Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases

Preface

vii One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, and over one million women are assaulted by their intimate partners every year. Although men are also victims of domestic violence, females constitute the vast majority of such victims. In addition, every year in the United States approximately 780,000 children come to the attention of child protective services because they cannot live safely at home. These children have frequently witnessed or become caught up in domestic violence themselves.1 Certainly these statistics alone merit our close look at what happens to women and children when they must navigate the criminal or juvenile court systems. Fortunately, these women and children have advocates who not only guide them through these systems but also work to ensure that their voices are heard and that their best interests are met. The work of those advocates is the focus of this book. More precisely, it is their persuasive practices that we believe illustrate how they attend to women and children who have been neglected and abused—how they make arguments on behalf of these women and children, how they guide them to articulate their own needs, and how they change the court system to better accommodate those needs. These advocates are not lawyers , and although some are employed by county offices and programs, many others are volunteers. We come to this project not only because of the continuing numbers of women and children who face neglect and abuse but also because of our own personal and professional experiences. Mary is a long-time volunteer with WATCH (originally Women at the Courthouse), a court monitoring organization that follows family and sexual and domestic violence cases and provides feedback to the justice system in Hennepin County,Minnesota.Amy was trained in crisis intervention in Colorado in the late 1990s through what was then the Boulder County Safehouse (now called the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence).Both of us proposed or were invited to participate in two WATCH Preface viii | Preface research projects, one involving victim impact statements and one involving child protection cases, over a four-year period. Our affiliation with WATCH opened many doors for us, particularly among the judges, and the WATCH volunteers served as observers throughout this project. Although criminal courtrooms are open to the public, seldom were observers invited to attend juvenile court hearings until WATCH became involved. Working with WATCH fueled much of our energy for this book and served as a reminder that merging advocacy work with academic work is indeed possible and that academic work can have an influence both within and outside of the academy. We dedicate this book to WATCH. Parts of this book that pertain to victim impact statements were previously published in three academic journals and are reprinted with permission: “Degrees of Emotion: Judicial Responses to Victim Impact Statements,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 6, no. 1 (2010): 75–104. “Making Academic Work Advocacy Work,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 22, no. 3 (2008): 299–329. “Understanding Genre through the Lens of Advocacy: The Rhetorical Work of the Victim Impact Statement,” Written Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 3–35. We thank the editors and reviewers of those publications for helping us understand our observations and interviews in the early stages of this project. This work was supported by the University of Minnesota through a grantin -aid and two semester leaves, as well as a faculty development grant for Mary, and Laura Gurak, chair of the Department of Writing Studies (and earlier the Department of Rhetoric), supported these grant efforts. Marna Anderson, executive director of WATCH, shepherded the project through many stages and encouraged and educated us well along the way, and Sarah Coulter, court monitoring coordinator of WATCH, answered all our questions quickly and thoroughly , participated in many interviews or observations, and paved the way through the complications of the juvenile court system with grace and humor. Susanne Smith, program manager of the Guardian ad Litem (GAL) Program in Minneapolis, and Kelley Leaf, guardian ad litem coordinator of the GAL Program , encouraged their GALs to volunteer for interviews and helped us understand the juvenile court system at every turn. Court personnel too numerous to name, from judges to clerks, welcomed us into their courtrooms and their chambers. Mary Biermaier, director of Victim/Witness Services at the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, helped us coordinate the collection of sample victim impact statements, and Lolita Ulloa, managing attorney of the Victim Witness [3...