Sally Engle Merry: Rights Talk and the Experience of Law.
In her article “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence”, Sally Engle Merry shows how women as victims of violence by their husbands come to take on rights consciousness through their experiences with the judicial legal system. first, one developed a rights-define self when one has the courage to speak up and seek help from the law. However, their encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, really define if the problem is relevant and if the offender is guilty, if he is not, then this subjectivity is undermine. A woman comes to take on a rights-define self when she sees herself as an autonomous self protected by the state. Some women are not still able to be aware of this consciousness because of their abused status that their husbands use as a way to show their masculinity, therefore abused women tend to file charges then drop them.
Through the interviews the author directed to various women sharing their experiences with the law, many women victims of violence by just taking a initiative to call the police for help, have already taken a huge step forward seeing themselves a defined beings capable of getting their rights protected. Since in the town of Hilo, the cases of violence against women have increased dramatically in the last 25 years, as a result of men trying to maintain their identify of masculinity and power by using violence, wives with the help of support groups and social services have taken taken a subject position by denouncing their husbands before the law.
The experience of calling to police, walking into courtrooms, filling out forms, gave women a sense of power and therefore enact a different self. This is how the law defines the self by recognizing women as subjects protected by law from violence even within the intimate sphere. But, when the legal system fail to arrest or to prove that the offender is guilty, this subjectivity is mediated by this, However, they can still become an entitled person by following through with the case, leaving the offender and overall not provoking violence to prove that she is a rational and autonomous person capable of taking on this protection. After this encounters with the law, either with a good or unsatisfying outcome, as the author states “She acquires a new self, now no longer enclosed in the private sphere of the family but constituted by the law even within that family”.
