The Plight of the Provoked Battered Woman

Abstract

Research has long recognised the barriers that women encounter in having their stories heard within the confines of a law traditionally made by men for men. Debate arising from the male-centric nature of the criminal law has been touched on in the previous chapter and is further built on within this chapter’s examination of the adequacy of the law’s response to battered women convicted of manslaughter on the basis of provocation. In examining the use of provocation in this unique context, this chapter contributes to an important body of research recognising that women have historically been assigned the role of the gendered ‘other’ within the criminal justice system (Currie, 1995; Graycar, 1996; Kaspiew, 1995; Walklate, 2008). In advancing this argument, legal scholar Susan Currie (1995, p. 14) describes how:

The realities of women’s lives have been invisible in the law because women have not been able to tell their stories, because they have not been listened to and because they have not been believed.