Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences

In recent months, we’ve seen an unprecedented wave of testimonials about the serious harms women all too frequently endure. The #MeToo moment, the #WhyIStayed campaign, and the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings have raised public awareness not only about workplace harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, but also about how routinely women survivors face a Gaslight-style gauntlet of doubt, disbelief, and outright dismissal of their stories. This pattern is particularly disturbing in the justice system, where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose, because women telling stories of abuse by their male partners are simply not believed. To fully grasp the nature of this new moment in gendered power relations—and to cement the significant gains won by these public campaigns—we need to take a full, considered look at when, how, and why the justice system and other key social institutions discount women’s credibility. We use the lens of intimate partner violence to examine the ways in which women’s credibility is discounted in a range of legal and social service system settings. First, judges and others improperly discount as implausible women’s stories of abuse, based on a failure to understand both the symptoms arising from neurological and psychological trauma, and the practical constraints on survivors’ lives. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women’s personal trustworthiness, based on both inaccurate interpretations of survivors’ courtroom demeanor and negative cultural stereotypes about women and their motivations for seeking assistance. Moreover, even when a woman manages to overcome all the initial modes of institutional skepticism that minimize her account of abuse, she often finds that the systems designed to furnish her with help and protection dismiss the importance of her experiences. Instead, all too often, the arbiters of justice and social welfare adopt and enforce legal and social policies and practices with little regard for how they perpetuate patterns of abuse. Two distinct harms arise from this pervasive pattern of credibility discounting and experiential dismissal. First, the discrediting of survivors constitutes its own psychic injury—an institutional betrayal that echoes the psychological abuse women suffer at the hands of individual perpetrators. Second, the pronounced, nearly instinctive penchant for devaluing women’s testimony is so deeply embedded within survivors’ experience that it becomes a potent, independent obstacle to their efforts to obtain safety and justice. The reflexive discounting of women’s stories of domestic violence finds analogs among the kindred diminutions and dismissals that harm so many other women who resist the abusive exercise of male power, from survivors of workplace harassment to victims of sexual assault on and off campus. For these women, too, credibility discounts both deepen the harm they experience and create yet another impediment to healing and justice. Concrete, systematic reforms are needed to eradicate these unjust, gender-based credibility discounts and experiential dismissals, and to enable women subjected to male abuses of power at long last to trust the responsiveness of the justice system

Reading the Wound: Wollstonecraft’s \u3cem\u3eThe Wrongs of Woman, or Maria\u3c/em\u3e and Trauma Theory

Discusses the theory of trauma presented in Mary Wollstonecraft\u27s novel \u27Wrongs of Woman, Or Maria.\u27 How the novel was both personally therapeutic for the author and historically significant for what it reveals about women\u27s lives under patriarchy; The repeated dissection of Wollstonecraft\u27s wounds which stem from sexual betrayal; The character of Maria as a representation of the psychological and sexual abuses that wound all women

Self psychology at work in trauma therapy

This theoretical thesis examines self psychology and trauma theory, specifically Judith Herman\u27s Trauma and Recovery. A brief history of the psychodynamic study of the influence of trauma on mental illness will be given to orient the present discussion in the field of psychodynamic theory. Major concepts of self psychology, such as selfobject, mirroring, idealization and twinship will be reviewed. Herman\u27s stages of recovery for the trauma survivor, namely establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection will be summarized. I will then present my understanding of trauma as anti-mirroring behavior, trauma\u27s ability to corrupt the idealized, and the twinship qualities of the reconnection phase of recovery. A case example is presented to elucidate my understanding of the selfobjects and selfobject functions at work in Herman\u27s conceptualization of the recovery process

A Relational Perspective on Psychological Trauma: <em>The Ghost of the Unspent Love</em>

Psychological trauma is central to the practice of all psychological therapies and is possibly one of the most frequently uttered terms in the history of psychology since its philosophical inception by the Ancient Greeks. Despite the abundance of scholarship devoted to the study and conceptualization of trauma, it remains a perplexing phenomenon given that the majority of contemporary studies focus on post-traumatic symptomatology and allied diagnostic pathology. While the psychopathology of post-traumatic ramifications has been thoroughly examined, the pathopsychology of trauma remains an arena of ongoing exploration and debate. The purpose of the current chapter is to offer an overview of the most predominant conceptual frameworks of psychological trauma residing in the psychodynamic school of thought, which not only addresses the intrapsychic and interpersonal origins of traumatic pathology but also provides a normative framework of healthy human development. Alongside that, a clinical case vignette will be presented to illustrate the interventions, processes, and outcome of psychodynamic treatment for complex trauma. Positioned within a post-modernist paradigm, the chapter aims to review current psychodynamic literature from a perspective that supports the notion that reality can be interpreted in multiple ways and thus embraces the diversity of multiple analytical contributions to the study of trauma

‘One of the best fathers until he went out of his mind’: Paternal child-murder, 1864–1900

Current scholarship suggests that when a mother murdered her child in Victorian England she was treated sympathetically by the press and in the courtroom. It is argued that because the crime was considered antithetical to womanhood it was viewed as an indication of insanity. This article examines newspaper reports, trial transcripts, medical literature and popular works on fatherhood, in order to explore the cases of sixty men committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum between 1864 and 1900 for the murder of their children. It questions two assumptions of the literature on infanticide: first, the idea that it was only women who were thought to be going against nature if they killed their child; and second, that it was only women who regularly successfully pleaded insanity in such cases. The Broadmoor case studies not only demonstrate Victorian attitudes towards paternal child-murder but also provide valuable material illustrating affectionate models of Victorian fatherhood. In trial and press reports detailing the crimes it is clear that fathers were expected, and expected themselves, to be temperate, provide for, and protect their children

A Psychoanalytic Theoretical Study on 'the Familiar'

Freud’s formulation of the repetition compulsion and the uncanny both can point to a strong tendency in human nature to seek out that which is familiar. Freud did not however further conceptualise this tendency. In discovering the potential psychoanalytic meaning and significance of this tendency towards the familiar across Freud’s three models of the mind, by integrating other schools’ relevant theories, and by interpreting the role of familiarity in clinical cases, this thesis seeks to identify different aspects of the concept of the familiar. According to the new conceptualisation outlined here, the strong tendency towards familiarity is driven by a dynamic and responsive framework in mind, which I have called ‘the Familiar’. This framework protects the subject from the fright caused by experiences of unfamiliarity, for example by recasting these in light of what is known by the subject, re-connecting him to a familiar psychical terrain. The conceptualisation of the familiar effectively connects pathological repetitions to general repetitions, as well as to other clinical theories, and constitutes a new orientation which may have clinical applications. This could enrich a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and psychopathology, which until now has mainly focused on the role of unfamiliarity and the alien. A discussion of the uncanny in the COVID-19 pandemic further illustrates the utility of the conceptualisation of the familiar. In this context, the uncanny is seen to follow from the overwhelming intrusion of unfamiliarity and then by the reappearance of terrifying familiarity, in which the fragile nature of what we are familiar is shown