U Not Gonna Like This

Right now I'm trying to find an old article on Men's News Daily that I though I had the link to, but it truns out I don't. As soon as I can find it hopefully I can post it. For now I give you this article from 2005 on Battered Woman Syndrome:



Battered Woman Syndrome: A License to Kill?



August 15, 2005
by Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.



A recent story link at Men's News Daily describes the case of a woman charged with raping and sexually assaulting her children because, among other charges, she dressed her son up as a girl and watched while his stepfather raped him. Her lawyer has a defense: "battered spouse syndrome," otherwise known as "battered woman syndrome" or BWS.



So what is "battered woman syndomre"?



The short answer: it's feminist junk science that turns pre-meditated murder into self-defense.



The long answer: it's a psychological theory largely rejected by psychologists and a legal theory that allows a woman to kill her while he's sleeping and claim she acted in self-defense. Or, as in the case cited above, to absolve her of guilt for aiding and abetting the rape of her children.



BWS was the brainchild of Dr. Lenore Walker, who hoped to explain why women stay with their abusive husbands and kill them. Her explanation was based on experiments conducted on dogs, which were placed in cages and shocked at random. Initially, the dogs would try to escape the shock, but would eventually give up trying to escape, even when experimenters gave them a way to escape. Their condition was called "learned helplessness."



Dr. Walker's purpose was to give a psychological explanation for why women don't leave abusive relationships–they have succumbed to "learned helplessness."



One big problem with this theory: there is no documented case of a human suffering from "learned helplessness," even among battered women.



And it's obvious women do leave abusive relationships. BWS doesn't explain why some women stay and some leave. Nor does it explain why a woman who can pick up a gun and kill her husband cannot pick up the telephone and call the police.



In addition, BWS is not recognized in DSM-IV. There are no standard interview protocols for recognizing BWS. The only study carried out on the syndrome involved a group of battered women but no control group. BWS provides no independent evidence of abuse. In short, most psychologists aren't buying the theory because it has insufficient empirical backing.



Still, BWS has become the basis for a very broad legal defense: a battered woman who kills her husband while he is sleeping or unconscious is entitled to a claim of "self-defense."



A classic self-defense claim involves two elements: imminent threat of unlawful bodily harm and reasonableness. One must show that one's life was in "imminent " or "immediate" danger and that one acted reasonably under the circumstance.



According to feminist Beverly McPhail, the standards of imminent danger and reasonableness should be "relaxed" for abused women:



When women act after the initial assault, the law declares it premeditated rather than self-defense, when actually her actions embody strategies of self-defense and survival. Some legal scholars suggest that the imminence argument be relaxed in cases of battered women, because often the fear is not impending injury but rather inevitable injury.



In other words, a woman who plans and carries out the killing of her husband while he sleeps should be treated the same as a man killing another man because his life was in "imminent" danger.



McPhail argues that the "self-defense standard" is an example of embedding "male bias" into the law because a fight between two men is different than a fight between a man and a woman. The woman is often "smaller, less physically strong and in the context of an intimate, yet abusive, relationship." For a woman to fight back, she argues, is often not "self-defense but suicide."



It may be true that a woman (or a man) is wiser not to fight back. But that's street smarts, not helplessness. That hardly gives her the right to kill him in his sleep when he can raise no defense. And if she kills him before he injures her, her injury was obviously not "inevitable." If she killed him for his life insurance money, that could also be a strategy of "self-defense and survival." Finally, McPhail's explanation leaves unanswered the question of why the woman doesn't just leave and call the police.



BWS asks us to believe the woman doesn't leave because she has succumbed to "learned helplessness." It asks us to overcome our common sense belief that a woman who can plan and carry out a murder can also open the door and leave. After all, even female survivors of the holocaust could leave their concentration camps at the end of the war.



Still, testimony regarding BWS is now accepted in 31 states, not on the basis of scientific validity but on the basis of legal precedent.



Attorney David L. Raybin of Tennessee claims it is effective as a defense:



I know that BWS works. Most recently, my partner.. and I represented a woman ...who had been convicted of murder. We were successful in gaining a new trial because her first attorney was ineffective for failing to raise the BWS issue... Following a remand, we tried the case, put on BWS and our client was convicted of the lesser offense of criminally negligent homicide and was placed on probation. BWS was a significant factor in getting a very different result based on identical facts. (http://www.hwylaw.com/CM/Articles/Articles73.asp)



In The Myth of Male Power, Dr. Warren Farrell describes several cases in which BWS enabled women to be acquitted in court or later pardoned by a sympathetic governor.



So it does work, at least in some cases. In others, either the judge or the jury has rejected the claim. In one case, a woman claimed the defense even though she shot him twice: first in their home, then at a neighbor's home. In another, she tried to hide the gun and gloves used to carry out the murder, but still claimed BWS.



Without scientific backing, BWS becomes nothing more than a legal justification for murder. The woman kills her husband and asks the law to confirm that she was justified in doing so–not because her life was in danger, but because he was abusive. She kills the man, then puts him on trial; if the jury believes she was justified, she is either acquitted or her sentence is reduced.



Either way, the man is dead.



If the state first executed a man and then held his trial, most people would be outraged. And rightly so. McPhail laments that "many times, women are still blamed for their rapes, asked what they wore or did to provoke the attack." And yet BWS permits the murderer to blame the victim for his murder and explain what he did to provoke it. A rape victim at least gets the chance to tell her side
of the story. A murdered man doesn't.


In the end, BWS must be seen for what it is--a failed psychological theory that's become a legal license to kill for women.



I suggest the license be revoked.


Sources:


Dixon, Joe Wheeler. "An Essay on Battered Woman Syndrome." At http://www.psychologyandlaw.com/battered.htm.


Dixon, Joe W. and Kim E. "Gender-specific Clinical Syndromes and Their Admissibility under the Federal Rules of Evidence." American Journal of Trial Advocacy. Summer 2003


Farrell, Warren. Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say. Tarcher Putnam. 1999.


Farrell, Warren. The Myth of Male Power. Simon & Schuster. 1993.


Fumento, Michael. "Battered Justice Syndrome." http://www.consumeralert.org/fumento/batter.htm


McPhail, Beverly. "Justice is elusive for those who are raped or battered." Houston Chronicle. July 30, 2005. At http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3288611


Raybin, David L. "Battered Woman's Syndrome: Trial Tactics." At http://www.hwylaw.com/CM/Articles/Articles73.asp


Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.