Domestic Violence and the Construction of 'Ideal Victims': Assaulted Women's 'Image Problems' in Law

48 Pages Posted: 15 Sep 2009 Last revised: 4 Nov 2009

See all articles by Melanie Randall

Melanie Randall

University of Western Ontario - Faculty of Law

Abstract

Some of the ways domestic violence is taken up in law - even those ways expressly aimed to remedy the defects and inadequacies of traditional legal responses - remain inextricably bound up with and shaped by incomplete and distorted representations of the nature, causes and effects of that violence. Dominant images and legal representations of women who are victims of violence typically fail to apprehend the co-existence of women’s victimization with women’s agency - agency which is often expressed through the context specific strategies of resistance which most women employ when they experience violence perpetrated against them. A consequence of this analytical severing of victimization from its co-existence with agency is a distorted understanding both of the particular problem of violence in individual women’s lives and its effects, and also of the broader social conditions in which this violence takes shape and gets perpetuated. This, in turn, limits the efficacy of legal responses to and interventions in domestic violence. The two classes of victims I analyse in this paper - the essentially helpless one with the syndrome and the overly active agent who is “uncooperative” - are mirror-image, and opposite examples of the difficulty incorporating acknowledgement of both victimization and agency in representations of women’s experiences of intimate violence. A critical examination of both of these categories of victims sheds light on the larger complications which attach to legal images of assaulted women, and the paradoxes and limitations of contemporary legal responses to domestic violence. These limitations, in turn, necessarily impede the development of more adequate and nuanced accounts of the dynamics of domestic violence, accounts which are able to grasp simultaneously the contours of women’s victimization and the ways in which women negotiate, resist and cope with this violence in the contexts of their lives.

Suggested Citation

Randall, Melanie, Domestic Violence and the Construction of 'Ideal Victims': Assaulted Women's 'Image Problems' in Law. St. Louis University Public Law Review, Vol. XXIII, pp. 107-154, 2004, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1473143

Melanie Randall (Contact Author)

University of Western Ontario - Faculty of Law ( email )

London, Ontario N6A 3K7 N6A 3K7
Canada

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