Women Intimate Partner Violence And The Law

"This book explores how women from diverse backgrounds interact with the law in response to intimate partner violence, over time. Every year, millions of women globally turn to law to help them live lives free and safe from violence. Women engage with child protection services and police. They apply for civil protection orders and family court orders to help them manage their children's contact with a violent father, and take special visa pathways to avoid deportation following separation from an abuser. Women are often compelled to interact with law, through their abuser's myriad legal applications against them. While separation may seem like a solution, it often accelerates legal engagement providing new opportunities for continued abuse. Countless women who have experienced Intimate Partner Violence are enmeshed in overlapping, complex and often inconsistent legal processes. They have both fleeting and longer-term connections with legal system actors. Their stories demonstrate how abusers harness multiple aspects of the legal process, and its actors, to continue their abuse. They highlight the regular failure of legal processes and actors to comprehend the significance of non-physical abuse. Women show how legal system actors' common expectation that separation is a single event, rather than a process, has implications for their connections with law and the outcomes they achieve. From time to time, the women in this study attained the safety and closure they sought from law, sometimes in circular and unexpected ways, but their narratives demonstrate the level of endurance, tenacity and time this often required"--

This book examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women--rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment--in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. It analyzes why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The authors have compiled original data that allow them to test various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. They also examine the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws. The original data produced for this book make a major contribution to comparisons and analyses of gender violence and law worldwide.

This edited collection addresses intimate partner violence, risk and security as global issues. Although intimate partner violence, risk and security are intimately connected they are rarely considered in tandem in the context of global security. Yet, intimate partner violence causes widespread physical, sexual and/or psychological harm. It is the most common type of violence against women internationally and is estimated to affect 30 per cent of women worldwide. Intimate partner violence has received significant attention in recent years, animating political debate, policy and law reform as well as scholarly attention. In bringing together a range of international experts, this edited collection challenges status quo understandings of risk and questions how we can reposition the risk of IPV, and particularly the risk of IPH, as a critical site of global and national security. It brings together contributions from a range of disciplines and international jurisdictions, including from Australia and New Zealand, United Kingdom, Europe, United States, North America, Brazil and South Africa. The contributions here urge us to think about perpetrators in more nuanced and sophisticated ways with chapters pointing to the structural and social factors that facilitate and sustain violence against women and IPV. Contributors point out that states not only exacerbate the structural conditions producing the risks of violence, but directly coerce and control women as both citizens and non-citizens. States too should be understood as collaborators and facilitators of intimate partner violence. Effective action against intimate partner violence requires sustained responses at the global, state and local levels to end gender inequality. Critical to this end are environmental issues, poverty and the divisions, often along ‘race’ and ethnic lines, underpinning other dimensions of social and economic inequality.

Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.

It is clear that physical abuse is an integral component of some intimate relationships. This book addresses not the violence but our responses or lack of responses to that violation of personal integrity and the accompanying trauma. How partner violence is responded to, individually and collectively, may well determine whether the violence can be prevented or will cease once begun. This text is intended to serve as a basic resource for the student, clinician and researcher. It provides a summary of how we have responded to such violence in the past and presents potential future directions for research and prevention efforts.

"This book explores how women from diverse backgrounds interact with the law in response to intimate partner violence, over time. Every year, millions of women globally turn to law to help them live lives free and safe from violence. Women engage with child protection services and police. They apply for civil protection orders and family court orders to help them manage their children's contact with a violent father, and take special visa pathways to avoid deportation following separation from an abuser. Women are often compelled to interact with law, through their abuser's myriad legal applications against them. While separation may seem like a solution, it often accelerates legal engagement providing new opportunities for continued abuse. Countless women who have experienced Intimate Partner Violence are enmeshed in overlapping, complex and often inconsistent legal processes. They have both fleeting and longer-term connections with legal system actors. Their stories demonstrate how abusers harness multiple aspects of the legal process, and its actors, to continue their abuse. They highlight the regular failure of legal processes and actors to comprehend the significance of non-physical abuse. Women show how legal system actors' common expectation that separation is a single event, rather than a process, has implications for their connections with law and the outcomes they achieve. From time to time, the women in this study attained the safety and closure they sought from law, sometimes in circular and unexpected ways, but their narratives demonstrate the level of endurance, tenacity and time this often required"--

Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women's words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women's practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Alessandra Gribaldo explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. On this basis it advances theoretical reflections on questions of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, and their implications for ethnographic theory. Gribaldo analyzes the dynamics that produce the subjectivity of the victim, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women. Perfect for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, this book will appeal to anthropologists and scholars of law, society, and gender.

This book addresses the intersection of two current major concerns in Australia: law and justice responses to domestic violence - including harsher punitive measures - and the over-representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system, which are similar concerns in New Zealand, Canada and the US. Nancarrow re-conceptualises typologies of violence and provides a means of understanding and explaining female use of violence without undermining the hard-won gains of the women’s movement. It does, however, argue for a paradigm shift, which has implications for every aspect of the system we have built to stop men’s violence against women (law, police policy and practice, counselling and advocacy for victims, and interventions for those who perpetrate violence). The book is based on quantitative and qualitative research and explores the nature of Indigenous intimate partner violence and the types of violence that domestic violence law sought to address.