Womens' response to violence (1)
01 January 1991
Womens' response to violence
artdoc February=1992
In Britain each year, an average of 70 women are killed by their
male partners compared to 12 to 15 men being killed by their
women partners. Yet according to the Crown Prosecution Service,
40% of these women are found guilty of murder compared to 25% of
the men. Many of the men are able to rely on defences of
provocation which reduces the charge from murder to manslaughter
and the sentence from life to a matter of years, or self-defence
which leads to acquittal. The partial defence of provocation
depends on being able to show that the killer reacted immediately
to the other person's actions or words without pausing to
consider their actions and in a manner in which any reasonable
person might be expected to react. It is a defence that has
developed in response to the majority of violent incidents, which
are perpetrated by men. It is a narrowly defined defence, which
does not recognise that women have been socially conditioned to
react to attack with caution, to try and negotiate and diffuse
situations and to respond with violence only as a last desperate
attempt to protect themselves. As a result, a woman who puts up
with years of abuse or who tries to negotiate with her attacker
by arming herself with the nearest available weapon may find
herself deprived of this defence. By the mid 1980s, the police
force and local authorities recognised, in theory if not in
practice, the need to respond seriously to domestic violence. It
became accepted wisdom that such violence was not the isolated
result of a sudden conflict of wills but a symptom of an ongoing
imbalance of power and resources. It was recognised that a brief
talking to from the local police officer was not an effective
antidote to years of social and cultural conditioning that placed
most women in a terminally inferior position in the eyes of many
men. Instead it was necessary to provide housing for single women
and their children, creches for women who needed or wished to
work and refuges for those whose partners wished to seek revenge
or force then to return to the home. However, resources were
scarce and there remained a minority of women who, through
economic necessity, a mistaken belief that they could reform
their partner or that they deserved his abuse, endured on-going
domestic violence. In the end, some of them were driven to
respond to violence with violence.
The law is blind to gender specific responses to violence. If a
woman is not reacting to an immediate act or words from her
partner, she cannot claim to have been provoked. And yet, the
House of Lords in DPP v Camplin [1978] 2 ALL ER 168 recognised
the need to judge the actions of a reasonable man in relation to
his age and race. The law also provides a complete defence to
murder if it can be proved that the person attacked reacted in
self defence and with a level of force proportionate to the
attack. Again, the law presupposes two protagonists of roughly
equal strength and experience. It takes no account of most
women's lack of experience of physical fighting or their lack of
strength, that stems not only from relative weight or muscle
power, but from their conditioned fear and inexperience.
Therefore, when a woman, because of her previous experience of
domestic violence or her own perception of vulnerability,
retaliates with a weapon, she often deprives herself of this
defence.
The law as it stands recognises that in the heat of the moment
a person might miscalculate the amount of force necessary. It now
needs to go further and recognise that the social conditioning
and history of many women also tends to lead to their over
reaction.
Many groups have raised these issues in submissions to the Royal
Commission on Criminal Justice and in the next few months, the
Court of Appeal will be hearing arguments on behalf of Amelia
Rossiter and Kiranjit Ahluwahlia, both victims of domestic