NCJ Number
101174
Journal
Victimology Volume: 10 Issue: 1-4 Dated: (1985) Pages: 186-205
Date Published
1985
Length
20 pages
Annotation
It is specious to draw a line between domestic violence assault and spousal homicide as if they were two distinct, separate species.
Abstract
They are not, instead they are often one and the same event, along a continuum of violence distinguished only by inter alia the force and the number of blows, where the knife plunged or bullet embedded. We should look to the shared characteristics, noting similarities in historicity, social and legal interpretations, impotency of civil and criminal remedies particularly as they are guided by gender characterizations and not to difference in the total outcome of one final episode in a series. The paper identifies the common features as guided by gender role stereotypes in so far as typical rhymes and reasons, explanations and justifications, invoked in cases of assault and homicide, neutralize and often legitimize the action of the male perpetrator whilst making the female assailed responsible for her own demise. In penetrating these everyday characterizations of gender, we examine the extent of their codification in civil and criminal remedies so called in the ideologies guiding discretion, and in the very legal constitution of provocation as a partial excuse to murder, which in practice is frequently accessible to the husband who kills a wife, but only occasionally to the wife who kills a brutally violent husband. (Author abstract)