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178 | 8 Beyond the Law Reconstructing the legal response to domestic violence will make the legal system a more viable alternative for many women. For other women, however, redress from within the justice system will continue to prove elusive, because the justice system cannot provide them with what they need or because they are unwilling to invite state intervention into their lives. Those women need a remedy beyond the law. Justice beyond the justice system, economic stability, meaningful engagement with men who abuse their partners, and community accountability: these are the central elements of the extra-legal anti-essentialist system. Finding Justice Beyond the Justice System “For your own peace of mind, be prepared to throw any illusions about ‘justice’ you might have had out the window,” abuse survivor Mary Walsh warned other women considering criminal prosecution of their partners.1 What does justice mean to women subjected to abuse? For some, justice is criminal punishment, a goal well suited to the retributive criminal justice system. But other women define justice differently. Psychiatrist Judith Herman found that women subjected to abuse often equate justice with validation (from families and communities of their abuse and the harm caused by that abuse) and vindication (through the community’s condemnation of the abuse).2 Punishment is not as important to some women as the ability to reclaim their places within the community and to heal relationships within the community that were damaged by the abuse. Justice may also mean breaking free of the continued emotional hold that their partners have over their lives, even after the abuse has ended. Law professor Brenda Smith asked her mother how she could forgive her father for years of serious physical and sexual abuse. Her mother replied, “I forgave . . . for me and for you. I could not continue to hold on to my anger . . . and do what I needed to do for myself or for you.”3 This “state of mind in which the offender and his offense Beyond the Law | 179 no longer dominated their thoughts. . . . this very limited sense of letting go of resentment and moving on with life,”4 can be called forgiveness. Forgiveness returns power to women subjected to abuse. Forgiveness can also create accountability, argues Smith, by focusing on the offender’s conduct, not on the offender as a person. This narrow conception of forgiveness can be a form of justice. An anti-essentialist system would help women achieve validation , vindication, and forgiveness without state intervention. Such a system would enable women to define what justice means for them and provide a variety of avenues to help them achieve it. Restorative (or transformative) justice practices, for example, can be accessed without state intervention and might provide a pathway to justice for some women. Hillsboro, Oregon’s Domestic Violence Surrogate Dialogue program allows women subjected to abuse to seek validation, vindication , and forgiveness by engaging with men who abuse—but not the men who abused them. The program pairs women subjected to abuse with men in prison who have accepted responsibility for the abuse they perpetrated against their partners and are involved in batterer intervention counseling . The program seeks to foster understanding between women subjected to abuse and men who abuse their partners, give women an outlet for their anger, and enhance women’s understanding of men who abuse. The program also hopes to build empathy in men who abuse their partners, allowing them to understand the impact of their actions from the perspective of women subjected to abuse. Women involved in the dialogues have reported empowerment , increased healing, and satisfaction from the sense that they have claimed voice not only for themselves, but also on behalf of the men’s partners .5 Men involved with the program report that the dialogues allow them to hear what they could not hear from their own partners—how destructive their behaviors were and how much courage it took for women to recover from abuse. The men found it humbling to reexamine their actions in light of the dialogues.6 Community-based truth commissions might provide another pathway to justice for women subjected to abuse. Described as “a radically new kind of justice,”7 truth commissions have been created throughout the world in the aftermath of conflicts involving human rights abuses. Truth commissions provide public space for both victims and perpetrators of violence to share their stories and to be heard by other participants and their communities . Unlike trials, during which story-telling is constrained by...

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