Domestic Violence Law Reform and Women’s Experience in Court: Th ...

This framework understands domestic violence as a pattern of abusive behaviors by the perpetrator designed to exercise power and control over the victim, which causes the victim to fear for her safety. This conception of violence is discussed in greater detail in chapter 2. The forms of violence reported by the 13 interviewees are set out in table 1.

Clearly, all of the women had experienced multiple forms of abuse, with the various behaviors identified tending to be experienced cumulatively, rather than separately. Some of the women had endured abuse over a very long period before they took legal action, including violent marriages that lasted for over 10 years, 15 years, and, in one case, 44 years. At the opposite extreme, one woman had come to Australia as a “mail order bride” but had stayed with her abusive husband for only 5 weeks before escaping to a refuge. The average period of time that the violence lasted before the woman took legal action, excluding the two outliers just mentioned, was over 5 years.

Obviously, such a small group of interviewees cannot possibly claim to be representative; nor was this the intention. Rather, these women’s accounts of their experiences in court serve to flesh out the statistical data from the court observations and to confirm (or disconfirm) and add depth to observed phenomena. As Deborah Hensler (1993) noted in relation to the report of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force, stories and statistics can be mutually reinforcing and can combine to present a fuller picture:

“[T]he stories give life to the statistics, and the statistics tell us that the stories are not idiosyncratic or aberrational” (p. 2193).