单项选择题
| Despite efforts to provide them with
alternatives such as the shelter, women frequently and repeatedly returned to
violent and abusive partners. By the late 1970s, feminists at Women Together,
like those doing similar work throughout the United States, began to understand
that battered women experience a range of post-traumatic psychological responses
to abuse, similar to those of victims of other types of violence or trauma.
Subsequently, the psychological response of battered women became reified as
"battered woman syndrome," a sub-category of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Interestingly, in the course of trying to create social change, the focus of
feminists perceptibly shifted to trying to explain why battered women fail to
leave the partners who beat them. In trying to address this question, a debate
ensued among feminists and mental health workers as to potential merits and
problems of categorizing as mental disorder what many feminists labeled a normal
response to fear and an appropriately angry response to abuse. Although many
women left abusive relationships or successfully ended violence by other means,
some responded to ongoing or accelerated abuse by killing or trying to kill
their male partners. In many states, when they went to trial, such women found
they were restricted from introducing testimony about the abuse they had endured
or their resulting states of mind. In trying to address these women’s needs,
some activists and scholars advocated the use of expert testimony to explain
battered woman syndrome to juries. This strategy would introduce evidence of
past abuse and challenge the gender biases of self-defense law by explaining the
woman’s state of mind at the time of the offense. Feminist legal scholars raised
potential problems in the use of battered woman syndrome. They argued that it
could be used against women who did not neatly fit pre-established criteria and
had the potential to become another example of the tendency to label women’s
normal angry responses as mental illness. While the desirability of working to
admit expert testimony was debated, individual state courts and legislatures
varied in their willingness to recognize battered woman syndrome, permit
evidence of past abuse, or allow expert testimony. As the legal debate about
battered women’s responses to violence was beginning to unfold, the Ohio
movement became directly involved in it when a former shelter resident, shot and
killed her abusive common law husband. In 1978 Women Together, in conjunction
with the woman’s lawyer, decided to challenge existing law by trying to
introduce battered woman syndrome expert testimony at trial. Because at the time the syndrome had little scientific merit or legal recognition, the trial court declared inadmissibility, a decision upheld by the State Supreme Court (State v. Thomas 1981 66 Ohio St. 2d 51). Women Together founders left the shelter to establish professional careers, viewing this as a means of advancing the feminist agenda. The frustrations, limitations and defeats they had experienced as outside challengers impelled them to adopt a strategy of infiltration and appropriation of the institutions they sought to change. For example, one founder, who had worked through lobbying for ERA America in addition to her other feminist activism, explained her decision to run for elected office by saying: "[When ERA was defeated] I decided to run for the legislature. I said ’I can do better than these turkeys. ’" |
Battered woman syndrome is ______.