| When a victim of domestic violence calls the police, requests a civil restraining order or is involved with dependency court, she enters into a legal realm where there are a multiplicity of connections between courtrooms, and whereby many of the subsequent actions taken by her or on her behalf are unknown to her at the time of her initial contact with the law. This study, therefore, seeks to explicate the multiple legal systems or processes that can simultaneously or consecutively intervene in cases of domestic violence, including the criminal prosecutorial process, civil protection order hearings, and the child protective services system, specifically dependency court. Through ethnographic research in San Francisco, California, I found that it is more often the abuse victim than the perpetrator who becomes "managed" or controlled by the legal systems in place. Moreover, the services which constitute the courtroom practices often have confusing or contradictory mandates which create different subject positions for the abuse victim in each courtroom, for example victim/witness in criminal court; victim/petitioner in civil court; and victim/mother in dependency court. The competing courtroom processes complicate battered women's efforts to achieve safety for themselves and their families by creating double binds, such as requiring her testimony against the batterer, something she may believe will make him angrier and possibly threaten her physical safety, even while the state prosecution may enhance her safety. In addition, workers in the system both conflate and obfuscate readings of victim agency with preconceived narratives about what makes a good victim, a good mother, or a good wife. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to accomplish three goals: (1) to transcend the "agency or oppression" debate, that is, that due to her battering status, a victim is by her nature without agency; (2) to complicate the notion of the legal system as a one stop shop for responding to and solving all problems related to domestic violence; and (3) to juxtapose how protection and safety often become confused by legal actors, who may substitute their notions of protection of the victim---and their jobs--for a woman's own ideas of safety. |
