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

As will be clear from the preceding description, my study focused solely on women as litigants in domestic violence proceedings. The reasons for this were twofold. Firstly, it would be difficult to make any kind of meaningful comparison between men’s and women’s experiences of speaking about domestic violence in court, because men so rarely appear in court as the targets (as opposed to the perpetrators) of domestic violence. Although, as is discussed in chapter 3, men frequently do make cross-applications for intervention orders, the context of those applications and the evidence raised in them are quite different from the context of and evidence in women’s applications. This is largely because, as discussed in the next chapter, women’s experiences of domestic abuse per se tend to be qualitatively different from men’s. Secondly, the aim of the research was not to examine gender differences or similarities in courtroom experiences, but to test feminist claims about the effect of legal proceedings and to determine how feminist law reforms were being implemented. Since those claims concerned the specific position of women, and since the reforms were designed for the benefit of women, it followed that, in order to answer the research questions, the study would necessarily focus upon women’s experiences in attempting to invoke the relevant legal provisions in court.

Finally, the study also draws upon data from other empirical analyses of—or of relevance to—intervention order and family law proceedings, both from overseas and from Australia, undertaken either before or after my own fieldwork. This data is incorporated into the discussion in chapters 3–7.