem of being for economic and social justice. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation — it is just that historically, feminists were much more mobilized by a question of unmediated violence question rather than the class question, which brings about violence but as a secondary consequence. I also think that debating this issue as a boy – neutral vs. girl emotive confrontation is extraordinarily unproductive. If violence against women should be the priority of social policy making in either Malawi, Brazil or Afghanistan, I want to hear rational arguments about this.

I should also note that Conor may have misread the report – either that or it misrepresents the Maria da Penha Law.
When he says “what happens is that a man (often drunk) threatens his partner and she (or a neighbour) call the police. When they arrive they can take the man into preventative custody where he will stay for several months until a judge holds a preliminary hearing (the backlog of cases in Brazil is huge and most courts have several thousand cases sitting there)”
he seems to be implying that the decision on preventative custody is made by the police, and that the arrested man doesn’t get to see a judge for months.
This isn’t true. The decision is made by a judge, as are decisions on other protective measures like exclusion orders.

No doubt Brazil’s prisons are horrible places. But that is not the fault of the campaigners against violence against women. It’s the fault of the Brazilian government – and that includes the judges, who are sentencing far too many people to long prison sentences and producing overcrowding. If a judge doesn’t think that a man needs preventative detention – if he or she looks at the case and concludes it was just a late-night shouting match – then the judge is perfectly able not to detain him! If, for that matter, a case comes to trial and the victim testifies in favour of her supposed attacker that the whole incident was nothing more than a heated argument – then, too, the judge is perfectly able not to sentence the man to prison.
But the answer is not to oppose new laws aimed at reducing serious violence for fear that they will overcrowd the prisons further.

(And there are some other irrelevancies in the original post: no doubt Brazil’s state pension system is overgenerous, but what on earth has that got to do with the case?)

Conor – that was actually intended a defense of you against some of the more accusatory comments – particularly those from Kathleen, who I assume is the same Kathleen Lowrey who works on indigenous communities in the Chaco –
I very much agree with you that people should understand first hand what’s going on in a specific situation before proposing/supporting reform and I’m a bit bewildered that it’s an anthropologist of all people who voices the strongest opposition.

But you say yourself (comment 10) that “there are many Brazilian feminists” who would agree with Kathleen on that particular point – that’s where I took the Brazilian feminists from.

I’m still curious about economic costs vs. unintended consequences. I do think the economic costs argument does have a ring of prioritizing other aspects over women’s rights, which is why I don’t quite understand where it comes in. The unintended consequences argument (something along the lines of husbands coming home after 7 months of jail are a lot more likely to be chronic wife-beaters) seems more relevant (and certainly not anti-feminist) to me.

(3) is a huge deal and the legal system needs to deal with (3), not pretend it doesn’t exist or is no big deal even if it does.

I still don’t get why you insist “having a law against (3)” is essentially the same thing as “locking up people who are accused of (3) for months before they have a trial or access to any legal recourse, even if the identified victim protests that the arrest is unwarranted.”

It’s the latter getting protested, not the former.

I don’t like the idea of locking up accused murderers, or alleged defrauders, or whoever, for months before they have a chance to enter a plea or issue a legal defense of themselves. Isn’t this what ‘innocent until proven guilty’ means?

I think you are conflating getting locked up for allegedly committing a crime with having the right to see a judge and plead your case within a reasonable amount of time. The right to a speedy (pre)trial.

but Kathleen, once again you are accusing Conor of things he doesn’t say!
He has repeatedly said here that he thinks domestic violence in Brazil is a huge problem that needs to be addressed. He thinks that AI should address domestic violence. No one wants to sweep this under the rug. And the reason people here are “shocked and appalled” by your “rudeness” (your words – I’m more annoyed by your monopolization of the feminism label and you acting as if there is no disagreement whatsoever among feminists on these issues – as he probably correctly notes above, Brazilian feminists are on both sides of this debate) is that you continue to accuse him of sexism in no uncertain terms and based on very far-fetched assertions.

He argues with regards to Brazil that the law might very well not be in the best interest of the affected women. Your arguments seem entirely based on the debate in the US/Canada etc. I can’t speak for Conor, but I think that preventive custody etc. are great tools within the context of a more or less functioning legal system – if anything I think they could be used more in Germany – which I know most about – and probably also in the US and Canada. But that doesn’t automatically make them great laws – or victories for feminisms equivalent to what their enactment constituted in many “Northern” countries – in Malawi or Brazil. Now, Conor bases his assessment apparently mainly on the experiences of a Brazilian (female) judge with the law. While that’s not exactly social science, I think it’s a reasonable start. I think he is also right in arguing that a thoughtful assessment of such a law requires a look at possible unintended consequences (I’m still not convinced about the economic part* ) – i.e. how is the practice of this law going to look. And while AI may come to a different result than Conor if they were to conduct such an analysis, I think he is right to deplore the fact that they don’t.

*still not clear on this: If the point is that an underfunded law is sometimes worse than no law at all, I think I agree. But I’m still confused what a cost-benefit analysis would look like. Would you want to calculate if the money – if spent differently (e.g. on women only police stations) would create better effects in terms of protecting women? That seems somewhat reasonable, but you’re not very clear on that. And than the question remains – what are the chances that the money used for law enforcement in these cases _would_ go to fund these programs and not, say, to subsidize the pension system?

Salient—Brazil’s overcrowded prison system has not been caused by this recent piece of legislation.

I’m, uhh, not worried about the poor ol’ prisons.

People ought to have a right to a swift trial, the right to plea their case and attest to their innocence or guilt before a judge (and preferably before a jury of their peers), et cetera. As I said, the concern is: “locking up people … for months before they have a trial or access to any legal recourse, even if the identified victim protests that the arrest is unwarranted”

Sounds a lot like Guantanamo. Bagram. Et cetera.

Even if the jails in Brazil were empty, I’d be protesting this.

53: On your point about victims of violence testifying in support of the people who have inflicted this violence – yes, you are right, this could happen and would probably result in the man being acquitted. But should such trials have gone ahead in the first place?

Do Brazilian prosecutors not have the discretion to drop cases which they do not think are winnable? That would be rather odd.

Unfortunately, there are nowhere near enough public defenders in Brazil to attend to people’s right to a defence and so judges tend to give considerable weight to the gravity of the charges against the accused when deciding whether to release them. One of the impacts of the Maria da Penha Law is that increases the severity of a number of categories of charges and so increases the likelihood that someone charged with them will remain in prison prior to any serious consideration of their case. This is a general problem of the criminal justice system

Frankly, it sounds like the main problem of the Brazilian justice system is neither foreign interference nor strict DV laws but lazy, inept judges.

57: the advocacy is not in the rich western countries where Oxfam’s supporters are based and whose governments are (arguably) implementing harmful policies and practices. Instead they are telling people in poor countries what to do.

Oxfam does actually advocate for policy changes in rich western countries where its supporters live. One example: debt relief for poor countries.

It’s like staring into the abyss.

Well, you could explain what’s wrong with protesting that accused persons are spending months in jail before their arraignment and trial. I still don’t understand what you see wrong with protest for the right to a speedy trial.

I would want the same right for alleged murderers and alleged terrorists, and I don’t think the right to a speedy trial with adequate legal representation should ever be abrogated.

I guess I can concede, if the right to a speedy trial must be revoked for some class of offenders, then those the class should be those who commit domestic violence. But I still don’t comprehend the desire for that revocation.

Perhaps that no one did that?

I did, and was clearly meant to be included in the “fan club.”

A post that argues that laws intended to prevent domestic violence are problematic because they put people in Brazil’s shameful criminal justice system, while not mentioning defendants in the criminal justice system for other reasons, suggests that the criminal justice system is tolerable for the purpose of serious crime, but treating domestic violence as serious crime is too much.

Except the specific protestation was: Lack of appropriate social services means she can rarely refer them anywhere and the new law is likely to lead to a dramatic increase in the number sent to prison. There is at least a debate to be had about whether this is the best way of tackling the problem.

That comment doesn’t tag domestic violence as an unserious crime. It does suggest, correctly, that many perpetrators of domestic violence are alcoholic, drug users, or in need of psychiatric care (which doesn’t relate to my point about right to a speedy trial). In other words, an investment in social services which aim to reduce alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and psychiatric needs might have a better reductive effect on domestic violence occurrences than this law we’re discussing.

As for my point… how to say this. Suppose someone proposed a law which doubled the prison sentences of murderers and burglars in Brazil. Given what I know about Brazil’s criminal justice system, as discussed above, I definitely would have voiced the exact same protest to this hypothetical change in law. I would have the same problem with it: domestic violence is indeed serious crime IMO, and the proposed measures (longer sentences, less speedy trial) are not an appropriate solution to a serious crime problem.

You are actually earning points in a game created by feminist bloggers called troll bingo, which describes the several stereotyped rhetorical moves commenters hostile to feminism consistently make.

You are assuming bad faith for no reason I can see. I don’t think one should always assume good faith in debate, but there is only a limited number of individuals (Tony Blair, David Kane, etc) whose past behaviour justifies shoot-first rules of engagement. Conor is not one of them.

More substantially, I would consider it axiomatic that proposals to increase the power of the state to incarcerate always lead to more incarceration, whatever else they may achieve or not. They are different from many other increases in state power, for example, in the power to regulate urban development or to provide medical care; they belong to a class of powers that are always used, because they cater to the fundamental imperatives of power itself. The state likes locking people up and will always happily do so, no matter what the resource constraints are, because the problems of insufficient resources here fall on the prisoners and prisoners are ipso facto bad people. They’re in prison!

As Jim Henley said, John Yoo didn’t suggest raping terrorist suspects’ children, because state agents don’t aspire to be paedophiles but they do aspire to have unlimited power to interrogate people they arrest by whatever means they like. Similarly, cops love to arrest people and lock them up, and if you give them further powers to do so they will use them, to what end they like.

Police powers, migration control, mental health, secrecy, prostitution, some workplace issues – these seem to be a brief list of topics where the state can be counted on to use whatever powers it is granted to the fullest possible extent, but not at all to the original purpose. This is clearly because they all bear on its relationship with The Other.

Consider the UK’s Prevention of Harassment Act 1997, which was marketed as “anti-stalker” legislation. It defines harassment as conduct likely to cause alarm or distress to a third party more than once. This has since become a common means of locking up political protestors – the police simply decide that your behaviour causes them alarm or distress, and it’s off to the Bridewell. Among celebrated cases, that of Lindis Percy stands out – she was accused of causing alarm and distress to the United States embassy, a first in ascribing emotion to a building, and eventually acquitted. If this is a problem in Britain, which I persist in believing to be a stable democracy with a reasonable judicial system, it is surely one in Brazil.

Police powers are always used, but not necessarily for the stated purpose. I don’t yet know how a mean Brazilian cop would repurpose this power, but then I’m not one; however, I am confident of their malicious creativity.

Further, isn’t it almost *the* crucial issue in any question of development that it is very easy to legislate but hard to implement? Yesterday’s Guardian reported in detail on the problems of distributing medicines in Uganda; they are certainly bought, and shipped to Entebbe airport, and delivered to the national medical stores, but they rarely make it to prescription without going out of date in a shed or being misappropriated.

I was not saying the suit needed to be formally brought in the name of the victim. I was saying that the advocates of the law in this thread are claiming to speak for the victim, and they cannot do that if they disregard what the victim specifically wants.

BTW, ajay, I believe you are misusing the term “protective custody”. People are taken into protective custody to protect them from third parties, e.g., witnesses against organized crime figures, not to protect others from them. Protective custody in this case would mean locking up the victim to protect her from the alleged abuser, something no one here, including, I assume, you is advocating. What we are talking about here is preventative detention.

However, the discussion has shown things to be a bit more complicated than I thought on Conor’s original post.

1) It seemed people were being incarcerated with no due process. Well, a judge signs off, but it sounds very cursory, so let’s say with minimal due process.

2) The victim’s wishes are disregarded in the decision to prosecute. Apparently not, by Conor’s later comment, but I still wonder if the victim’s objections have any weight in the initial incarceration. Conor, does the judge signing off on the initial detention get told whether the victim desires prosecution, and, if so, are they expected to take this into account?

3) The rationale for holding the alleged perpetrator initially includes “preventative detention”. That is to say, the considerations of law include not just the initial estimate of whether a law has been broken or prosecution will proceed, but some opinion (from the cops? the judge?) on whether future offenses are likely.