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Gender-Based Violence And Honest Victim Scripting In The Twitterverse, Francine Banner Sep 2015

Gender-Based Violence And Honest Victim Scripting In The Twitterverse, Francine Banner

Francine Banner

This article critically analyzes Tweets regarding recent allegations of interpersonal violence against celebrities in order to explore societal perceptions of and expectations about alleged victims and perpetrators. The article concludes that Twitter may be viewed as a micro-courtroom in which victims’ veracity and perpetrators’ responses are evaluated, interrogated, and assessed. A key, feminist critique of rape law is that the determination of guilt or innocence of the perpetrator too often hinges on assessment of the character of the victim. This is borne out on Twitter, where the terms “gold digger,” “slut,” and “ho” are engaged to describe those who come …


A Provocative Defense, Aya Gruber Feb 2014

A Provocative Defense, Aya Gruber

Aya Gruber

It is common wisdom that the provocation defense is, quite simply, sexist. For decades, there has been a trenchant feminist critique that the doctrine reflects and reinforces masculine norms of violence and shelters brutal domestic killers. The critique is so prominent that it appears alongside the doctrine itself in leading criminal law casebooks. The feminist critique of provocation embodies several claims about provocation's problematically gendered nature, including that the defense is steeped in chauvinist history, treats culpable sexist killers too leniently, discriminates against women, and expresses bad messages. This article offers a (likely provocative) defense of the provocation doctrine. While …