Safety for Battered Women in a Textually Mediated Legal System

Using Dorothy Smith’s work on institutional ethnography I have conducted an investigation of the Duluth, Minnesota, criminal court system which shows how the safety of battered women becomes marginalized in the process of managing cases. Those efforts which have been made to build safety into this system have been piecemeal. The complexity of the case processing system results in a single case being processed by six levels of government, over a dozen agencies, and as many as thirty individuals. I have shown that the system is textually mediated at every point of institutional action and is embedded in an institution which is hierarchical, incident focused, bureaucratically fragmented, and based in an adversarial process of resolving cases. Each of these features of criminal law compromises the likelihood of practitioners taking protective measures for battered women. I have shown that the daily routines of the legal system are linked to ideological ways of interpreting women’s lives and extended relations of social ruling. I have proposed conducting an interagency safety audit as a legal reform strategy which can identify concrete ways to insert victim safety into domestic-assault case management procedures.