Week 8: Sin By Silence

This week we had two different objectives.
One was to watch the documentary "Sin by Silence" about a group of women in the California Institute for Women who killed their violent intimate partners when they saw no other escape , and write a paper on our reactions, and the second was to look up domestic violence deaths on mydeathspace.com.

"Sin by Silence"

Wow. just wow. I can't even begin to really explain how that documentary made me feel. I was angry, sad, hopeless and hopeful all at the same time. It was so awful to see these women, who had been terrorized and beaten and seeing no other escape, killed their violent intimate partners. Many people think, "well, these women should have found another way". Ok, yeah, that would have been great. However, being a victim of DV and being stuck with a partner who controls you, your money, sometimes your friends, isolates you and makes you believe there is no other escape, can be a real deterrence from seeking forms of help outside of the situation. Also, there are not always great advocates and resources in small communities. What then? If you don't have a car, access to a phone or internet, what is one supposed to do? There are so many factors that play into why these women took the actions they thought were right, it is hard (and in my opinion, not right) to pass judgment on them.

Some interesting facts I found while I was writing this paper that I think you might all want to know about is Intimate Terrorism (IT) and Violent Response (VR). IT is intimate terrorism is a pattern of fear-prodding and controlling behaviors that can be criminal (from assaults and stalking) to non-criminal (monitoring partners friends, activities, public humiliation, etc). These are some of the actions that these women in the documentary suffered and probably contributed to the reason they saw murder as their only means of escape. VR is violent self defense. Often times if a partner fights back it elicits a more aggressive and dangerous actions from the violent partner. This, again, can contribute to these women's reasons for escaping the situation the way they did.

Some of you might be wondering about Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) that is sometimes a defense for women who do kill their partners in self-defense against DV. Some of these women, though, were convicted of murder before BWS began to talked about in the court setting. Also BWS is technically not a defense, but more of a testimony from professionals and the examination of DV as prior evidence. Many of these women were charged on the murder and the jury might not have heard all of the previous violence done to the victim, therefore, condemning these women to life in prison. Even with the "discovery" of BWS in the late 1980's, some of these women who ask for an appeal still were not freed. BWS is also loosing steam in the world today, there are a few problems with it. It's hard to prove for one, and it is also very gender biased. So while BWS might still be used in some contexts, it is not the great shield that some of us think of it as. Still, these women (and all victims of IPV) suffer.

However, there was something really empowering and hopeful about this documentary. One of the women, Brenda, founded CWAA (Convicted Women Against Abuse). In the California Institute for Women, Brenda led groups to help women who killed their partners like she had, understand DV, the causes, warning signs, and ways to protect oneself. She came back from her darkest spot to help these women, who in turn, help more women and so and so forth. Even from the bowls of  this California penitenary, these woman showing great reslience and  are fighting the battle against DV....and doing one hell of a great job!


All in all, this was a seriously impacting documentary I urge you all to watch. I really got me more invested in this research and kind of put more steam into my personal mission of dispelling social myths revolving around DV in my everyday life. 




Mydeathspace.com


So the second part of this week we had to look on this website, mydeathspace.com (a site for obituaries), and look up vicitms of DV. I found a few, very horrifying accounts which I am not going to recite here, you can look them up for yourself. However, it wasn't the articles that disturbed me, but the comments that people had. People would post horrible comments like "that bitch deserved it" or "that's not rape, he was her husband" that made jokes about these serious acts of DV that resulted in death and also backed up rape culture. I was completely horrified. In fact, I don't really remember seeing a lot of positive comments at all. It makes me upset to see this happening....




Anways, that's all I had for this week.


-Ciao