Assignment 9
In the article “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: implementing Women’s human Rights to protection from Violence” by Sally Engle Merry She mentions how import is for a woman to take action if they are abused by her husbands.
At the beginning of the article, she made as familiarize in the topic of women against violence. As she mentioned a movement called “Battered women” was created to help women to find help if they were abused by their husbands.
Merry Interviewed thirty women about domestic violence, every story was different but with the same domestic violence in their lives. During the interview twelve women were in court for the first time, Some of them feel fear and anxiety about turning to the courts for the first time but they also feel supported in some ways. They also expressed how for them took a long time to decide to go to court and when finally they went most of the time they felt fear in court and the angry face of their husbands.In other cases, women were forced to drop off charges because they didn’t want their husbands going to jail. I believe most of the time men try to put all the fault on women making them believe they are guilty.
The essay also mentions for example in Hilo, cultural patterns justify violence in some cases because men were thinking women deserved that violence. “Men typically defend their violence as justified by the woman’s sexual activities or her failure to care for their children” (Pg.368)
From my point of view, Merry is showing us in this essay how men more of the time were having more support by the law in contrast to the women. I believe this was the reason why most of the women preferred to keep quiet and don’t tell about the abuse they were having by her husbands o partners. Women didn’t believe they were going to be protected by the law.
I believe this is happening these days because not all women get the protection they deserve, and some of them can be controlled by their own husbands to continue in the same domestic violence. Some women don’t say a word about their domestic violence and sometimes family or neighbor are the ones who claim something is happening. I know women who didn’t do anything until her husband hit his own child and send him to the hospital.
