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

Transforming Aggressive Prosecution Policies: Prioritizing Victims’ Long-Term Safety in the Prosecution of Domestic Violence Cases

Until fairly recently, prosecutors\u27 offices around the country ignored domestic violence cases, failing to press charges in the vast majority of situations and dropping charges prior to conviction in many others. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the battered women\u27s movement made significant efforts to improve the criminal justice system\u27s response. One way that this effort has met with substantial success is that many prosecutors\u27 offices now have adopted aggressive no-drop policies for domestic violence cases. In these jurisdictions, cases proceed regardless of the victim\u27s preferences about prosecution, even if she recants her original story and testifies for the defense

Beyond the RCT: Integrating Rigor and Relevance to Evaluate the Outcomes of Domestic Violence Programs

Programs for domestic violence (DV) victims and their families have grown exponentially over the last four decades. The evidence demonstrating the extent of their effectiveness, however, often has been criticized as stemming from studies lacking scientific rigor. A core reason for this critique is the widespread belief that credible evidence can derive only from research grounded in randomized control trials (RCTs). Although the RCT method has its strengths, we argue that it is rarely an optimal—or even a possible—approach for evaluating multifaceted DV programs. This article reviews the reasons that RCT is a poor fit for such programs and argues that a more inclusive conceptualization of credible evidence is critical to expanding our knowledge base about how DV programs affect survivors’ safety and well-being

Longitudinal Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence, Risk, Well-Being, and Employment: Preliminary Findings

Over 7 months (June 1999 to January 2000), researchers recruited 406 women from 1 of 3 sites in a northeastern city at the point they were seeking help for violence against them by a current or former male partner. Intimate partner violence was measured with a modified version of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale. Some form of serious violence during the previous year was reported by 88 percent of the participants. By the first 3-month follow-up period, nearly one-third of the participants reported the recurrence of some form of physical violence; 20.4 percent reported an injury; and 18.1 percent reported sexual abuse. Stalking between time 1 and time 2 was reported by 46.9 percent of participants. By the 1-year follow-up, 38.8 percent of participants reported at least some recurrence of physical violence within the past year. At time 1, a significant number of participants indicated their level of risk for future violence as high. Overall, results suggest different trajectories for violence and abuse following participants\u27 involvement with community and legal system interventions. Mean scores on each of the measures of well-being showed an overall improvement in reported quality of life at time 2 compared to time 1. An overall mean decrease in reported depressive symptoms was observed; however, this progress was not uniform. There was a slight increase in employment among the women over the 1-year period. In showing different patterns of revictimization across different types of intimate partner violence acts (physical violence, sexual abuse, and stalking), this suggests to researchers the importance of including all these categories of intimate partner violence in their protocols. Implications of the findings are also drawn for practitioners. 2 exhibits and 15 references

Longitudinal Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence, Risk, Well-Being, and Employment: Preliminary Findings

Over 7 months (June 1999 to January 2000), researchers recruited 406 women from 1 of 3 sites in a northeastern city at the point they were seeking help for violence against them by a current or former male partner. Intimate partner violence was measured with a modified version of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale. Some form of serious violence during the previous year was reported by 88 percent of the participants. By the first 3-month follow-up period, nearly one-third of the participants reported the recurrence of some form of physical violence; 20.4 percent reported an injury; and 18.1 percent reported sexual abuse. Stalking between time 1 and time 2 was reported by 46.9 percent of participants. By the 1-year follow-up, 38.8 percent of participants reported at least some recurrence of physical violence within the past year. At time 1, a significant number of participants indicated their level of risk for future violence as high. Overall, results suggest different trajectories for violence and abuse following participants\u27 involvement with community and legal system interventions. Mean scores on each of the measures of well-being showed an overall improvement in reported quality of life at time 2 compared to time 1. An overall mean decrease in reported depressive symptoms was observed; however, this progress was not uniform. There was a slight increase in employment among the women over the 1-year period. In showing different patterns of revictimization across different types of intimate partner violence acts (physical violence, sexual abuse, and stalking), this suggests to researchers the importance of including all these categories of intimate partner violence in their protocols. Implications of the findings are also drawn for practitioners. 2 exhibits and 15 references