Advancing Socially Just Intimate Partner Violence Expert Testimony for Victim-Survivors Charged with Homicide: Critiquing the Old Bones of Knowledge

Abstract

In assessing whether victim-survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) were acting in self-defence in response to homicide charges, the criminal court favours disciplinary knowledges which erase social context and structural violence. This article argues that these factors are integral to understanding victim-survivors' experiences of IPV. The courts' overreliance on Euro-Western psych disciplines (psychiatry and psychology) that privilege neoliberal ideas of self and perpetuate flawed psychological theories of IPV is a significant problem. Critically, the white epistemology underpinning the psych disciplines and mainstream theories of IPV omit any appreciation of the operation of colonial violence, institutional racism, and the marginalisation of Indigenous women. This article suggests that experts must be able to critique the family violence response system using intersectional and anti-colonial conceptual frameworks. This will assist the criminal courts in understanding Indigenous and marginalised women's realities and support socially just outcomes in cases involving prosecuted victim-survivors. The article concludes by sharing the authors’ insights from providing expert evidence on social and systemic entrapment at trial and sentencing in the 2020 New Zealand case of R v Ruddelle.