Domestic Violence and the Construction of Ideal Victims: Assaulted Women's Image Problems in Law
![handle is hein.journals/stlpl23 and id is 123 raw text is: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDEAL
VICTIMS: ASSAULTED WOMEN'S IMAGE PROBLEMS IN LAW
MELANIE RANDALL*
In large part, the limits of current legal responses [to battered women] are
rooted in the same persistent structural inequities and biases which underlie
battering itself.'
I. INTRODUCTION
A significant amount of public attention and legal intervention in the past
few decades has focused on the issue of violence against women and children,
and especially on domestic violence. This attention and increased public
concern is a direct achievement of several decades of activism, scholarship,
and advocacy undertaken by those concerned both with ending violence
against women and achieving equality rights for women generally.2 Yet most
mainstream social and legal responses to the problem of violence against
women, especially violence against women in intimate relationships, remain
inextricably bound up with and shaped by incomplete and distorted
representations of the nature, causes, and effects of that violence.3 As a result,
some of the ways domestic violence is addressed in the law - even those ways
expressly aimed at remedying the defects and inadequacies of traditional legal
responses - inadvertently end up reinforcing the problems they seek to rectify.
Two examples of this are found in stereotypical representations of women
who are subjected to violence in their intimate relationships. Both of these
representations rely on the construction of categories of victims of domestic
violence that misapprehend and stigmatize women's ways of coping with
* Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, and Scotiabank Professor, Centre for Research on
Violence Against Women and Children, University of Western Ontario. I would like to thank the
editors, in particular John M. Challis, of Saint Louis University Public Law Review for the
invitation to contribute to this issue and for their excellent assistance with finalizing this
manuscript. Thanks also to Dr. Lori Haskell and Professor Dale Ives for their helpful comments
and to Angela McCallum and Yola Hamzo for research assistance.
1. Evan Stark, Re-Presenting Woman Battering: From Battered Women Syndrome to
Coercive Control, 58 ALB. L. REv. 973, 979 (1995).
2. See id. at 976-77.
3. Id. at 979-80.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/stlpl23&div=11&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Domestic Violence and the Construction of Ideal Victims: Assaulted Women's Image Problems in Law
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