Womens' response to violence
01 January 1992
In Britain each year, an average of 70 women are killed by their male partners compared to 12 to 15 men being killed by their women partners. Yet according to the Crown Prosecution Service, 40% of these women are found guilty of murder compared to 25% of the men. Many of the men are able to rely on defences of provocation which reduces the charge from murder to manslaughter and the sentence from life to a matter of years, or self-defence which leads to acquittal.
The partial defence of provocation depends on being able to show that the killer reacted immediately to the other person's actions or words without pausing to consider their actions and in a manner in which any reasonable person might be expected to react. It is a defence that has developed in response to the majority of violent incidents, which are perpetrated by men. It is a narrowly defined defence, which does not recognise that women have been socially conditioned to react to attack with caution, to try and negotiate and diffuse situations and to respond with violence only as a last desperate attempt to protect themselves. As a result, a woman who puts up with years of abuse or who tries to negotiate with her attacker by arming herself with the nearest available weapon may find herself deprived of this defence.
By the mid 1980s, the police force and local authorities recognised in theory if not in practice, the need to respond seriously to domestic violence. It became accepted wisdom that such violence was not the isolated result of a sudden conflict of wills but a symptom of an ongoing imbalance of power and resources.
It was recognised that a brief talking to from the local police officer was not an effective antidote to years of social and cultural conditioning that placed most women in a terminally inferior position in the eyes of many men. Instead it was necessary to provide housing for single women and their children, creches for women who needed or wished to work and refuges for those whose partners wished to seek revenge or force then to return to the home.
However, resources were scarce and there remained a minority of women who, through economic necessity, a mistaken belief that they could reform their partner or that they deserved his abuse, endured on-going domestic violence. In the end some of them were driven to respond to violence with violence.
The law is blind to gender specific responses to violence. If a woman is not reacting to an immediate act or words from her partner, she cannot claim to have been provoked. And yet, the House of Lords in DPP v Camplin [1978] 2 ALL ER 168 recognised the need to judge the actions of a reasonable man in relation to his age and race.
The law also provides a complete defence to murder if it can be proved that the person attacked reacted in self defence and with a level of force proportionate to the attack. Again, the law presupposes two protagonists of roughly equal strength and experience.
It takes no account of most women's lack of experience of physical fighting or their lack of strength, that stems not only from relative weight or muscle power, but from their conditioned fear and inexperience. Therefore, when a woman, because of her previous experience of domestic violence or her own perception of vulnerability, retaliates with a weapon, she often deprives herself of this defence.
The law as it stands recognises that in the heat of the moment a person might miscalculate the amount of force necessary. It now needs to go further and recognise that the social conditioning and history of many women also tends to lead to their over reaction.
Many groups have raised these issues in submissions to the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and in the next few months the Court of Appeal will be hearing arguments on behalf of Amelia Rossiter and Kiranjit Ahluwahlia, both victims of domestic violence who finally met violence with violence, but yet were not able to rely on the tradit