WDW101Y1 Lecture Notes - Frontier Justice, Homicide, Redneck
Document Summary
Last week we talked about self-defence, the situation of women who attempt to or kill the abusers and wish to plead self- defence and feel they were acting in self-defence. We discussed the difficulties they experienced in making this plea because even though the prosecutors may be sympathetic to their view, the traditional doctrine is about limiting people"s access to claiming it. When this has been applied to women, they come off bad, even when they are abused. Sometimes they are seen as especially heinous, despite the sympathy and it has resulted in many murder convictions. The response has been the psychological concept of bws. Don"t underestimate how psychological a concept it is. It isn"t a concept that is meant to capture what women are thinking and how it"s bound up in their action. Bws is a deeply psychological concept meant to explain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but it isn"t meant to be a description of their rationalizations.
