He shattered my cell phone…I just kind of knew the situation was going to escalate, I didn’t know if the police were coming, so I went to my car to look for a weapon to defend myself and at that time he had came up behind me and strangled me to the point where I blacked out…when I woke up he was instantly apologizing, hugging me, saying he was sorry, but I was in panic and freak out mode, you know, because I had just woken up on the concrete. Then he started strangling me again, squeezing my stomach, kicking me, punching me, covering my mouth and my nose while he was strangling me, telling me that he was going to kill me, that he was going to kill, um, that he was going to terminate my pregnancy. – “Melanie” [pseudonym], age 30
If Melanie’s story moved you, you probably want justice for her. But what does justice look like in the aftermath of intimate partner violence (IPV)? What does it take for survivors of physical, sexual, and psychological violence to feel restored to their whole selves or as restored as they can be? These questions about restorative justice drove a social worker, Annah K. Bender, to conduct interviews with 30 survivors of IPV in St. Louis, Missouri, bringing in a philosopher (Jill B. Delston) to contribute to the theorization of those results. This interdisciplinary project aimed to offer an account of justice that accurately represents the participants’ views while proposing a normative theory for restoring justice to survivors in a way they found acceptable.
As often happens in these situations, theorizing the results proved harder than expected, partly because the survivors spoke to concerns we did not fully anticipate. We were expecting answers about punishment, rehabilitation, or restitution, and did receive some answers along these lines. Yet survivors were primarily concerned not with the aftermath of IPV and how to feel restored to justice, but how to end a case of IPV still in progress. In other words, Dr. Bender’s research project, which focused solely on those who had survived IPV, included many individuals who did not feel they had survived IPV—yet. Twelve were actively hiding from their abuser: some living in shelters, some having crossed state lines to escape the relationship. Another five were still in contact with their abuser because of divorce proceedings or child custody arrangements. Five more were still romantically involved with an abusive person, hoping to find a safe way to leave the relationship. Several continued to receive threats from their abuser. How can someone feel free of IPV when they are in contact with their abuser regularly to manage a divorce proceeding, co-parent children, receive child support, or for some other reason? The answer is that they can’t.
This result raised new questions: In what way does ending abuse serve as an answer to a question about restorative justice? And how do the survivors’ answers relate to existing theories of justice? We were not going to get a simple answer about whether anti-carceral solutions versus more stringent punishments through the criminal justice system were preferred by a sample of women exposed to IPV. And, we were not going to get a straightforward position on retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or any other theory of punishment. Instead, we were looking at a hybrid theory of justice and a new perspective on key terms in the literature. This result itself was exciting. That’s because the relationship between folk conceptions of moral terms and philosophical theories is a thriving literature. What we had here wasn’t any old “folk” conception but insights from those who had experienced IPV and lived to tell the tale.
One perspective from these answers was a new conception of traditional concepts. For example, prison time is traditionally viewed as a form of punishment that serves as retribution (a punitive measure taken as a matter of desert), deterrence (threats that scare off potential criminals), or even rehabilitation (removing a criminal from a context in which they had been committing crimes). However, survivors in Dr. Bender’s study often viewed prison as a deterrent because prison literally made the abuse stop through a temporary measure. Fifty-seven percent of respondents used the criminal justice system for “just-in-time” needs despite being ambivalent about its value or success. Similarly, while deterrence is traditionally viewed as an approach to change the cost-benefit analysis for potential criminals by ensuring “crime doesn’t pay,” survivors generally viewed deterrence as instances where a conception of ongoing IPV was disrupted. Rehabilitation also got a reframing in the survivors’ perspective, with a complaint that rehabilitation efforts after IPV were almost exclusively focused on victims, with virtually no resources for perpetrators.
Taken together, these approaches to restoration after IPV offer a new, hybrid account of justice. In this theory, restoration provides the criterion of justice while incorporating elements from existing theories. With retribution essentially reconceived as deterrence, deterrence reconceived as crime interruption, and crime interruption reconceived as a precursor to restoration, the interviews demonstrate overlapping contributions from multiple, distinct theories of punishment, each of which is necessary but insufficient to provide justice.
We recently presented this paper at the E-APA and plan to publish our results. But further research is required on the issues raised by these interviews. Three other projects that have arisen from this collaboration are a forthcoming report of the qualitative findings by Dr. Bender in the journal Violence & Victims, another co-authored paper on the specific impact of IPV in Missouri on pregnant women, presented at the C-APA last month, and a book proposal synthesizing the research and fleshing out the theory and practical implications. We hope to amplify marginalized women’s voices and incorporate a new view on justice that respects their vision of restoration.
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