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Very late to this party and I know I've already mentioned it but @yourewrongabout is fantastic. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439
It hits that sweet spot for me: funny, sweary, feminist, smart. I listened to my first episode: @yourewrongabout murder, after @francesmahonlaw tweeted about it. Right in my wheelhouse. I was hooked.
I've now gone back to the beginning and am about 30 episodes in. I've learned how we are wrong about the Jonestown Massacre, the Exxon Valdes spill, Monica Lewinsky, and Afterschool Specials!
I love how @Remember_Sarah and @RottenInDenmark take us through the many ways we are wrong - we miss the structural, the cultural, and the particular. Some things require layers of debunking. I love the posture of inquiry and openness to being wrong.
And it is in that spirit I will say to @Remember_Sarah and @RottenInDenmark: #YoureWrongAbout battered woman syndrome. Maybe you already know this (I'm about two years behind in my listening!) but BWS has come up a few times and the description is pretty incomplete/misleading.
There are a few levels of wrongness here. Bear with me. Caveat is that my knowledge is primarily of Canadian law and research, but it relates to US law, as well. First point is that it's not (or shouldn't be seen as) a syndrome.
Viewing the sometimes violent responses of abused women as rooted in a syndrome tends to miss both the structural and the particular. Feminist scholars much smarter than me have critiqued "learned helplessness" as wrongly assigning disordered thinking to battered women.
My colleague @igrantubc has critiqued the "syndromization of women's experience". The groundbreaking 1990 Lavallee case changed the Cdn law of self-defence based on evidence of BWS. But it did not establish a defence of BWS. The media and some lawyers are often wrong about this.
The idea that abused women are in the throes of a syndrome when they, for example, kill a partner in his sleep or while his back is turned misses the many ways that their use of violence can be a reasonable, rational response to their situation, when understood in context.
Rather than "learning helplessness" battered women - particularly WOC, Indigenous women, trans women, poor women - have experiences of the police not assisting them in the past. Abused women are also at a greater risk of being murdered when they leave! https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/domestic-violence-victims-1.3885381
