Latinas' Narratives of Domestic Abuse : Discrepant versions of violence [1 ed.] 9789027296009, 9789027218551

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Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse Discrepant versions of violence

Impact: Studies in language and society impact publishes monographs, collective volumes, and text books on topics in sociolinguistics. The scope of the series is broad, with special emphasis on areas such as language planning and language policies; language conflict and language death; language standards and language change; dialectology; diglossia; discourse studies; language and social identity (gender, ethnicity, class, ideology); and history and methods of sociolinguistics.

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Volume 17 Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant versions of violence by Shonna L. Trinch

Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse Discrepant versions of violence

Shonna L. Trinch Florida State University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

8

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trinch, Shonna L. Latinas’ narratives of domestic abuse : discrepant versions of violence / Shonna L. Trinch. p. cm. (Impact: Studies in language and society, issn 1385–7908 ; v. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sociolinguistics--United States. 2. Hispanic American women-Languages. 3. Family violence--United States--Case studies. 4. Hispanic American women--Social conditions. I. Title. II. Series. P40.45.U5T75 2003 362.82’92’08968073-dc21 isbn 90 272 1855 2 (Eur.) / 1 58811 415 5 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

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© 2003 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

List of figures and tables Acknowledgments

vii ix

Chapter 1 Narrating violence in institutional settings

1

Chapter 2 Telling the truth about violence: Language ideology and the function of narrative structure

15

Chapter 3 Representation, ownership and genre: Language ideologies of narrative production and performance

37

Chapter 4 Telling and re-telling: Latina narrators interacting with institutions

57

Chapter 5 The protective order interview: A linguistic tug-of-war for representation

87

Chapter 6 Disappearing acts: Power, control, opposition and omission

121

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Table of contents

Chapter 7 Disfigurement and discrepancy: Taking the story out of the report

155

Chapter 8 Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax

191

Chapter 9 Beyond the storytelling taboo: Latinas’ narratives and sexual violence

225

Chapter 10 Discrepant versions and the margins: Truth or consequence for Latina battered women?

269

References

279

Appendix Glossary of legal terms

295

Author index

301

Subject index

305

List of figures and tables

Figure 4.1. Figure 5.1. Figure 5.2. Figure 6.1. Table 6.2. Table 6.3. Figure 7.1. Figure 7.2. Figure 7.3. Figure 7.4. Figure 8.1. Table 9.1. Table 9.2. Table 9.3.

Possible narrative path through the sociolegal system Domestic violence questionnaire, page four Example of sample affidavit Where women come from when they apply for a protective order The structure of the interview revisited An accounting of narrative turns that appear in the affidavit Recap of the resources that comprise stories and reports Inside stories and reports: Relation- vs. rule-orientations Ethnographic details about clients (C) from Pro Bono Law Clinic and final action taken in their cases Inside discrete incidents of violence Example of sample affidavit Spectrum of directness for terms survivors use to refer to sexual assault Official inscription of sexual assault in institutional memory Spectrum of directness for recording sexual assaults in institutional memory

80 95 102 129 132 132 158 163 164 181 222 232 236 240

Acknowledgments

The thirteen months of fieldwork for this study were funded by the generous financial support of the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science Program (Dissertation Improvement Grant SBR-9709938), the Social Science Research Council’s Sexuality Research Fellowship Program and the University of Pittsburgh’s Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. A very special thanks must go to all of those people in my two field sites who cooperated with me during data collection. Issues of confidentiality preclude me from naming them, but I remain forever grateful to all of the service providers who allowed me to tape-record their daily work with survivors. Their cooperation with academic research that may shed some light on victims’ concerns is a testament to their commitment to advocacy. I very much respect the important work they do. As any professional working in the field knows, the real experts from whom we learn about domestic violence are its survivors. I am privileged to have heard these Latinas’ stories. At the University of Pittsburgh, I wish to thank my professors, Herschel Frey, Alan Juffs, John Beverley and Alicia Covarrubias for their training and direction. Christina Paulston has been a tremendous teacher, and Susan BerkSeligson deserves more than the thanks that I am linguistically able to give. When I was Susan’s advisee, she was never more than a phone call away, and the example of availability to her students that she set is something for which I strive in my professional career. I very much appreciate the people who have been my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. In their varied ways, they all work to create a context in which one can achieve their goals. Among those I would like to mention are Jean GrahamJones, Jean Dangler, Aimée Boutin, James Mitchell, David Darst, Delia Poey, Santa Arias, Roberto Fernández, Bill Cloonan, and Mark Pietralunga. While shortcomings are mine, I want to acknowledge the assistance of my editors at John Benjamins Publishing, Annick De Houwer and Kees Vaes. They and two anonymous readers pushed for clarity in order to improve the work.

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Acknowledgments

For showing me courage, I thank my compañeros from graduate school, Ana Forcinito, Therese Tardio, Emilia Garofalo, Anadeli Bencomo, Elena Ruzicková, Ana María Caula, Vicente Lecuna and Jorge Porcel. For offering me their keen understanding of the world and their unfaltering support, I extend my heartfelt thanks to my best friends: Jennifer Prappas, Laurie Valkanas, Kristen Lenzi Hammel, Jayanne Matthis, Samantha Swift, Dana Meute, Kathleen Wright and Kelly Burris. To Bear Gaylin and Clare Gilbert I am indebted for their immediate acceptance of me. I cannot count the ways in which Linda Pritchard helped me with this project. She was and continues to be a friend, a mentor, and a sounding board. To las monjas de la Asunción and my dear friend Angel Weruaga Prieto: thank you for showing your world to me. I would be a very different person if it had not been for you. Words are insufficient when it comes to describing the admiration, love and gratitude that I feel for my parents, Angela and Samuel Trinch, to whom this book is dedicated. The greatest lessons that I have learned come from their wisdom and example. And finally, I wish to thank Edward K. Snajdr for being the reason. His love serves as a constant reminder of the wonderful gifts that life has to offer. Tallahassee, March 2003 S. L. T.

Chapter 1

Narrating violence in institutional settings

This book is about risk as it emerges both in and as a result of communication about violence. Specifically, it is a study that links the risks inherent in narrating to a linguistic examination of how U.S. Latina women’s accounts of abuse evolve and change in the U.S. sociolegal system.1 With narratives of domestic violence as the focus of the study and the U.S. Civil and Criminal Justice System the socio-cultural arena in which these narratives are created, the book examines how linguistic ideologies regarding truth and authorship serve in the construction of authority and credibility for the production of appropriate and meaningful representations of abuse. Among its many functions, language is the structuring mechanism that we employ to make sense of what has happened to us, to understand what is occurring in our immediate interactions and to predict what might happen to us in our potential encounters. While several competing linguistic forms, or representations, may co-exist at any given time, social order in a particular context is produced and reinforced when certain linguistic structures are continually favored over others. In this book, I examine the intersection of American cultural notions of authority, narrative, and truth that amount to prejudice against what could be called non-standard narrative forms. Sociolinguists often work with the analytic construct of an idealized linguistic standard in order to compare and describe the way in which non-standard varieties differ from what is presumably agreed upon by members of the speech community as the educated, accepted norm. Such comparisons usually include phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical differences of standard and non-standard forms. Other scholars, through language attitude studies (Arthur, Rarrar, & Bradford 1974; Berk-Seligson 1984; Carranza & Ryan 1975; Giles & Powesland 1975), go beyond mere descriptions of dialectal similarities and differences vis-à-vis the standard. We know that speakers of non-standard varieties are often viewed negatively, and their non-standard linguistic forms are seen as substandard (Lippi-Green 1997).

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Chapter 1

Recent work in sociolinguistics (Bamberg 1987, 1997; Maryns & Blommaert 2002; Riessman 1987, 1993) and linguistic anthropology (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Briggs & Bauman 1992; Briggs 1997; Hirsch 1998; Hymes 1996) suggests that at the discourse level, speakers may manifest narrative in various configurations. Furthermore, there is evidence that interlocutors judge certain narrative types quite prescriptively, just as they do non-standard phonological variants and syntactic constituents. Not surprisingly then, to the nonlinguist, non-standard narrative forms (i.e., those non-prestigious forms that are not sanctioned by government, formal education, the written system or any other culturally valued institution) are often disparaged. Conley and O’Barr (1990: 58), for example, note that in small claims court, people who do not couch their “disputes in terms of rules and principles that apply irrespective of social status” are judged negatively as narrators. About these types of narrators Conley and O’Barr (1990: 58) state, “Predictably, the courts tend to treat such accounts as filled with irrelevancies and inappropriate information. . .,” and that these types of “litigants are frequently evaluated as imprecise, rambling, and straying from the central issues.” This finding is not particular to the legal system where rules for speaking and establishing blame are formally instituted. Other researchers encounter similar biases toward some narrative forms in social science interviews (Briggs 1986; Riessman 1987) and within the medical profession (Diaz-Duque 1989; Fisher 1991). These findings beg the following questions: Can we argue that at the discourse-level, there is a standard narrative form against which other variable narrative forms are judged? What linguistic evidence is needed to make an argument that narrative is not simply “one way of recapitulating” past experience (Labov & Waletzky 1967), but rather a category in which different narrative genres exist hierarchically? And finally, what social evidence is necessary to argue that certain narratives are preferred in institutional settings, precisely because they are the ones that command authority? By examining narratives of domestic abuse, this book is a case study addressing how the sociolegal system produces and reproduces reality and knowledge through narrative. Tied in with this examination of epistemology is an investigation of how the cultural construct of truth is created and exploited in the American Adversarial System. The data in this investigation highlight the problems that narrators face when their narrative forms clash with institutional preferences. In general terms, this empirical study is an ethnographic account of Latina women’s norms and ways of narrating intimate-partner violence in institutional settings. Its primary goal is to show how and why Latina women’s nar-

Narrating violence in institutional settings

ratives of abuse are altered. Ultimately, I argue, these alterations diminish women’s power to represent abuse, and the transformations their narratives undergo constrain the potential their stories might have at affecting systemic change. This process of transformation contributes to the broader marginalization of Latina women in U.S. society. First, Latinas, as are most victims of domestic violence, are relegated to a peripheral space within the Criminal Justice System. And second, because of this type of ghettoization of the problem of domestic violence and of its victims, these women and their issues are kept out of central legal areas where their voices might have an impact on changing the system. Long before a domestic violence case makes its way to trial, women narrate their accounts of abuse, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen times with a whole host of sociolegal representatives.2 In these institutional conversations, both victims and service providers contribute to forming pretrial testimony and official documentation of abuse. Narrative is the fundamental unit of analysis because it is through this speech activity that testimony is borne as events come alive linguistically. Narrative is especially important in law, because often in cases of gender-related violence, the abusive event occurs privately. It is only through its verbalization within institutions that the event becomes public and can act as evidence for consideration when judicial decisions are made. Furthermore, through the act of narrating, victims and legal authorities carve out the meaning of abuse. Narrative then, is not only a way of recounting; it is also a way of remembering. Perhaps nowhere is this fact more poignant than it is in a legal system where people’s accounts of the past become part of institutional memory (cf. Linde 1999). While trauma is often given as a reason for narrative inconsistency (Felman & Laub 1992; see Cohen 2001 on denial; van der Kolk 1994), the linguistic divide that separates the way victims and institutions inscribe representations of violence is also a potential source of narrative alteration. What will be shown to be significant is the compromise that women and service providers negotiate in order to narrow the gaps between the personal story and the official report of domestic abuse. These negotiations leave the victims’ meaning and their means of representing themselves and their experiences at risk in several ways. For domestic violence victims, the empirical site where such threats to meaning may occur is the protective order application interview.

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Chapter 1

The protective order A protective order is a court injunction that is issued by a judge to keep an abusive family member away from a complaining party for a specified period of time. The issuance of an order is a preventive measure, intended to protect survivors from further abuse. The petition for a protective order is a civil court procedure, but violations of the terms of these court orders can become criminal offenses. The first two violations may result in criminal misdemeanor charges, while the third violation can result in a felony charge. Eligibility for an order is restricted in slightly different ways in the various states throughout the U.S. In some states, such as Arizona, Florida, Ohio, New York and Texas, the family codes restrict eligibility to persons who are related to (either by blood or through marriage), have a child with, or have lived with the person against whom they are requesting the injunction. Other state codes, such as California and Colorado, allow applicants who have had only dating or engagement relationships with alleged abusers to apply for a protective order. But, definitions of what constitutes family violence – as it relates to adult victims – vary insignificantly from state to state. An examination of several state family codes (Arizona, Florida, Ohio, New York, and Texas) reveals a general consensus: Family violence constitutes acts that have resulted in physical injury, assault, or sexual assault, or acts that place a person in imminent fear of physical injury, assault, or sexual assault. In most places, the application process is free of charge, though sometimes, small pro bono clinics request a processing donation (e.g., of $20.00 or so) to cover costs of writing supplies and materials. In many states, volunteers and other legal professionals, who are situated throughout the sociolegal system, are in place to help women apply for orders. In most places, the application process entails a speech event that includes an interview. From the protective order application interview, the victim and the person(s) to whom she recounts the abuse produce at least two narratives. These two narrative texts are conceptualized as belonging to different narrative genres: the oral story of abuse and the written report of abuse. Each genre has its own “thematic content, style and compositional structure. . .inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance” (Bakhtin 1986: 60). Between these two narrative genres, intertextual links and gaps occur as one text is produced as a result of the production of the previous text (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Briggs & Bauman 1992). The representations of abuse are analyzed as texts that are both shaped by and integral in shaping legal definitions of violence against women.3

Narrating violence in institutional settings

Narrative, representation and power This study of the speech event of the protective order interview begins with the premise that narrative is an interactional achievement or a co-production. This premise is predicated on studies conducted by conversation analysts (Jefferson 1978, 1985; Pomerantz 1978; Sacks 1986; Schegloff 1982; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974), discourse analysts (Polanyi 1979, 1985, 1996; Schiffrin 1994), sociologists (Ewick & Silbey 1995; Goffman 1974), and anthropologists (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Briggs & Bauman 1992; Bauman 1986; Gumperz 1982; Ochs 1997; Ochs, Smith, & Taylor 1996). But, it is not the case that conversational participants carry out the communicative or representational work equally. In fact, institutional representatives hold a degree of power over what gets said and how what gets said is recorded. At the same time, the interviews indicate clients’ resistance to the institutionalization of their accounts. As a result of this linguistic tug-of-war, stories change and reports are incomplete. This analysis takes as a starting point the social theory of language proposed by Bourdieu (1999). Undeniably, certain types of language and certain ways of speaking are great sources of symbolic power: Linguistic exchange – a relation of communication between sender and a receiver, based on enciphering and deciphering, and therefore on the implementation of a code or a generative competence – is also an economic exchange which is established within a particular symbolic relation of power between a producer, endowed with a certain linguistic capital, and a consumer (or a market), and which is capable of procuring a certain material or symbolic profit. In other words, utterances are not only (save in exceptional circumstances) signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. The pursuit of maximum informative efficiency is only exceptionally the exclusive goal of linguistic production and the distinctly instrumental use of language which it implies generally clashes with the often unconscious pursuit of symbolic power. (Bourdieu 1999: 502)

Likewise, some narrative utterances, as representational resources (Kress 1996), are capable of securing symbolic capital, while others are not. Keeping with the theme of linguistic instrumentality, many researchers focus on language use in the courtroom (Atkinson & Drew 1979; Atkinson & Heritage 1984; BerkSeligson 1990a, 1990b; Matoesian 1993, 1999; Wodak 1980, 1985; Woodbury 1984), but several others (Conley & O’Barr 1998; Maynard 1990; Philips 1998; Sarat & Felstiner 1995; Stygall 1994) examine how language is employed in





Chapter 1

informal legal settings where decisions as to how a case should proceed are made. This study follows in this tradition of studying law and language at stages prior to trials, because it investigates the way in which the legal system molds cases from their inception. The institutions that constitute and support the Civil and Criminal Justice System favor certain information and certain ways of voicing that information. Such partiality is combined with a prevailing linguistic ideology about narrative – fostered and even reified by the sociolegal system – that mediates how domestic violence is talked about and stored in an institution’s archives. This ideology is comprised of two fundamental beliefs about narrative production and purpose. These narrative ideologies are certainly not confined to the institutions of the U.S. Justice System, but their prevalence in this important social arena is significant, because what women are held accountable for having said may have serious repercussions for them in the future. The credibility of both defendants and victims is in jeopardy when their accounts are shown to be inconsistent. This work, however, questions whether the U.S. Justice System can rely on the construction of truth as an invariable and unchanging narrative representation of the past. Matoesian (1997, personal communication) states “Our adversarial system of law. . .is organized around the ideology of inconsistency during cross-examination of witnesses and that ideology is relied on by authorities even prior to trial. Inconsistency is taken to be a natural juxtaposition of opposite or contradictory facts.” And he adds, “In rape trials and other institutional tellings of victimization to the authorities, attorneys and others make use of alleged inconsistencies to undermine the victim’s claim – to attack her credibility.” Victim credibility and discrepancies in victims’ stories have been identified as strong variables in predicting prosecutors’ decisions to reject filing cases in gender-related crimes (Frohmann 1991, 1996; Kerstetter 1990; Stanko 1981) and as compelling reasons for juries to acquit defendants (Sanday 1996). For these reasons, it is imperative to observe how pragmalinguistic interaction leads to incongruent versions of a legal account. Specific questions that guide the analysis that follows include: How does the legal system manage distinct voices in order to weave a single narrative fabric? How are divergent meanings and ways of speaking negotiated between participants in the production of a narrative? And, what happens to difference when certain ways of speaking are preferred, and thus gain privilege, as authoritative modes of representation?

Narrating violence in institutional settings

The data for this study Sociolinguistic studies suggest that people from different speech communities organize and interpret language according to their cultural norms and ways of speaking (Berk-Seligson 1980; Diaz-Duque 1989; Hymes 1986; Riessman 1987; Sanchez 1994; Tannen 1980; Wodak 1985). These findings, combined with the fact that the Latino population is one of the largest and fastest growing minorities in the U.S. (Enchautegui 1995; Valencia 1991), make it important to understand communication in public spheres where people either speak a language other than English or merely organize their utterances in ways that differ from Anglo linguistic norms. Moreover, research conducted on battered women suggests that women from different ethnic, racial and socio-economic backgrounds define domestic violence differently, suffer from different levels of post-traumatic stress and vary in response to and utilization of institutional services (Dimmit 1995; Gondolf, Fisher, & McFerron 1988; Ruch & Chandler 1979; Williams & Holmes 1981). During thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in two U.S. cities, I gathered Latina women’s narratives of domestic violence, as they told them in protective order interviews. In order to protect the identities of the participants, in these interviews, the pseudonyms “Anytown” and “Someville” will refer to these field sites. In these two cities, protective order interviews are not conducted in the same types of institutions. In Anytown, women in search of assistance go to a district attorney’s office, where paralegals are employed to interview them, draft affidavits on their behalf and accompany them to court. In Someville, the setting is a pro bono law clinic, where volunteers, most of whom are attorneys or paralegals, donate their time to help clients apply for these court injunctions. Throughout the U.S., district attorney’s offices are primarily responsible for prosecuting crimes committed against the state. Pro bono law clinics also exist all over the nation, but they are designed to provide legal aid to indigent clients, who wish to pursue civil, as opposed to criminal, justice. We will see that as a central agency in the Criminal Justice System, the D.A.’s Office, with its constitutional and procedural links to law enforcement and the judiciary, signifies quite differently in processing civil protective orders than does the Pro Bono Law Clinic, which has far less inter-institutional connection. A total of 163 protective order interviews were observed and tape recorded for this study. Ninety of these were collected from the District Attorney’s Office in Anytown, and seventy-three were gathered from the Pro Bono Law Clinic in Someville.

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Chapter 1

The D.A.’s Office and the Pro Bono Law Clinic are situated ethnographically in a social arena with other institutions that serve battered women. Therefore, the participants in the protective order application interview – both clients and interviewers alike – are informed and influenced by their interactions with an array of other institutions that are also in the business of processing cases of domestic battering. A report of domestic violence is a special type of narrative genre that is created in bureaucratic settings through interaction and is seen as both a means to an end and an end in itself. The report narrative functions to accomplish domestic violence processing, or work done by service providers that is analogous to what sociologists (Martin & Powell 1995; Martin 1997) and criminologists (LaFree 1989) call rape processing. Rape processing amounts to “work done by organizations to move rape cases through the law enforcement, judicial, therapeutic and advocacy networks of a local community” (Martin 1997 from Martin & Powell 1995: 861). Like rape processing, domestic violence processing also requires, to a certain degree, that institutions collaborate with one another and agree on the action that should be taken in each case. This inter-institutional reliance makes it important to understand how legal personnel behave with victims, as well as how institutional authorities interact with one another. In Anytown, it is quite common that interviewers share the ethnolinguistic background of their clients. The Latino community in Anytown is largely bilingual in the Spanish and English of the region, and Anytown in fact, is a good example of societal bilingualism. Silva-Corvalán (1995: 3) defines societal bilingualism as a situation that obtains with “extensive use of two or more (multilingualism) languages in time and space by groups of individuals.” Perhaps not surprisingly then, U.S. Latinos in this U.S. town, whose population exceeds 40 per cent of the total population, are quite often the institutional representatives to whom Latina women speak in these organizations and agencies. In contrast to the homogeneity of Anytown’s victims and service providers, the ethnolinguistic backgrounds of protective order interviewers in Someville rarely matches those of the clients they interview. In cases where interviewers speak no Spanish and victims state that they prefer to speak in Spanish, either the court provides a state-certified interpreter, or a bilingual family member or a friend does the interpreting. If a protective order case is heard by a judge, and either the complainant (i.e., the alleged victim) or the respondent (i.e., the alleged abuser) does not speak English, the court appoints an interpreter. In Someville then, both service providers and victims exhibit varied degrees of bilingualism. The bilingual interviewers and clients in Someville are akin to the individuals described by Silva-Corvalán (1995: 3) who have “a certain degree of

Narrating violence in institutional settings

competence in the use of two languages as vehicles of oral communication”, but they rarely come from the same speech communities or self-identify with the same ethnic labels. In both field sites, Latina women represent more than half of the applicants for protective orders. This focus on Latina women is in no way meant to suggest that battering is particular to or even disproportionately common in the U.S. Latino community. Rather, the percentage of Latinas as clients in these state offices reflects their representation in terms of the geographic area’s population. The primary purpose of this study is an analysis of intertextual communication and variation, as opposed to intercultural communication and variation. But, given the numbers of Latinos in the U.S. as well as the fact that U.S. institutions across the country are grappling with issues of representation for minority groups, this work seeks to add Latina women’s experiences to the ethnographic record of law and language studies. At the same time, it resists essentializing Latina women as a uniform, homogeneous group, and it will not compare them with women from other ethnic groups. The following section describes the social characteristics of protective order applicants. This information is from data compiled by the District Attorney’s Office in Anytown. Descriptive statistics from the District Attorney’s Office, as opposed to data on the social characteristics of survivors as kept by other agencies such as the Pro Bono Law Clinic, are used here for the following reasons. First, the District Attorney’s Office had a computerized database from which I could easily compile the statistics. And second, of all the agencies with which I worked during the data collection phase of this project, the paralegals in the District Attorney’s Office interviewed more survivors daily than did service providers in any other agency. According to annual statistics kept by this D.A.’s office, protective order paralegals interview an average of 300 applicants each month. For 1996, the office reports having interviewed nearly 4,000 applicants, and a total of almost 2,000 of them (i.e., roughly 49 per cent) were recommended for orders.

Social characteristics of protective order applicants To best describe the social characteristics of people who seek assistance from the District Attorney’s Office, data drawn from nine months of intake-logs and its computerized Victim Database, totaling 2,668 individual cases, were examined. The sample data consist of nine-months of client intake information, rather than twelve months because of changes made in the District At-

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Chapter 1

torney’s Office regarding its methods of data collection, and certain data were not available for the first four months of the year. Data records for this research were made complete by gleaning information from both in-take logs and the District Attorney’s Computerized Victim Database in which paralegals enter information about both victims and defendants. Although in-take logs for an entire year are available, the first month for this sample begins with the month the computerized Victim Database was installed. The last month for which data were collected was my last month in the field site. Intake data show that both men and women apply for protective orders against opposite-sex, and to a much more limited degree, same-sex intimate partners.4 However, the majority of the applicants, nearly 91 per cent, or 2,426 of them, are women. In some cases, both men and women file against their children, stepchildren, parents, stepparents, and other extended family members. Basically, one can file against any relative, or even a roommate. For the nine-month period in question, in nearly 87 per cent of the cases (n = 2,317), petitioners sought help for trouble they were having with current or former intimate-partners. Of those clients complaining about intimate partners, 2,088 were women. These women ranged in age from eighteen to seventyfive; however more than 1,952 clustered in the following three age ranges: (a) 18–45 (18–25 age range: n = 455), (b) (26–35 age range: n = 880), and (c) (36–45 age range: n = 617).5 The ethnic composition of this sample is more difficult to determine than sex or age, as nowhere in the intake log or the computerized database is data kept on ‘ethnicity of complainant’. However, of the 2,668 cases entered in the intake logs, 69.6 per cent, or 1,857 people, are Spanish-surnamed. One can expect a margin of error, since most of these applicants are women, many of whom may have changed their names upon marrying. Thus, Anglo, AfricanAmerican and Asian women married to Latino men may have a Spanishsurname, while Latina women married to either Anglo, African-American or Asian men may not. Nevertheless, women with Spanish-surnames comprise 63 per cent of the total number of clients applying for protective orders during this nine-month period. Of them, 1,503 applied for protective orders against husbands, exhusbands, boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. Although domestic violence is perpetrated by a variety of family members, these numbers suggest that women comprise the undisputable majority of people who seek legal redress for abuse perpetrated by their current or former male-intimate partners within the sociolegal system.

Narrating violence in institutional settings

Of the 2,668 cases of protective order applications examined, 1,528 (or 57 per cent) were recommended by paralegals for protective orders, while 596 (or 22 per cent) had warning letters as their outcome. The paralegals send warning letters to alleged abusers stating that the District Attorney’s Office has been made aware of a complaint and that if certain behaviors continue, the Office may intervene. Fifty-nine persons left the office before they were interviewed. And nineteen people could not be seen because of a conflict of interest with the District Attorney’s Office, which was either prosecuting them on a criminal charge or was already filing for protective orders against them on behalf of their partners. In 225 cases no action at all was taken after the interview.6 To summarize, the protective order interview is a sociolegal speech event from which slightly more than half of the people looking for solutions to domestic abuse emerge with action taken by the state. While those who leave their interaction at the District Attorney’s Office without having been recommended for an order may be perceived as unsuccessful, as a legal remedy the protective order is merely a piece of paper mandating that an abuser stay away from a victim. This book is not concerned with the effectiveness of protective orders nor is it within the scope of this study to look at women who do not participate in the interview process. Rather, this study investigates how Latina women and the interviewers, who are there to help them, participate in communicating about and responding to violent intimate relationships.

Overview of the book As an ethnolinguistic account of Latina women’s experiences of narrating for protective orders, I have arranged the book to include not only the theoretical framework from which I analyze the data, but also an examination of the social contexts from which the data emerge. The social contexts comprise a landscape that consists of multiple settings that are created by narrative as much as they are connected to one another through narrative. Both service providers and the victims alike perceive these connections in meaningful and consequential ways. Since narrative is the fundamental unit of analysis, Chapter 2 presents a review of the scholarly conceptualizations of narrative (Labov & Waletzky 1967; Polanyi 1985). Issues of linguistic ideology are linked to narrative structure, so as to suggest that the referential function of narrative in U.S. culture, and especially within its legal institutions, is often overstated at the expense of understanding how people use narrative as a strategy in human interaction and survival.

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Chapter 1

Chapter 3 examines linguistic ideology as it relates to narrative production, by making the argument that narrators are held responsible for processual and contextual utterances that they did not produce or create alone in the first place. By couching an understanding of narrative within an interactional analytic model, Chapter 3 highlights the importance of situational factors that have an impact on the way narrative is achieved in the interview context. Both intercultural communication and the interview as a speech event are described to support my claim that the co-production of narrative within social and legal settings is one factor that can account for multiple versions of emerging abuse narratives. Because the structure a narrative takes, the way that it is produced and the function that it is meant to serve are all dependent upon both the speech event in which it is created as well as the reality which it is meant to represent, Chapter 3 concludes with the suggestion that narrative be re-conceptualized as an analytic construct to encompass a variety of narrative genres. Chapter 4 situates the protective order interview among the other institutions serving survivors of domestic violence. This ethnographic exposition takes as a point of departure Goffman’s (1961) work on total institutions to compare and contrast the array of services that are available to survivors of domestic violence and the types of narratives these different service providers require. Institutions that serve battered women are defined as interactional, rather than totalizing. Still, through discourse, certain aspects of women’s identities are indeed heavily emphasized by these institutions, as their representatives seek to justify their provision of services. Such a description offers insight into how certain narratives come to circulate among distinct institutions that serve the same population over extended periods of time (see Briggs 1997; Cicourel 1995). Chapter 5 begins with a linguistic analysis of the process involved in obtaining a protective order. For victims of domestic violence, this process is comprised of three communicative activities that amount to different exercises in representation: (1) filling out intake forms, (2) being interviewed, and (3) and reading and signing a sworn statement or affidavit, which includes an official and actionable account of the abuse. An analysis of the interview brings to light how it is designed to sift out non-report elements in order to elicit from women a specific type of narrative. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are framed by the theory of genre and intertextuality proposed by Bauman and Briggs (1990) and Briggs and Bauman (1992). Chapters 6 and 7 examine what gets left out of Latina women’s narratives of abuse when they become official reports. Chapter 6 centers on the differences

Narrating violence in institutional settings

between the thematic content of victims’ ‘stories’ and the thematic content that eventually becomes official ‘reports’ of their accounts. These omissions are linked to the structure of the interview and the participant frameworks of stories and reports. Chapter 7 continues this examination of missing information, but the focus is on the telling of particular events and the portions of those events that go unmentioned in the affidavits. Even though interviewers, through the structure of the speech event and their designated role within it, attempt to control what is said, victims find ways to resist this power and narrate in story form anyway. Yet, evidence from the affidavits suggests that in the end, it is indeed the interviewer who ultimately decides what gets said in the official report of abuse. Interviewers do not only determine what gets written into the final report, but they also have the power to control how something is said there. Chapter 8 centers the analysis on alterations and transformations of the victims’ words. It shows how victims’ oral descriptions of the actions and actors (i.e., their own and those of alleged abusers) are changed by interviewer manipulation of and influence on narrative form, production and performance. Implications of these alterations are discussed in terms of the risks that discrepancies pose for individual victims and for battered women in general. Chapter 9 suggests that intercultural communication may also result in narrative distortion. In this chapter, the analytical lens turns to the topic of sexual assault. Communicative breakdowns that occur because of the sociolinguistic taboos bound to this subject are discussed. Chapter 10 summarizes the range of communicative strategies Latina women employ to create their complex narratives of domestic abuse. I juxtapose these strategies with the rather simple focus on incident-based violence that governs the construction of ‘reports’ required by the current U.S. sociolegal system. Alterations in victims’ stories may have ramifications and even potentially negative consequences for individual victims, but all victims of domestic violence must shoulder the costs in important ways. What institutions choose to remember about domestic violence, we will see, is quite different from what women remember about it. The mismatch in remembering and representation, from a critical discourse analytic perspective, can preclude new ways of seeing and perceiving violence.

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Chapter 1

Notes . The terms Latino and Hispanic are used interchangeably throughout the study to refer to people of Latin American descent, be they first generation South or Central American or third generation Mexican-American. I recognize the polemic inherent in defining terminology for these groups of people. I choose Latino and Hispanic, because most of the research participants self-identified as such. Also, Latino is used interchangeably with Hispanic, because as Skerry (1993: 16) points out, this generic usage follows in the tradition of the National Council of La Raza, a national lobbying group. For a more detailed discussion on ethnic labels see Oboler (1995). . I use the terms client, victim, survivor, and victim-survivor to refer to people who come to the social and legal institutions from which data for this study were collected. Likewise, I use terms such as abuser, respondent, defendant, and intimate-partner to refer to the people against whom victims file complaints of domestic violence. My decision to use this terminology is based on the fact that professionals working with these people and their cases refer to them in this way. I am also uncomfortable with these terms, because the women that I spent a year listening to cannot be reduced to such singular identities. For a discussion on the problems involved with the use of this terminology, see Lamb (1999a, 1999b). . The term text refers to a broader category than that of narrative, as not all texts are narratives, while all narratives are texts. I adopt Bauman and Briggs’ (1990: 73) definition of ‘text’ as a “stretch of linguistic production” that forms a unit “that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.” . For more on same sex intimate-partner violence, see for example, Eaton (1994). . There were 108 entries for which no age was provided in the computerized Victim Database. . For 147 cases, the action taken by the paralegal was not entered into the log.

Chapter 2

Telling the truth about violence Language ideology and the function of narrative structure

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C:

O.K., Now this incident happened. . .1 Wednesday evening. The fifteenth? Yes. About what time? After seven-thirty in the evening. Between seven-thirty and nine (around there) (.06) Tell me what happened between you. Uh, when I arrived in my home, he was in my backyard waiting for me to get there. And he wanted to see Alvaro, who is our son. Uh, uh, I allowed him to come into the house, ( ) it was chilly just to be standing outside. So, um, we were standing right on my entry area and um, we started talking about uh, what he was gonna do, if he was gonna start helping financially and things like that, because he hasn’t done anything for Alvaro. So, um, during our conversation, he got upset because he said he was tired of people telling him he was an unfit father, and that, he wasn’t responsible enough, so, it just escalated to the point where he just grabbed Alvaro and said he was gonna leave with him. And I told him that he was, I was not gonna allow him to leave with my son. And uh, during the struggle, he beat me several times, hit me on my face, and the back of my head. And uh, I managed to get to a phone to call the police. And when, I think he heard my conversation where he heard me say “Help,” and he didn’t know who I was talking to. So he left the house, and on his way out he pulled my telephone wires. But uh, I got on my mobile phone, and I called to make sure that they had found the message that I, and when I was on the phone, the police officers arrived at my house. O.K. now, he hit you on the face and head, right? Right, he hit me twice on my face. [With what? His fist.

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Chapter 2

The interview above occurred in a small office tucked away in a long corridor of the District Attorney’s Office in the center of Anytown, U.S.A. It was a stifling, hot summer day, and Ms. Ocala and her interviewer, Rita Rodríguez, talked for about thirty-five minutes in the dark room, uncomfortably chilled by a powerful air conditioner. As a result of this interview, a protective order was granted against Mr. Ruiz, the client’s ex-boyfriend, who also happened to be her baby’s father. The above interview raises two important questions for an understanding of narratives of domestic violence in the U.S. legal system. First, what is the purpose of recounting intimate-partner abuse in this institutional space? And second, who is responsible for the violent account that emerges in and from this interaction? In this chapter, I try to frame an answer to the first question. I examine how accounts of abuse are not only shaped by the context in which they are told, but more importantly how they are interpreted by the people who listen to them. Following this examination of narrative function, in the next chapter I explore the issues surrounding the second question. That is, who is perceived to own the words uttered, recorded and typed into a legal document? In other words, who ultimately possesses the story and what is its fate? The answers to both of these queries are related to a third set of questions: What makes an account of domestic violence credible? How does its status move from a story about the home, the family, an intimate-partner relationship to an official account of criminal activity that can be adjudicated by the Civil and Criminal Justice System? Put differently, how does an account of family violence move from perhaps gossip in the grocery store or a quiet confession to a good friend in a laundromat to an afternoon appointment in a divorce attorney’s office or to a clerk’s file as it is handed to a judge? In each of the above settings, an account of domestic abuse gets created through narration. But these settings are more than just physical spaces. As part of the space, interlocutors themselves play a role in creating the very accounts of abuse to which they aim to respond. Moreover, the very act of telling of violence in search of safety from it can create a new position of vulnerability for the narrator whose intentions for having narrated will be judged. Here, I argue that narrators’ motives are assessed against ideologies of interpretation that are prevalent in U.S. culture. These interpretive ideologies prescribe not only that a woman own her story, but also that her purpose for telling it be to provide her listener with a set of utterances that contain an exact, linguistic replica of what actually occurred in the past. In fact both sets of linguistic beliefs generate an expectation regarding the narrator’s purpose for telling. They essentially allow interlocutors to interpret narrative function as a way of seeing

Telling the truth about violence

truth through correspondence theory: “matching of words to worlds” (Blum 2001: 252). Furthermore, this ideological expectation of narrative purpose as a way of matching words to worlds combines with the social notion that truth is best expressed in certain linguistic forms. Philips (2001: 190) explains the view that underlies this project, . . . the constitution of social reality is itself considered a central form of power. . . Entextualization refers to the process through which the content and form of particular texts become fixed in varying degrees of performance. Fixed texts entail more power than context-dependent texts because of the way they culturally and ideologically reproduce the same ideas over and over.

Ideologies of narrative While narrative may be universal, its structural components vary from context to context and its function is rarely singular. Linde (1993: 66) asserts that studies that adhere to a strictly “structural approach to discourse. . . [are] barren, while a purely functional approach is not possible at all, since some form of internal linguistic structure must be posited (if only covertly).” I am not so much interested in how scholars have defined narrative structure and function,2 but rather how beliefs about narrative structure, function, and production circulate within and among institutions to support legal linguistic ideologies that privilege some representations of the past over others. According to Woolard (1998: 3) language ideologies are “representations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. . .ideology is that which is derived from, rooted in, reflective of, or responsive to the experience or interests of a particular social position.” Woolard argues that ideologies are carried in ideas, disclosed in discourses and enacted in social practice for the purpose of maintaining or acquiring power. Of interest here is the way that legal ideologies intersect with the cultural linguistic ideologies that are available to interpret narrative utterances. As a cultural relativist, Hymes (1972: 64) states that “norms of interpretation implicate the belief system of a community.” And Woolard (1998: 7) goes on to argue “. . .even though ideology so often represents itself as universally true. . .ideology is a direct link to inhabitable positions of power – social, political, economic.” This is not to say, of course, that ideologies are separate and distinct from a social reality, but rather that they function to help us in perceiving, defining and making sense of our environment. In so doing, they aid

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Chapter 2

in the creation of what we come to understand, or in Hymes’ words, “interpret” as our world. We can think of norms of interpreting narratives of violence as the particular criteria used by members of speech communities to evaluate first the narrative and then the person who tells it. These criteria are intimately and incriminatingly connected to the types of beliefs people have about their rights to places of power and about the paths necessary to arrive at them. But language ideology, like culture itself, is not monolithic and undifferentiated. It is comprised of a set of complex and sometimes paradoxical or outright contradictory beliefs about the way people should behave linguistically. Where narrative is concerned, two prominent interpretative ideologies repeatedly offer perhaps facile, but nonetheless tenacious and influential answers to the questions that opened this chapter: (1) Who owns the narrative of violence? and (2) What is the purpose of its telling? Let us take the second question first, as we examine both the social and linguistic evidence that supports my view that there exists in U.S. culture an ideological interpretive view that the purpose of a narrative is to match words to worlds (see Blum 2001). That is, when people narrate there is an expectation that they do so in order to tell the truth.3 The idea that narrative functions primarily as a precise representation of a real past event might emerge from our cultural notions of the utility of language in social life in general. Rumsey (1990: 352) argues that Western linguistic ideology operates on “the dualism of words and things; talk versus action; real world events versus ways of talking about them.” So, speakers of Standard Average European (SAE) languages do not see words as themselves things; rather words are what we use to describe things. Words “stand in for things. They are mere symbols or signs, the purpose of which is to talk about a reality that lies beyond them and apart from them” (Rumsey 1990: 352). Evidence for Rumsey’s argument that in Western cultures there is a fundamental belief that reality can be adequately represented in language comes from a comparison of English and Ungarinyin, a language spoken by the Ngarinyin people of northwestern Australia. English, for example, incorporates a method for speakers both to report speech and to appear to quote it directly. Showing that Ungarinyin does not have the grammatical forms to quote speech as does English, Rumsey posits that it is likely that Ngarinyin people do not posses the ideology with respect to language’s ability to accurately represent the world. Consider the different grammatical forms used by one of the women in this study to represent the obscenities she reports that her husband used toward her. The following excerpts come from the Pro Bono Law Clinic, located in the center of Someville, U.S.A. In this setting, an interpreter is present to render the client’s Spanish into English for her interviewer. The first excerpt comes

Telling the truth about violence

from an overview of the last violent incident given by the client early on in the interview. In this excerpt, we see that the client chooses indirect reported speech to represent her ex-husband’s verbal abuse. These utterances are shown in bold type below:

Excerpt 2.1. Indirect reported speech to represent obscenities C: I: C: I: C: I: C: I:

Empezó a agredirme, me, me, me, me lastimó. ((He started to assault me, he, he, he, he hurt me)). [He started to assault me, he hurt me. Me jaló de los cabellos. ((He pulled my hair)). He pulled my hair. Me decía muchas malas palabras, co ((He was calling me many bad names li)) [He called me obscenities. como bitch, y cosas así. ((like bitch and stuff like that)). He called me names.

Later, however, she employs a direct quotation to represent her husband’s prior discourse. Again, the salient parts of her speech are shown in bold in the excerpt below:

Excerpt 2.2. Direct reported speech to represent obscenities C: I: C: I:

Y él cerró la puerta y dijo. . .((And he closed the door and said,)) [He closed the door, [“A esta vieja bitch, no la quiero ver.” ((This old bitch, I don’t even want to see her.)) and he said, “I don’t want to see this old bitch.”

In Excerpt 2.1, the client merely reports what was said, but she does not quote it as she does in the second example. With her use of the direct quotation, there is at least the possibility of interpreting her words as an attempt to repeat verbatim how her husband verbally abused her. Rumsey’s data from Ungarinyin, as compared with the grammars of Spanish and English, suggest that some languages allow for this type of linguistic portrait of language itself, while others do not. In English, according to Matoesian (2001: 112) “[d]irect quotes implicate a broader form of linguistic ideology in which the sole or primary function of language is to refer to things, what Mertz (1985) refers to as the “drive for reference. . .” On this same explanatory note, Matoesian (2001: 112) states that interlocutors in interaction

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Chapter 2

“misrecognize the interactional work direct quotes accomplish in context because grammatical design naturalizes and foregrounds referential value over strategic meaning.” Matoesian’s argument is provocative in the analysis of Excerpts 2.1 and 2.2. It brings up the question of the client’s interactional purpose for recasting into direct – reported speech the abuser’s name – calling the second time around. Two possible explanations come to mind. One reason may be purely linguistic in terms of precision in reporting. During the second mention of this incident, the client is in the process of giving a step-by-step account of what happened within a discrete incident of violence. In the first mention of the verbal abuse, her speech activity could be defined as a loose description of a series of violent acts. Schiffrin (1994) would characterize this distinction as the difference between a narrative and a list, where lists are made through the mention of a series of perhaps thematically coherent, but temporally unrelated events or items. If the purpose of the first mention was to give only a brief description of the types of violence suffered, then it could stand to reason that later on, in the middle of a full-fledged telling of the event, she elected to reinforce her account with a direct quotation. Another possible explanation would entail the client’s desire to have the interpreter actually say the word bitch. When she brings up the name – calling for the first time, the client says the word bitch, but the interpreter opts for “obscenities” in his rendition of her speech. With the term “obscenities”, he selects a euphemistic substitute that, while descriptive, remains nonspecific (see Chapter 9). Further evidence in support of this interpretation of the client’s purpose being to emphasize the word bitch itself can be found in the syntax of the direct quotation. Not only does the client use direct reported speech to emphasize this verbal act of aggression, but she also fronts the complement of the verb. Typically, Spanish syntax, as does English, takes SVO word order where the complement of the verb, here the noun phrase, (“esta vieja bitch”, this old bitch) follows, rather than precedes, the head verb. Presumably Spanish syntax for common, everyday language use would generate, “No la quiero ver a esta vieja bitch”, or I don’t even want to see this old bitch. Under a functional analysis, the pre-position or fronting of the verbal complement could indicate the client’s wish to underscore not only that fact that the abuser called her an ugly name, but that she also actually wants that the name itself be said. This analysis parallels a theme/agent analysis for the communicative differences achieved from a speaker’s selection between passive/active constructions. Key claims in these analyses are that the purpose of the passive construction is to deflect the importance of the agent in order to accentuate the theme

Telling the truth about violence

NP (O’Grady et al. 2001). In this case, it might be that the direct quotation combines (or in Auer’s 1995 terms, “bundle[s] together”) with the syntactic transformation of pp-fronting in order to stress her point. It could even be argued in this case that the bundling of attention-getting features occurs to keep the focus on both the agent and the theme. Such a structural-functional conclusion regarding the ways in which grammar naturalizes a certain interpretation – say referential over functional – should lead to a search of other linguistic forms in SAE languages that also make salient referential as opposed to strategic meanings. From a sociolinguistic perspective though, we would argue that it is not linguistic form in-and-of-itself that carries meaning. Rather, meaning somehow gets attributed to linguistic form, especially as form indexes beliefs we hold about different types of language users and different elements of language use. The compelling question then is: Just how do linguistic forms come to take on social meanings? Language ideologies, as mechanisms that organize and order our social and communicative world, often do so by appearing as prescriptive mandates for the employment of language in social realms. When ideologies are inscribed in the rhetoric of powerful institutions, notions that they exist as universals are reinforced. Rumsey (1990: 356) for example, brings up how this process functions in the courtroom, noting that the “Guide for Witnesses” in the Attorney General’s Department in New South Wales, tells those who take the stand: If you are asked to tell the court about a conversation you heard which is relevant to the case, you must always tell the words spoken to you as they were said, e.g., if the person asked you the time, you do not say “She asked me for the time.” Instead you should say – “She said, ‘What’s the time?”’ Always try to use exact words if possible.

The Pro Bono Law Clinic from which I collected my data provides a similar example. The training manual for the volunteers who interview Latina women and draft their affidavits states: Use direct quotes and describe with as much specificity as possible why the client feels she will be harmed if [the abuser] is not excluded [from the home].

The court gives credence to direct quotation as a measure of accuracy rather uncritically, as there are plenty of linguistic analyses to suggest that direct quotation, while apparently mimetic, is rarely exact (see Lucy 1993; Hickmann 1993). These linguistic commands in both New South Wales and in the United States operate on the notion that at the very least, we can expect words spoken in narrative to match words spoken previously in the world. Beyond this how-

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Chapter 2

ever, we see that the U.S. mandate is even more problematic than the one from the Australian court. The U.S. training manual, for example, does not specify whether volunteers should write affidavits in such a way that directly quotes the victims’ own speech, or whether they should convert indirect quotations used by victims to direct ones. This lack of specificity connotes an even greater idealized expectation of the power and importance of representing reality through direct quotations. It seems that for the U.S. court the issue is that direct quotations, no matter where they come from, are strong iconic building blocks of a semblance of truth. Undeniably, in the U.S. and the Australian context, the courts, as prestigious sociolegal institutions, both model the utility of the imitative capability of language at the same time they further strengthen the idea that language can function to represent reality at this level of exactitude. By applying this interpretive ideology of a language’s ability to represent the world to a study of narrative, prior conceptualizations of narrative performance (Bauman 1986; Hymes 1975; Wolfson 1978) can be opened up to understand not only how narrators bring their texts to life, but also, how narrators exploit linguistic resources and linguistic beliefs in order to create the adequate performative text for a given social purpose. The term performative text refers to those texts that narrators use to make themselves seem a certain way, or to perform meaning that goes beyond its semantic content. The early work of Goffman (1959) and more recently that of Butler (1990) brings the question of narrative and performance from one that addressed what people do with words in narrative production, to an examination of what people seek to do with texts. Texts, as entities made of up words, sentences, and paragraphs, are created for specific purposes, and as such are related to cultural processes of meaning making. Just as Butler (1990) argues that ‘gender’ is not something that people are, but rather something that they do – in part through linguistic practice – a witness’s story is not necessarily just credible, truthful or authoritative. Instead narrative genres aid individual narrators in the cultural performance of credibility, truthfulness, and authority. Performative texts not only serve to construct narrators’ identities; they also serve to convince interlocutors of the narrators’ rationality and indeed, veracity. Additional sociolinguistic evidence revealing the prevalent and conventional notion that language use acts not in the construction of reality, but only as a mere representation of reality has been brought to light in studies on the use of interpreters in court proceedings (Berk-Seligson 1990a, 1990b). BerkSeligson (1990b: 156) states, “One of the most prevalent beliefs held by court personnel is that bilingually conducted judicial proceedings – that is, proceed-

Telling the truth about violence

ings carried out with the assistance of a foreign language interpreter – are in no way different from normal, monolingually conducted proceedings.” Along these lines, this same ideology of language is found by research that exposes the largely unchallenged logic that there can really be a verbatim record of court proceedings (see Walker 1990). But what is it about narrative in particular that leads to the expectation that the narrator’s fundamental reason for telling is to provide an exact linguistic replica of what happened in the past? Part of the answer may be found in how Western theorists throughout history have formally characterized the recapitulation of past events. Aristotle is attributed with the most general conceptualization of narrative structure as consisting of a beginning, a middle and an end. More contemporary, literary approaches to the study of narrative maintain the Aristotelian structure as the underlying form for their definitions (Barthes 1980; Chatman 1978; Gremais 1983; Propp 1928 all of which are cited in Cortazzi 1993 and/or Toolan 1988). Given this tradition, perhaps it is not surprising that Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) seminal model of narrative in sociolinguistics follows this Aristotelian structure. For these researchers linguistically speaking, ‘narrative’ can only represent an event that is conceived of and conceptualized of as a discrete happening – consisting of a commencement that is followed by a particular and sequential trajectory, which is eventually brought to an end. However, Labov and Waletzky’s (1967: 16) model is not only structural, but also functional, in that they consider oral narrative to be “one verbal technique for recapitulating experience, in particular, a technique of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that experience.” Their definition of narrative suggests that this referential function is intimately dependent on narrative structure.

The Labovian Model: “Normal narrative structure” Labov and Waletzky determine what is “normal” to narrative structure from a corpus of near-death experience accounts that they elicited in an interview setting. While they conclude that individual narrators do not always produce accounts that possess a uniform structure, they nevertheless posit ‘a normal form for oral versions of past experience’ that consists of the following parts: (1) orientation, (2) complicating action, (3) evaluation, (4) resolution, and (5) coda. In a later study conducted with Fanshel (Labov & Fanshel 1977), the definition of normal narrative structure incorporates the non-obligatory compo-

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Chapter 2

nent known as the abstract, which for all intents and purposes, when it appears, generally comes before the orientation.4

Abstract Labov and Fanshel (1977: 105–106) define the abstract as an introductory structural device that gives “the listener sufficient notice that a narrative is about to begin. . . .” Other narrative analysts offer slightly different definitions of the abstract. Linde (1993) and Álvarez (1991), for example, see the abstract as an announcement that can serve an array of communicative functions. For instance, abstracts may summarize what is to come, indicate for the listener the type of account that will be told, or attempt to establish the relevance of the narrative to the preceding conversation. Both Linde and Álvarez note abstracts can serve speakers as a request for permission to hold the floor. Polanyi (1985) discusses conversation as democratic, in that all speakers have equal access to gain the floor at appropriately marked conversational turns. Because of this, when a speaker begins a narrative, she must either request permission from her interlocutors, or at least warn them of her desire to hold the floor over multi-unit turns. Conversation analysts Sacks (1986) and Jefferson (1978) name this petition for an extended floor space a story preface. Schegloff (1982) argues that because ordinary conversation is designed to move from speaker to speaker at natural turn breaks, a story preface is necessary to alert listeners to a speaker’s intention to embark on a multi-unit turn. Since Labov and Waletzky do not include the abstract as a structural device in their early paper on normal narrative components, perhaps it is not surprising that they also do not provide a mechanism for understanding, analyzing or considering the fact that listeners can either reject or accept the proposition embedded in the abstract. These structural options are most likely absent in the 1967 work due to the contextual limitations that defined how the neardeath accounts they analyzed were produced. Because the researches elicited the accounts, narrators did not have to incorporate abstracts to negotiate their rights to extended floor space. We will examine in the analytical chapters how victims of domestic abuse negotiate their right to hold the floor with abstracts or story prefaces.

Orientation Orientation clauses generally cluster near the narrative’s outset and “serve to orient the listener to person, place, time and behavioral situation” (Labov &

Telling the truth about violence

Waletzky 1967). Orientations are a group of free clauses that can appear anywhere throughout the telling, because they do not advance the action in the narrative nor disturb temporal sequencing. While orientation clauses are not obligatory, their absence can become a communicative problem. As do Labov and Waletzky, Linde (1993) concludes that the ability of a speaker to include an orientation section is often a determining factor in the satisfaction of the listener. Interestingly, Labov and Waletzky (1967) have observed that narratives of children and less verbal adults frequently lack an orientation section. And when speakers recounted distasteful past experiences, they noted the narrators’ tendency to reduce their narrative to bare-bones tellings of only the obligatory elements. Labov and Waletzky (1967: 32) argue, “suppression of the full narrative structure is plainly motivated by explicit reluctance of the narrator to identify persons and places.” In contrast to this claim, and as was mentioned in Chapter 1, other scholars (Conley & O’Barr 1990; Wodak 1985) indicate that speakers’ socio-economic class, race, ethnicity and/or gender may be variables that correlate with the inclusion or exclusion of an orientation section. Much of what the women in this study report is distasteful and difficult, thus, it will be interesting to see if the data bear out the prediction put forth by Labov and Waletzky.

Complicating action The complicating action is the only obligatory component of the Labovian model. It is the backbone of the narrative that surfaces in speech as a series of sequenced clauses, told in simple past tense forms that demonstrate the action and the result of the event. Labov and Waletzky refer to these clauses as “narrative clauses,” or temporally sequenced clauses that mirror the order of events as they actually occurred. “Two clauses which are temporally ordered with respect to each other are said to be separated by temporal juncture. This juncture has no relation to any free or restricted clauses which may fall in between the temporally ordered clauses” (Labov & Waletzky 1967: 25). Labov and Fanshel (1977: 107) refine the point of temporal juncture and temporal sequencing with the following formal linguistic rule: Rule of Narrative Sequencing In a narrative, if A refers to an event with a sentence S1, that has a non-stative main verb in the preterit or present tense, and then refers to another event with a sentence S2 of the same structure, then B will hear A as asserting that the event referred to by S1 took place before the event referred to by S2.5

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Chapter 2

Rumsey’s (1990) analysis of direct quotations as described above sheds light on how narrative syntax, as defined by Labov and Fanshel (1977), can come to be taken by the listener as a representation of the truth. Given that languages like Standard Average European (SAE) allow for an interpretation that what is said first, happened first, there is reason to believe that narrative syntax at least partially contributes to the cultural “drive for reference.” Arguably focus on first a, then b temporal ordering in narrative also highlights the referential value of language over other possible functions. Put more prosaically, the strategic work narrators might intend to accomplish with a narrative could be overlooked rather easily if listeners believe narrative function to be primarily referential.

Evaluation While evaluation clauses may occur throughout the narrative, Labov and Waletzky find narrators reserve a portion of the narrative for an evaluative section between the complicating action and the result. The evaluation section, when appearing in this position, halts the action, and thus helps to create suspense and excitement. Evaluation goes beyond pure reference, as it tells the listener why the narrative is important. Labov and Waletzky (1967: 34) analyze evaluation sections as credibility seeking devices, because narrators use them to “appear in the best possible light and to help [them] distinguish the complication from the resolution.” Evaluation will be important as it relates to various aspects of narrative performance.

Resolution and coda The resolution is the result or the outcome of events. Just as the abstract serves to open the narrative, the coda, also an optional component, functions to bring the speaker from story time to discourse time (Schiffrin 1987). Álvarez (1991: 273) describes the coda as a linguistic tool that bridges a gap between the resolution of a past event and the moment of speech in the present conversation. Because temporally sequenced events do not, as a rule, contiguously link the narrated event to the time of the narration, narrators use the coda as a functional device for “returning the verbal perspective to the present moment” (Labov & Waletzky 1967: 39).

Telling the truth about violence

Other narrative functions Even though Labov and Waletzky recognize that there are other ways that speakers can represent the past linguistically, they still endeavor to define narrative as a specific communicative unit with a fixed set of compositional possibilities. That is, rather than seeing narrative as a broader category that encompasses a variety of narrative-types, Labov and Waletzky exclude certain types of tellings of past experience from their definition of narrative. The following two abusive episodes, recounted by two different women from my data, illustrate how Labov and Waletzky distinguish between what they call narrative and what they perceive to be non-narrative tellings. According to the 1967 criteria for narrative, the first event located, in Excerpt 2.3 would be considered a narrative of past experience:

Excerpt 2.3. Narrative of past experience as per Labov and Waletzky’s criteria Text 14A Client: He walked in the house, he, he’s he made an excuse that, ‘cause he still has some of his things there. That he was gonna be looking through the things and I said, “Well I’d appreciate it if we’d do it some other day because this is my day off and right now” you know, “I’m tired.” And, and, he goes, “Well let me go through these boxes,” and I said, “Fine, you can go through the boxes,” and then he started talking about this and that and one thing led to another and he grabbed me and he threw me against the um, air-conditioning system. And I said, “No, enough is enough,” so he walked out and I called the police officers and he left.

Their 1967 criteria would preclude the designation of narrative for the following text shown in Excerpt 2.4 below.

Excerpt 2.4. Non-narrative recapitulation of past experience Client: Yeah [I talked to his parole officer], but um he has a new one now, and I’ve never spoken with her, so, and see, I, I went, and I spoke with his parole officer the first time, because I, I talked to him the first time because he had, he had done something to my truck or something. And he was, um, having some girls harass me and stuff like that, they were calling me all the time to harassing me and doing stuff to my apartment and stuff, so, and since I couldn’t prove it, there was nothing I could do.

Following the Labovian definition of narrative, the discourse in Excerpt 2.3 would be a narrative, because the client’s account seems to reveal the actual

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order of events as they took place. The language in Excerpt 2.4, however, would not be conceptualized as a narrative, since the client’s speaking with the parole officer about the alleged abuser most likely occurred after he vandalized her car or encouraged another woman to harass her. Labov and Waletzky state that non-narrative formulations of the past, like the one in Excerpt 2.4 above are, “are perfectly logical, orderly and acceptable ways of representing a sequence of events,” but they insist that such other recapitulations not be considered narrative. They state, “The basic narrative units that we wish to isolate are defined by the fact that they recapitulate experience in the same order as the original events” (Labov & Waletzky 1967: 21). This model suggests an iconic relationship, or a union between a sign and a linguistic pattern. The pattern of placing side-by-side simple past or simple present tense clauses, which contain action verbs, gets interpreted as the actual ordering of events as they took place in the past. In this way, the Labovian definition of narrative acts as a linguistic map of time and events. So, while Labov and Waletzky make no overt claims regarding the truthvalue of the linguistic unit they define, they do suggest a one-to-one relationship between representation and reality by stating that narrative is produced by “. . .matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events in which they actually occurred” (Labov & Waletzky 1967). And Labov and Fanshel (1977) with their Rule of Narrative Sequencing assert that listeners interpret or expect narratives to be a portrayal of what happened at least inasmuch as the order of events is concerned. In this way, the narrative model described by Labov and Waletzky (1967) underscores the linguistic belief or ideology that we use language because we strive for reference. In its teller-and tale-focus, the Labovian definition ignores any other important social and interactional functions narrative might have.6 Moreover, although temporal sequencing is a common organizing element for narrative in many cultures, anthropologists suggest that narrative function need not be so dependent on structure. That a narrative takes what appears to be a teleological structure is not itself evidence that the only goal the narrator has in mind is that of the matching of words to worlds. Yet, for purposes of representing the past, institutions prefer this particular narrative model, perhaps because it upholds and reifies the iconic relationship between structures of linearity and temporality with notions of logic and truth. It is this marriage of structure and purpose that feeds into the language ideology, which emphasizes the referential function of oral accounts of violence. As such, it is precisely what leaves victims of abuse in danger of having their accounts impeached as it opens them up to the inescapable generation of inconsistent versions what happened.

Telling the truth about violence

Beyond telling the truth about violence Hymes (1977) distinguishes between referential and social meaning in the following way, “Referential meaning broadly describes the content to which narrative refers. Social meaning, the social, affective or moral value a narrative may have, is a less obvious aspect of narrative” (as cited in Cortazzi 1993: 101). Hymes’ distinction between the referential and social meanings of narrative is analogous to the distinction made above between referential and interactional work that is done with direct quotation (Matoesian 2001; Rumsey 1990). So, while listeners are intent to focus on the wording of narrative, they may miss the social meaning behind the act of telling. Contrastively, what the narrator is doing with a narrative might be more important than the actual information it contains. The following review of anthropological and sociolinguistic studies of narrative illustrates this very point. Haviland (1996) for example, finds that among the Tzotzil speakers in Zincantán, elders use narrative in their discourse on marriage to reconstitute social order. Zincantán elders recount past events – perhaps about a scandalous courtship, the groom’s excessive drinking or the questionable industriousness of the bride – to the newly married bride and groom. The elders’ tellings serve to advise the couple of the proper behavior for married people. In telling about the couple’s own past, the elders’ narratives function to articulate community expectations of the couple at the same time they intensify their rites of passage. In addition, Haviland finds that community elders use their rights to official discourse to impose organization and order on the original, impassioned and disorderly fighting words of married couples in crisis. Elders involve disputants “in a mediated encounter, in which [the couple’s] very words are cast into more controlled, formal, sequential and social surroundings” (Haviland 1996: 179). For this community, narrative is used to consolidate the elders’ authority, to restore order and to state community expectations for adult members. Among the Tzotzil, narrative discourse does much more than merely map time and events. Haviland’s findings support Brenneis’ (1996: 47) conclusions that “narratives are not epiphenomenal reflexes of sociopolitical relations, solely mirroring apparently real action going on elsewhere. Rather, they constitute both important opportunities for and means of carrying out such action.” Brenneis studies two different types of conflict narratives, namely gossip and mediation, among an Indian community in Bhatgaon, rural Fiji. However, where Haviland takes the position that the voices of the disputants in mediation are drowned out by the univocality of the elders, Brenneis (1996: 43) hears “multivocality

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quite literally; the negotiation of co-narration and privileging of one particular account over others are central to their tellings.” Among other things, Brenneis finds that narratives are elicited in speech events that exist for their very production – showing the culturally valued importance of narrative as a medium of cultural expression. Finally, Brenneis states that cultures have peculiar ways of organizing narrative events is evidence that narration constitutes social life, as narratives often reveal the types of order – linear, temporal, spatial – that display what Sherzer (1987) calls ‘cultural logic.’ We need not go so far a-field to understand what tellers and their listeners achieve through narrative both in and for their communities. Even though Polanyi’s (1985) analysis of narrative is heavily structural, it is also cultural. By cultural, Polanyi means that speakers tell narratives in conversation to make their points. Whether their points are personal, social or political in nature, narrators conjure up a story to drive these points home. Polanyi puts her finger on a very crucial function of narrative discourse – a function that if fully comprehended defies reliance on exactitude. What comes to mind when reading Polanyi’s study is the common utterance, often made by conversational narrators in English, who pause in mid-sentence to find their point. The utterance they use asks their listeners, “Now, why was I telling you this?” Such an utterance indicates that the purpose of the telling lies beyond what is being recounted. In conversation then, narrative is often used as anecdotal evidence that serves the speaker in proving a prior claim. Occasionally, the women in this study employ this type of narrative to support their assertions. Note for example, in the following excerpt, how the client uses the story as an anecdote to prove her point.

Example 2.5. Narrative as anecdotal evidence7 Client:

Paralegal: Client:

And see, I’m, I’m so hesitant to call the police, because, I mean, there’s times when I’ve had understanding police, and there’s times when I’ve had, I had one incident where he pushed me, and I hit him, and he called the cops on me. And the guy said that he was gonna, he was gonna make the police report seem like I was the worst mother, or something like that, in the world, the police said. Because I had hit him. Yeah, you get all kinds of different They’re not all the same. You know? And so, you know, after that, I mean, I was hysterical. . . .

In the above extract, the client uses a narrative to make the point that she does not call the police automatically when something goes wrong. Her justification

Telling the truth about violence

is that not all policemen are alike and that some are highly unsympathetic. Further evidence for this reading comes from Schiffrin’s (1987) analysis of the English marker, you know, which she finds is often used to preface the point of a story through external or internal evaluation. Polanyi’s claim that people narrate to make a point in conversational settings is well taken, but this conceptualization does not work for an analysis of narrative in the case of these institutional interviews. First, in the reporting context, women do not need a reason to tell their story of abuse. Both the women themselves and the interviewers know that the speech event is designed for a telling. And second, as we will see, these data suggest that these women are trying to do more than just make a point with their narratives. At the level of an individual teller, Schiffrin (1996) finds speakers use narrative to present self-portraits. Hence there are instances in which narrators try to give their listeners an idea of who they are. Sometimes the recounting of their past deeds/interactions also serves to tell their interlocutor about the kind of people they are, or at the very least, about the kind of people they want to be perceived to be. Moving from an individual’s use of narrative to an examination of the way families employ them, both Norrick (1997) and Ochs et al. (1996) shift the focus from narrative structure to narrative function as a structuring mechanism for social relationships. Ochs et al., for example, note that narrative can fortify participants’ positions in the family. When mothers encourage children to ‘tell dad what happened at school today’, they use narrative formats to send messages about their own roles and those of their husbands within the family structure. Ochs and her associates also find that narratives are one of the discursive formats used by American families to solve problems, work out the details and to get to the bottom of things. Similarly, Norrick (1997) studies how and why family members tell the same narratives over and over again. Retelling familiar stores aids narrators and their immediate community in “(a) fostering group rapport, (b) ratifying group membership, and (c) conveying group values” (Norrick 1997: 199). These observations, though poignant, are not likely to be an exhaustive list of the ways and reasons people use narrative to mediate their everyday interaction. In relationships among family members and even old friends, narrative can function to raise common ground by invoking a time, a place and an event that whether mutually enjoyed or mutually suffered, was at the very least, shared. In cases where interaction between family members or friends is infrequent, exactly what happened is necessarily less important than the fact that

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Chapter 2

something happened at all. And, where interaction is frequent, the reiteration of the fact that a history is shared intensifies present relationships. At a broader level of the larger community, narratives told in a public setting can serve as a platform for either reinforcing or challenging cultural norms. On the one hand, political speeches may include anecdotes about values or beliefs that touch the audience and reaffirm a sense of unity and common purpose. A vibrant recollection of a winning football season can serve a university president in inspiring new faculty or new students to become a part of the collegiate atmosphere. Eulogists at a war memorial recalling brave actions of fallen heroes hope to (re)constitute and justify a sense of nationhood among young onlookers who have never experienced a war. On the other hand, I have attended many domestic violence community events where women, who have escaped a battering relationship, are asked by grassroots activists and formal institutions alike to bear witness publicly about their abuse experience. These ‘speak outs’ often rendered as narratives challenge commonly held notions of secure and happy family life. Likewise, these narrators promote awareness of significant dangers within a familial unit, while they confirm hope among silent victims that survival is actually possible. At speak outs that I attend in Tallahassee, Florida I am struck by the transgressive nature of the discourse survivors and activists use to insist that domestic violence be brought to an end. Narratives of violence in these settings clearly function to set new ideals for men and women in the community. These women’s stories, while they speak of the past, are aimed at changing the future. When a victim of domestic violence tells her story in a bureaucratic setting, what she says has the potential of becoming part of what Linde (1999) calls institutional memory. Linde (1999) argues that narrative “. . .functions to project the future, in constructing a record that can serve as” protection for that institution “in case of possible challenge” (Linde 1999: 139). As members of institutions recount to one another any incident that challenges institutional culture, say for example, an inmate’s attempted prison escape, their tellings encompass not only an account of the event, but also an accounting of the action taken to restore institutional order during and after the disruption. Linde’s work explains how these types of tellings – inscribed in both written and oral form – reconstitute the institution. First they do so by restating its mission, then by fortifying its future through the creation of documentation that will guard against any threat to it. The accounting of the steps taken re-authorize the position of the agents involved as subordinates and superiors, when they take their participant roles in narrative production as narrators and narratees. Institutional memory, according to Linde (1999), functions in bureaucratic set-

Telling the truth about violence

tings to (re)create and (re)produce the institution (cf. Cook-Gumperz 1999; Frank 1999; Gunnarsson 1999; White 1999). I expand the concept of institutional memory to include in its meaning those narratives told by people who are not bureaucratic insiders, but rather members of society that enter institutions and in exchange for assistance, narrate a past event within them. The U.S. Justice System acts as an archive where such lay people may go to have their experiences documented. The telling generally results in a physical document that can take the form of a police report, a case report, an affidavit, or an intake form. Whatever the final stage or form, these people’s oral tellings inevitably become part of some type of archive that exists as institutional memory. Their narratives will end up being available for various future uses, perhaps among the most extreme of which might be the making or breaking of a future legal case. Let us consider for example, the multiple functions of a police report. A police report is a linguistic representation of a past event that is produced in an interview setting by a person who recounts his/her perceived victimization to a police officer. The police officer is then responsible for physically inscribing the account in written form. While perhaps not as important as a formal signed statement taken by a detective for the purpose of formulating a charge for prosecution, the police report is nonetheless a significant incipient narrative disclosure. If nothing else, it documents possible criminal activity in terms of taxonomy and frequency. Moreover, such incident reports may serve to frame future police investigations by providing a basis for questions that will be asked. Where domestic abuse is concerned, women who make police reports of abusive incidents leave an institutional paper trail that establishes the patterns of the abuser’s behavior. In essence, multiple police reports of domestic abuse can bolster the credibility of the victim in future institutional encounters or in future judicial proceedings. For this reason, advocates and other professionals encourage women to report each and every violent or abusive occurrence. The very inscription of the event as an account in an official space further imbues it with credibility and authority, which it is not likely to have garnered in its oral form (Tiersma 1999; White 1999). Narratives of domestic abuse are not new to institutional memory. Although not labeled as such, for centuries both in the U.S. and abroad, women have used official, legal spaces to air their complaints about intimate-partner maltreatment. Even before the abolition of coverture,8 or early U.S. common law’s designation that a married woman’s legal identity be subsumed in her husband’s, some women were able to make cases against physically abusive partners on the grounds that these men failed to uphold their responsibili-

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Chapter 2

ties of protector and provider in the nuclear family unit (see Alonso 1995 on the case in Mexico and Merry 1994, 1996, 2000 on the case in Hawaii). Additionally, these historical glimpses of the institutional treatment of domestic violence suggest that even though the state sanctioned a husband’s right to discipline his wife, it did so with the idea that there existed some measure of tolerable and intolerable physical punishment by husbands who corporally punished their wives. Today in many places in the United States, domestic violence narratives are received in institutional spaces designated especially for them. The protective order application interview is one of these newly created spaces. Introduced in response to grassroots advocates who collected and amassed individual narratives of abuse in order to demand of existing institutions a protocol for dealing with domestic abuse, such spaces now serve as primary areas for the institutional treatment of domestic violence. In Anytown service providers talked of how the very ‘act of narrating’ encouraged institutional higher-ups to re-name violence between former or current intimate partners “domestic violence,” and to begin to include domestic abuse in its official memory. Anytown’s police department became involved with the systematic treatment of domestic abuse in response to these grassroots organizers’ successful lobbying efforts. The group, by asking the simple question: “How many domestic dispute calls do patrol officers receive each year?”, promoted the realization that domestic violence is a serious crime and a community problem. A simple computer analysis brought to light that Anytown’s patrol officers answered nearly 30,000 of these calls per year. Almost a third of those was categorized as having been physically violent. Victimologists Mawby and Walklate (1994: 96) in their discussion of police responses to victims state, “[e]ven when the fact that a crime has been committed is accepted, the police may do nothing more than record the incident.” Understandably, some activists and victims might perceive this police effort to be a less than ideal type of intervention. But, from a macro discourse perspective, the act of recording is not insignificant. The Anytown case shows that recording is a way of remembering. When such memories can be harnessed, they may be the catalyst of action. At all levels of communication, narratives have the potential to make people stop and take notice of something that was imperceptible before. The association between narrative, institutional memory and linguistic ideology both enables and limits the mutually transformative power of discourse and institutional practice. As Vershueren (1999) and van Leuween (1996) argue, before social phenomena can be represented, they must first be perceived. As long

Telling the truth about violence

as the mental processes of representation and perception are intimately linked together, narrative remains a primary communicative unit of representation that has the power to effectuate social change. So, as different versions of violence against women – different in terms of narrative structure, function and content – are heard in the sociolegal system, new ways of understanding such violence might become possible. Despite this transformative potential however, the fact remains that the creation of institutional memory, like narrative itself, is a collaborative endeavor. So, while the creation of individual narratives can and certainly has altered the way institutions remember, institutions in the narrative dialogue may also alter the way society remembers the individual’s case. Though Linde focuses on the role of insiders in creating institutional memory, it is also important to study the way those on the outside, here, the women in battering relationships, become participants in the creation of sociolegal memory. As the inseparable mental processes of perception and representation are at work in the production of narrative, institutional memory is both permeable and permeating in struggles over representations of reality. It is influenced as much by what is perceived as it is by the way what is perceived has been represented. The U.S. sociolegal arena is a complex system that is represented by and representative of a wide range of peoples. Its historical and cultural roots can be traced to times when representation was reserved for only some people and some experiences. During those times, the language used by the court and its servants presumably functioned in order to limit who and what could be represented, as well as who could represent that which was sanctioned for representation. Today too, legal language has been criticized (Dumas 2000a, 2000b; Stratman & Dahl 1996) for being undemocratic, some of the people for whom it exists tend to find it incomprehensible. Additionally, it has been suggested that legal ideologies exclude or marginalize narratives that are not couched in the existing rules of law. In the following chapter, we look at how legal and linguistic ideologies conspire to reproduce, rather than alter, the system that exists. The cultural emphasis on the referential function of language in general and of narrative in particular is exacerbated in the Civil and Criminal Justice System where words are often all that is available for adjudication. Operating on the expectation that narrative is capable of carrying a precise representation of the past, legal actants expect lay litigants to come equipped with the truth. Paradoxically this expectation holds not only that narrators speak the truth, but also that such truth be communicated and conveyed in special and particular

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Chapter 2

ways. In the following chapter, I discuss the second question I raised at the beginning of this one. Backed by linguistic ideology about how a narrative is produced, the other crucial expectation that interlocutors have for narrators is that they ‘stand by’ or own the words that they have uttered. We will see that when tellers are perceived to be speaking alone, it is easier to hold them accountable for whatever it is that gets said.

Notes . All names, dates, places and other identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy and to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of the service providers and the women seeking assistance in the various institutions from which data for this study were collected. . For excellent reviews of the literature on narrative see Ochs and Capps (1996), Ochs et al. (1996) and Ochs (1997). . While I write about narrative structure, function, production and performance as separate and distinct entities for the purposes of clarifying my argument, they are processes intimately connected to one another. It is impossible to discuss narrative function without referring to narrative structure and vice versa. Along these lines, as the structure of narrative carries its supposed functions, the residual effects of that relationship must also be accounted for. Narrative structure, I hope to show, carries an enormous ideological load about its function. . Silva-Corvalán (1994) lists several other structural components used by narrators to initiate tellings. . Non-stative main verbs in the present or past tenses are action verbs such as “talked,” “run” “waited,” “moved”, etc. Stative verbs are those that express a state of being or a condition, as in “I was happy” or “I am sick”. . Labov and Waletzky (1967: 13) also state that narrative “serves an additional function of personal interest determined by a stimulus in the social context in which the narrative occurs.” . These data were published in Trinch and Berk-Seligson (2002). . Marcus (1994: 19) explains “Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, the legal identity of a married woman was merged with her husband; she was protected or sheltered – a femme covert.” Essentially the Married Women’s Property Act of 1848 in New York was the first reform to bring about an abolition of the legal arrangement of coverture.

Chapter 3

Representation, ownership and genre Language ideologies of narrative production and performance

Prior to drafting an affidavit for Ms. Ocala, paralegal-interviewer Rita Rodríguez negotiated a second meeting with her at a time several hours later that same day. The extra hours provided Rita with the opportunity to interview other clients, go out for lunch with co-workers and friends, return to her office to file her other clients’ petitions for protective orders with the court and finally, to draft an affidavit of Ms. Ocala’s experience of domestic violence. Ms. Ocala did not mention what it was that she would do in the downtown area, while waiting for the time to come that she could return to the D.A.’s Office. Before settling on 4:00 p.m. that same day however, near the end of their 20 minute interview Rita asked Ms. Ocala if she could return to the D.A.’s Office the following day to sign her affidavit. Wanting to accommodate, Ms. Ocala hesitated, saying that she would have to ask her employer if she could leave work a little early the next day. When Rita suggested that she could squeeze Ms. Ocala in later that afternoon, Ms. Ocala seemed pleased and said that she would be available. She added that she had taken that whole day off of work to “take care of things” with her ex-boyfriend. At 4:00 p.m., one of the three secretaries who greet clients from a bulletproof window at the District Attorney’s Office handed Ms. Ocala an official version of her account. Ms. Ocala was told by the secretary to read it, check it over for the facts, sign it and date it. In this manner, Ms. Ocala’s account of abuse became a narrative of violence in the space of institutional memory. The information depicted in Ms. Ocala’s interview at the beginning of Chapter 2 appears as the following, in the affidavit that would secure her protective order: On March 15, 1999, at approximately 8:30 p.m., Teo was in my backyard and wanted to see our son. I allowed him to come inside. He began talking to me about helping me financially with our son. He began getting upset over people saying he was not responsible. He grabbed our son and was going to leave with him. We struggled and Teo hit me on the face and head several times with

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closed hands. I grabbed our son away from him and upon leaving my home, Teo pulled the wires to my phone. I called the police from my mobile phone. A report was made but Teo had already left. I have filed Assault-Bodily Injury charges on Teo for this incident.

A couple of weeks after her interview, Ms. Ocala was granted a protective order for one year. Issued by a county court judge in Anytown, the protective order stated that her former intimate-partner, who happens also to be the father of her child, could not be within one hundred yards of her, her home, or her workplace for a period of one year. The purpose of this chapter is to arrive at a more inclusive definition of narrative that enables us to consider all that people say when they recount the past to be “normal” to narrative (cf. Labov & Waletzky 1967). The alternative analytic framework that I propose attempts to understand narrative diversity from a theory of speech genres. The complementary ideologies of language as referential and of narrators as the sole owners of their narratives must be analyzed within the social contexts where narratives are not only made, but where they are also regulated by other linguistic ideologies about language use and language users. Building on the linguistic and anthropological notions of indexicality and iconicity, I examine conceptualizations of narrative performance that follow the theoretical work of Butler (1990, 1997) and the empirical work of Hirsch (1998), Ehrlich (2001) and Bauman (1992). Additionally, I further develop the argument that I began in Chapters 1 and 2 regarding the utility of thinking about narrative performance as a textual, rather than an utterance level, performative phenomenon. If, as I suggested in Chapter 2, the uncritical interpretative norm of narrative function brings about the interlocutor’s expectation that the purpose of narrative is to be largely referential, then, the second pervasive ideological framework used to interpret narrative is that of narrator ownership. In this chapter, I first make the argument that interlocutors perceive that the person who experienced and recounts the event at issue is the sole author of the utterance that emerges to depict it. I then discuss the various contextual influences that operate on narrative production to show how and why this expectation though cultural, and where convenient an exploitable ideology, amounts to a linguistic impossibility. The claim here is not that in the absence of these particular ideologies or influences the ‘real story’ would emerge, as language ideologies do not keep us from knowing truth. Rather, they serve as guides in our interpretation of truth.

Representation, ownership and genre

With the affidavit that opens this chapter, the second issue I raised at the beginning of Chapter 2 regarding the relationship between accounts of violence and language ideologies comes to light. Ms. Ocala, in signing the affidavit, becomes the only owner of this official account of domestic abuse. The violence she has experienced in her private relationship, by a man she has had a child with, has become a public document, now archived as institutional memory in the U.S. Civil and Criminal Justice System. It is through this institutional interaction that parts of Ms. Ocala’s personal story make their way into a public record. The record, as part of institutional memory, is available for use in the future in both criminal and civil cases. While the protective order hearing is not a criminal proceeding, violations of the order can result in criminal charges being filed against the abuser. The first two times that Ms. Ocala’s ex-boyfriend, for example, decides to violate the terms of the order, he risks misdemeanor charges; the third time, he can be prosecuted on a felony offense. As a public and legal document, the protective order affidavit can be entered into evidence in civil cases such as divorce proceedings or child custody cases. This record of violence can also serve the state attorneys in the event that they prosecute on a criminal charge involving an assault on Ocala perpetrated by her ex-boyfriend. In a criminal case, the protective order affidavit can enter evidence to suggest a steady pattern of violence in contrast to the notion that the charge for which they are prosecuting is a one-time event. And finally, the state can use the protective order affidavit against Ms. Ocala herself in case she decides to recant her sworn testimony of domestic abuse (see for example, Alex Roth’s 1998 news story “Jailing the victim: Courts force battered women to testify”). Regardless of what the future holds for the affidavit, the point here is that with the interpretive norm of narrative, notwithstanding its co-constructed nature, Ms. Ocala alone will be considered to be its author. As we examine variables found by other researchers to have an effect on narrative production, we will become acquainted with the many factors that influence narrative shape and content. These factors have an impact on narrative development long before we get to the problem this book takes up: the purposeful transformation of a story genre of domestic abuse into a report genre of it.

Narrative and interaction Not long after Labov and Waletzky (1967) published their seminal article on narrative structure and function, scholars began to realize that while certain

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Chapter 3

narrative elements may be consistent across different contexts, the appearance or absence of others is influenced by context. A structural view of narrative – “largely independent of surrounding talk. . .” and conceptualized as “autonomous textual units whose internal parts stand in systematic relationships with one another” (Schiffrin 1994: 285) – does not provide a means by which narrative can be studied to bring to light just how it is affected by both the surrounding talk and by the physical setting of the telling. A structural approach tends to focus on the teller and the tale to the exclusion of the interaction that goes into its making. When interaction and context are not taken into consideration, the influence of the audience for whom the narrative is produced or performed and the setting in which it is performed is left unconsidered. And thus, following Linde (1993) and drawing from Polanyi (1985), I avoid a strictly structural or a solely functional definition of narrative as a particular discourse unit. Keeping in mind there are various approaches to narrative (see Chapter 2) and taking as a point of departure the Labovian structural/functional model, narrative, from here on, will be defined as a broad linguistic category, rather than as a unique discourse unit. That is, there is no one ‘normal’ narrative, but a variety of different types of narratives that are normally produced by narrators and their interlocutors. Therefore, narrative, as the term is used throughout, refers to an open text of either written or oral communication that is undertaken by human beings to engage one another in the purpose of the telling. By open, I mean that narrative is multifunctional, not necessarily confined to just one structure, and perhaps best understood as a social and communicative process as opposed to the singular product of a particular narrator. The conversational analytic approach to narrative emphasizes interaction by stressing the different forms of what analysts call collaboration. But the word collaboration should be used cautiously in analysis of narrative production in institutional and legal contexts. As a noun, collaboration implies either a friendly or a conspiratorial effort shared by at least two people in pursuit of some common goal. Indeed, one dictionary defines the verb, to collaborate as meaning: (1) “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort,” and (2) “to cooperate treasonably” (American Heritage Dictionary 1982). Given the nature of ordinary conversation where people – even when engaged in furious and heated discussions – often talk to one another because they want to, and not because they have to, perhaps it is not surprising that many analysts have chosen to describe all conversation as a collaborative achievement. Conversation then, as a joint accomplishment, is governed by rules for turn-taking and topic-raising, and the claim for ordinary conversation is that these rules ap-

Representation, ownership and genre

ply democratically to all conversing participants. Obviously, the rules, rights and obligations for talking in interview settings are not always the same as those that regulate ordinary conversation (Briggs 1986; Erikson & Shultz 1982; Fiksdal 1990). However as the following paragraphs suggest, there is not a strict dichotomy between ordinary conversation and interview settings either. Focusing on stories told in naturally occurring conversation, Polanyi’s model of conversational story narratives departs from the Labovian model in two significant ways. First, her definition of narrative is broader as she describes it as “kinds of discourse organized around the passage of time in some ‘world’ ” (Polanyi 1985: 9–10). In so doing, she accepts the temporal ordering of narrative clauses as a basic, fundamental and Western organizing principle at the same time she recognizes that in conversation story narratives can be cast in other organizations of time as well. Second, Polanyi’s approach to understanding narrative is much more interactive than is Labov and Waletzky’s. Making use of the conversation analytic approach, Polanyi (1985: 32) finds that American storytellers in ordinary conversation “are under a very strong constraint to make their utterances somehow coherent with what has been going on immediately preceding their talking.” Thus, unlike Labov and Waletzky who actually provide the context for the telling with their elicitation techniques, Polanyi finds that in ordinary conversation, conversationalists have to work to create an opportunity to make their narrative suitable to what has been said already. According to Polanyi, narrators in conversation negotiate their right to an extended floor space, and once the narrator and their interlocutors agree, turn-taking rules are abandoned. Schegloff (1982), however, does not see this agreement as one of abandoning or relinquishing turn-taking rights. About turn-taking, Schegloff (1982: 73) states: . . .the production of a spate of talk by one speaker is something which involves collaboration with the other parties present, and that collaboration is interactive in character and interlaced throughout the discourse, that is, it is an ongoing accomplishment, rather than a pact signed at the beginning, after which the discourse is produced entirely as a matter of individual effort.

For conversation analysts, the primary concern rests with the way human beings organize the way they interact in order to talk to one another in everyday life. The important research from conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974) shows that ordinary conversation is a highly structured social system. Turns for talking are taken and exchanged among conversational participants in such an orderly way that there are few overlaps, interruptions and/or unnecessary pauses or silences.

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As a description and theory of conversational storytelling within the linguistic systems of turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and speaker intuitions of ordinary communicative rules, the conversational analytic approach to narrative implicitly refutes any conventional wisdom that a narrator is the sole producer and subsequent owner of his/her account. It does this by maintaining in focus during the analysis the necessary presence of an interlocutor for the narrator’s telling. Jefferson (1978: 245) argues, “. . .a story not only articulates with turnby-turn talk at its edges, but throughout. Roughly a story is not, in principle, a block of talk, but it is constructed of ‘segments’ via which teller and talk can alternate with recipients.” In a slightly different fashion, this sentiment is voiced by Bakhtin (1986), who complains that “speaker/listener” models of “speech” are at worst a fiction, and at best, only a partial abstract representation of what communication really is. He argues: [a]ny understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely. Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or another: the listener becomes the speaker. (Bakhtin 1986: 68)

The interview, as would be any other speech event, is also made up of interactional and communicative rules. But not every interview is the same, and the rules that govern participants’ communication within each different kind of interview apply to participants in distinct ways. Unlike spontaneous conversation where it is presumed that these rules of interaction put no speaker in the privileged position of determining who gets to talk or of deciding the topics about which the participants will converse, ideal interaction in an interview setting is quite different. Normally, it requires that one person, namely the interviewer, raise topics, ask questions and determine when and whether the other (the interviewee) has supplied a sufficient amount of discourse on a given topic. In other words, in the interview setting, turn-taking, topic-raising, topic-changing and topic-ratification rules are pre-allocated and not supposed to be continually negotiated as would be the case in ordinary conversation. In interviews there exists a set of interactive rules that governs who gets to speak, how the speaker ought to speak, what the topics are that can be spoken about and even how long a person can hold the floor (Briggs 1986; Ewick & Silby 1995). This is an important observation for a legal system that places such a premium on its own epistemological ability to produce truth. Most pretrial legal testimony is created in an interview setting where, in reality, speech gets mediated by a plethora of forces.

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The interview as context While everyone agrees that the use of language both influences the speech event and is influenced by it (see Schiffrin 1994), most analysts and theorists also find defining context for any particular speech event a real challenge (Circourel 1992; Duranti & Goodwin 1992; Hymes 1972). Briggs (1986), borrowing from Hymes’ (1972) ethnography of speaking, notes that context, first and foremost, is the sum total of all factors that are obviously and physically present in the interview situation as well as elements that, though most probably present, are less observable. The obvious factors operating on the production of discourse in the interview are the primary participants (e.g., the interviewer and the respondent), the message form (all signals, both verbal and non-verbal that transmit information), the referent, which Briggs (1986: 40) describes as the “‘something else’ that is represented by the sign vehicle” and the social situation, which entails the place and time of the interview. The less obvious factors influencing speech production are the social and interactional roles of the participants (Goffman 1981), the category or type of communicative event in which the interviewee places his/her participation, and the interactional goals, or “the motivation of each of the participants for engaging in the interview” (Briggs 1986: 41). Scholars in the social sciences (many of whom are cited throughout this book) and others from more humanities-oriented fields (Beverley 1993, 2001; Skowaldoska 2001; Sommer 1991; 1999, 2001) have elucidated the theoretical and methodological problems associated with the cultural expectation that an interview can produce truth. Yet, the humanists just cited question just how well understood the interview as speech event is within the social sciences given anthropologist David Stoll’s (1999) recent book that debunks the literary testimonio of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. The Menchú incident is worth mentioning here, because it illustrates how concepts of truth, authenticity and narrative come together in ways that allow for the impeachment of a narrator’s credibility. Rigoberta Menchú is an indigenous woman from Guatemala who escaped her country’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982, Menchú recounted her story of oppression, resistance and survival to Venezuelan anthropologist, Elizabeth Burgos-Debray in France. As a result of their interview-interaction, the book, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia,1 was first published in French, then later in Spanish in 1983 (Menchú/Burgos-Debray).2 This text has been described as belonging to the Latin American literary genre of testimonio. The genre of testimonio, whose legal connotations are implied in its name, is also worth briefly

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defining. Beverley (1996: 25) cautions against an absolute definition of testimonio, saying any attempt to define it, his own included, must be read as “at best provisional. . .at worst oppressive.” Nevertheless, according to Beverley, testimonio is produced through the necessary and urgent narration of a marginalized person’s life or life story (meant to be a metonymic representation of the lives of people like the narrator), to an interlocutor who hears it as truth and who has the where-with-all and resources to publish it. Menchú’s testimonio is credited with calling the world’s attention to the plight of the Indigenous Mayans, who at the time of its publication, were being systematically exterminated by the Guatemalan army (Arias 1990, 2001). Yet, in many circles, Menchú’s testimonio has been discredited by the publication of David Stoll’s (1999) book, Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans. In his book, Stoll, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Menchú had exceedingly important pragmatic reasons for her narrative distortions (i.e., the survival of an entire ethnic group), maintains that Menchú, as interviewee, was obligated to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The very purpose of his academic work was to show the world the discrepancies between Menchú’s version of the events and the versions of other Mayan survivors. Briggs points out the persistence of social scientists like Stoll. Such researchers uncritically view the interview method as a chief methodological means of gathering data without paying any mind to the caveats inherent in doing so: What is said [in the interview] is seen as a reflection of what is really “out there” rather than as an interpretation which is jointly produced by interviewer and respondent. Since the context-sensitive features of such discourse are more clearly tied to the context of the interview than to that of the situation it describes, the researcher is likely to misinterpret the meaning of the responses. (Briggs 1986: 3)

In the Stoll/Menchú controversy, it is important to point out how Stoll writes a book, also largely the product of interviews, without making much note of the context-sensitive features of a civil war-torn Guatemala. Interestingly, his book is critical of Menchú and not of Debray, who was the interview participant actually responsible for the published document. Menchú narrated her life story orally, and Debray used it to produce a book without bothering to corroborate any of the material – yet only Menchú is held responsible for the factual errors. Meanwhile, the data Stoll uses to contradict Menchú come from a variety of sources, ranging from government archives to interviews with other Mayan

Representation, ownership and genre

peasants. Nowhere in Stoll’s book is it clear why he would believe that either of these sources would provide a version of reality that was not context-sensitive. But taking context-sensitive features into consideration is not an easy task. One of the reasons for the difficulty is that ‘context-sensitive features’ are themselves constituted as a complex array of social elements. For example, we cannot talk about the participants as only interviewer and interviewee without making reference to each person’s gender, ethnicity, social status, age, occupation, level of education, dominant language, and sociolinguistic competence. About these issues, Briggs (1986: 28) states: The greater the distance between the cultural and communicative norms of [interviewer] and [interviewees], the more likely it becomes that this hiatus will generate interpersonal tension and misinterpretation in interviews. This commonly leads to difficulties in inducing the respondent to answer the question, producing seemingly irrelevant or incomplete replies or even silence.

And as we come to understand the complexities of identity (Johnstone 1996; Kroskrity 2001, 1993; Livia & Hall 1997), matters are further complicated because we know that even the social categories of men/women, Latino/Anglo/African-American are themselves too simplistic. Micro-analytic studies of narrative production within interviews show that one cannot presuppose identity based on the assignment of nominal categories. After all, narrative is a communicative mechanism that we use to forge identity (Schiffrin 1996). In the next few pages we will examine the social and contextual factors that have been found to influence narrative production.

The language of the interview A conversational participant’s ability to make a choice of linguistic code (i.e., English vs. Spanish) may play a role in his or her ability to carry out a speech activity successfully. In the case of institutional interviews of survivors of domestic violence, using one language instead of another may either facilitate or impede the narrating process. The very issue of language choice in the interview setting raises two important questions. First, do victims and the authorities who interview them possess the same linguistic and sociolinguistic competence in Spanish and/or English? And second, does variable competence in either Spanish or English have an impact on narrative production? In an interview setting where both victims and authorities may have some linguistic competence in the language of the other, research suggests that there are differ-

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Chapter 3

ent cultural norms and ways of speaking (in the sense of Hymes 1972) that are often misinterpreted in intercultural communication (Scollon & Scollon 1981). Ultimately, does the language of the interview have a bearing on the creation of discrepancies, and how could such a factor be taken into consideration? About the problem of language choice, Marin, Triandis, Betancourt and Kashima (1983) find that Hispanic bilinguals, when answering the same questionnaire twice, first in English and then again in Spanish translation, tend to give different responses to the same questions. These researchers suggest the following two reasons for this phenomenon. The first is the notion of “crosscultural accommodation” or “the giving of a response that is appropriate in the other culture” (Marin et al. 1983: 176). And the second is that of “ethnic affirmation,” or the idea that a person’s second language arouses an awareness of his/her ethnicity that causes a more extreme ‘ethnic’ response. Marcos and Trujillo (1984), from the field of psychotherapy, also note the importance of ‘language of the interview’ in making assessments about clients through their speech. These researchers explain that the Mental Status Exam (MSE), used to assess the psychopathological status of patients, can be misapplied to Latino bilinguals by clinicians attempting to gather information about patients in order to diagnose their mental state. They find that clinicians tend to evaluate Hispanic bilinguals as reluctant, defensive, and depressed, when in fact, their short answers (e.g., “I don’t know,” “I don’t think so,” “No, Sir”), result from the interview having been conducted in English rather than in Spanish. These short answers are really a reflection of non-dominant language behaviors, and are not necessarily related to passivity, submissiveness or unwillingness to speak. As can be imagined, when interviews are conducted in English rather than in Spanish, many Hispanic bilinguals exhibit a significantly higher percentage of speech disturbances, some of which include: autocorrecting, producing incomplete sentences, stuttering, repeating or omitting information. While such disturbances may accurately signal patient anxiety in monolinguals, just as slow rates of speech and long silences often reflect depression, Marcos and Trujillo (1984) state that clinicians must consider that among bilinguals, this type of speech may be due more to a language barrier than to psychological problems such as advanced schizophrenia. As anti-essentialists, Marcos and Trujillo raise a final point worth noting about bilingual communication in institutional contexts. They find that the true condition of the patient can be understood only in terms of the context of the interview. Given the social, linguistic and cultural context operating on verbal production in the interview, the researchers argue that speaking in English, for mental patients, “already a casualty of adaptation” may heighten their

Representation, ownership and genre

psychopathological state, and therefore, these patients may really be “less sick” in Spanish than they are in English.

The participants in the interview In addition to the language in which an interview is conducted, we must wonder who the participants are in the interview setting. Do interviewers, as do victims, self-identify with a particular ethnic group such as Latinos, Anglos, or African-Americans? Are the interviewers men or women? And, how old are they? Also crucial to the context of the narration is whether Latina victims or their interviewers bring anyone along to the protective order application interview. Do interviewers allow others to be present? Or, are they there alone, just as interviewer and interviewee talking about the violence experienced by just one of them? In other words, what other types of co-narrators participate in the construction of institutional memory of domestic violence? Mandelbaum’s (1987) work on co-narration among intimate-partners calls into question the dichotomous speaker/listener model of earlier narrative conceptualizations in a way that echoes the questions I raise above. Her study brings to light two important findings for understanding narrative production. First, in a narrative setting when two people have personal knowledge of an event, there are two possible tellers, and these two tellers can work together or against each other in various ways to create a narrative text for their audience. Second, during narrative production neither teller is the same type of recipient as are others who, while certainly contributing and influencing narrative production, essentially have no knowledge of the event for which their responses aid in fabricating a linguistic representation of it. As we will see in later chapters where interview data are presented, domestic abuse narratives that inevitably become part of pretrial testimony are developed in the sociolegal system in speech events where both knowing participants and non-knowing participants are present. Often women who wish to involve the system in their private affairs, or said differently, women who wish to make their private affairs public through interaction with the Criminal or Civil Justice System, come accompanied by cousins, parents, girlfriends, new intimate-partners, and their own small or adult children. We will see what can happen to narratives in situations where these secondary, yet knowing narrators participate in the process. But beyond the presence or absence of knowing participants, there are other contextual factors that may also have an impact on narrative production.

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Chapter 3

We must wonder what effect interviewer-ethnicity has on the production of Latina women’s narratives of abuse. While conventional wisdom might hold that Latina women would feel more comfortable with fellow Latino/a interviewers, could the opposite actually be the case? In other words, will Latina women prefer to speak with other Latinos, or will they find disclosure of domestic abuse and of acts of family violence more fathomable when speaking to non-Latinos? And then, among out-group and in-group members, do Latina women have a gender-preference for their interlocutors? In addition to misinterpretations caused by a speaker’s (even if somewhat unconscious) identity politics (as in Marin 1983 et al. above), or as a result of a misapplied interpretive professional framework (as argued in Marcos & Trujillo 1984), or because of preferences for interviewer-ethnicity and/or gender, sociopragmaticists find communicative breakdowns occur because of sociopragmatic failure. Sociopragmatic failures are “errors [in interpretation] resulting from non-native speakers not knowing what to say or not saying the appropriate things as a result of transferring incongruent social rules, values and belief systems from their native language and culture” (Eisenstein & Bodman 1986 as cited in García 1989: 7). It is to the issue of sociopragmatic failure that this exposé of affecting factors now turns.

The participants’ norms and ways of speaking Research in ethnography of speaking suggests that misunderstandings, frustrations and failed conversational goals among members of different ethnic groups often result when bilinguals are capable of producing grammatically correct utterances in their weaker language, but are unaware of the rules for using and for interpreting these utterances in specific social contexts (see Gumperz 1982 on contextualization cues). Sources of miscommunication in intercultural conversations can be found at the level of the word, utterance, speech act or discourse. Such communicative breakdowns often result in misunderstandings, the reinforcing of cultural stereotypes, and disharmonious encounters (Scollon & Scollon 1981). García (1989) for example, analyzes the speech act of apologizing in Anglo-Anglo and Anglo-Venezuelan conversations and finds that because of different expectations of politeness, both Anglos and Venezuelans reported that they were discontent with these intercultural interactions. García describes the strategies of Anglos as being highly deferential, and thus maximizing distance and respect. In contrast, politeness strategies of Latinos are more casual and perhaps reflect an attempt to emphasize solidarity.

Representation, ownership and genre

However, norms and ways of speaking and divergent rules of interpretation do not only clash when speakers from different language backgrounds meet to converse. Several researchers have suggested that communicative failures occur as a result of different norms and ways of speaking among men and women (Bogoch 1994; Conley & O’Barr 1990, 1998; O’Barr & Atkins 1980; Tannen 1990; Wodak 1985), between people of different ethnic backgrounds (Bailey 1997; Riessman 1987), and as members of different socioeconomic classes converse (Merry 1990; Wodak 1985).

The ideology of narrator authorship and ownership While we know that no narrative can ever be produced without the presence and the influence of an interlocutor, his/her role in narrative production often is either overlooked or if seen at all, it is viewed negatively as having spoiled the data. As O’Barr and Conley (1996: 132) put it, narratives “. . .simply do not exist outside their telling, but are context- and audience-specific.” Conley and O’Barr (1990) provide evidence that narrators themselves, as lay litigants in small claims court, possess the ideology of narrator ownership. After meeting with judges, these litigants lament not having been given an adequate opportunity to tell their version of events or their side of the story. In short, there is no real story that can come out if only the right conditions existed for the teller to narrate. But, the cultural notion that there could be a true story is so prevalent and tenacious that it creeps into social science studies, which begin with bias theory’s premise that if the incongruent variables of researcher/informant difference (e.g. their race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status) were erased, the real truth would emerge. Briggs (1986: 22), acknowledging that such variables do indeed affect the discourse, nonetheless maintains: The researcher who factors out difference, distorts the entire context in which the response was given and falls victim to the misguided concept of ‘truth.’ The social situation created by the interview does not simply constitute an obstacle to the respondent’s articulation of his or her beliefs. Like speech events in general, it shapes the form and content of what is said.

The science model is not the only academic paradigm where truth and assaults on it get reified. Ironically, revisionist history (see the critique of it in Lipstadt 1994), subaltern studies and post-colonial studies also have created an academic climate that re-institutes positivistic notions of truth by placing

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Chapter 3

heavy emphases on retrieving, rescuing or recovering the voices of oppressed peoples that historically have been denied an opportunity to tell their stories.3 It is, of course, important and necessary to include the experiences of those people whose representations have been excluded from any understanding of social life. Yet, promoting such narrators, like Menchú, in ways that suggest that they are somehow more capable or more authentic narrators serves only to artificially reinforce the narrator-as-sole-author ideology. Such reifications of what it means to have voice and of what it means to be speaking are dangerous, both because they are illusory and because they deny the interactional and negotiated nature of first discourse itself, and then ultimately of representation. Why it may be that both narrators and interlocutors alike possess this ideology of narrator ownership in Western culture is not clear. Schegloff (1982: 174) suggests a psycholinguistic reason: “. . .bits of talk and behavior produced by other than the ‘main speaker’ are regularly discarded when discourse – the stories, the arguments, etc. – are extracted from the tangle of detail which composed their actual occurrence.” Scollon’s (1995, 2001) writings on plagiarism argue for a cultural rather than conversational reason for this interpretive norm. Noting that all discourse is constituted in interaction and through embedding prior discourse(s) in the texts we are currently creating, Scollon (2001: 184–185) finds that accusations of textual appropriation, or plagiarism, “can be viewed as hegemonic and derogatory positioning.” Understood in these terms, cultural notions of textual ownership, like other types of language ideologies, are readily exploitable in the service of maintaining power and controlling representations. Where victims of domestic violence are concerned, the other side of this interpretive coin of narrator ownership is also exploited in hegemonic ways that denigrate the authority of the narrator, albeit quite differently than is the case with plagiarism. Whereas the process of intertextuality, or the connection that one text has with another, provides the discursive links in a plagiarism situation to be reconstructed as appropriation, or the taking of text for one’s own use without permission, it is this same intertextual process that makes not textual sameness, but rather textual difference a problem for victims. Intertextuality is a linguistic fact that is made strange when combined with language ideologies of narrative purpose and function. Interpretive ideologies of textual ownership and textual purpose are exploitable to discredit narrators, when they are used to challenge narrator-credibility. I now turn to a discussion of how textual producers select their packaging so as to gain an immediate framing advantage that suggests that what is being said should be interpreted as factual.

Representation, ownership and genre

Speech genres and social hierarchies As we have seen, several researchers have argued that gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class correlate with narrators’ differential abilities to produce certain types of narratives. Yet others (Blommaert & Bulcaen 2000; Fairclough 1992a, 1992b; Hymes 1996; Wodak 1989, 1995) argue that there is a link between certain discursive practices and the reproduction of social inequality. According to these critical discourse analysts, this connection is precipitated by the way discourse is assessed and judged. These assessments produce and strengthen the power of those whose ways of talking are valued, at the same time they reinforce the powerlessness of those whose discourse is stigmatized. Reframing the empirical evidence that suggests the existence of narrator differences within this theoretical perspective allows for a proccessual understanding of the reproduction of dominance and subordination through the deployment of language ideologies. Now, we can address how it is possible that certain narrative forms point to and assert power, while others index powerlessness in social interaction. Metalanguage, or language used to comment on, critique or refer to language use itself (Mey 1993), used by speakers to positively or negatively evaluate larger discursive units – e.g. entire recapitulations of past experience – suggests that people’s perceptions of prestigious and stigmatized narrative genres, at least in particular contexts, certainly do exist. Bauman (2001: 79) defines genre as “one order of speech style, a constellation of systematically related, co-occurrent formal features and structures that serves as a conventionalized orienting framework for the production and reception of discourse.” Defining criteria for different genres have included examinations of their form, function/effect, content, orientation to the world, truth value, tone, social distribution, manner of use and context of use (for a complete review on work on genre see Briggs & Bauman 1992). Referring to the work of Bourdieu (1977, 1991), Briggs and Bauman concur with the critical discourse analysts mentioned above, noting too that genres are more than just different norms and ways of packaging information. Genres, as they occur in what Bakhtin calls certain “spheres of communication”, are ideologically mediated through their connections to social groups, different types of human endeavors, historical moments, political practices, genders, occupations and the like (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 145). Briggs and Bauman (1992: 148) state: Invoking a genre thus creates indexical connections that extend far beyond the present setting of production and reception, thereby linking a particular

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Chapter 3

act to other times, places, persons. . . Genre thus pertains crucially to negotiations of identity and power – by invoking a particular genre, producers of discourse assert (tacitly or explicitly) that they possess the authority needed to decontextualize discourse that bears these historical and social connections.

In many languages, Spanish being one of them, the word for genre, género, is also the lexical item used to refer to gender. The nexus of genre and gender is often made important by literary theorists who suggest that those literary genres traditionally associated with women, such as diaries and letters, are kept out of the canon of culturally valued literature. Yet, genres such as novels and poems, by virtue of their association with men, are precisely what constitute the canon. In linguistic anthropology, Hirsch draws on Briggs and Bauman, to connect speech genres with gender in a similar fashion. Hirsch examines the discourse of men and women litigants in Kadhis courts who cast their accounts into discursive patterns along gendered lines. Women, according to Hirsch (1998: 30), “entextualize their stories by embedding many features of narrative performance, while men frame their accounts through metalinguistic statements.” Though not overtly suggesting two separate narrative genres – one used by women and the other used by men – Hirsch argues that women’s use of the performed story itself indexes women as a category. That is, performed stories – or those narratives replete with linguistic elements such as reported speech, repetition, shifts in intonation, imitation of accent or dialect of others, evaluations of events, actors and/or the entire narrative – conjure up for the listener, or more technically, index, women’s other speech forms. In other words, the performed story is linked to other forms of speech – gossip, complaining, trivial talk about weddings, luxury goods and entertainment – that are also associated with women in Swahili culture. The cultural expectations for women’s speech forms exist in stark contrast to what is typically thought of as male-oriented speech. Male speech is characterized as interpretations and authoritative pronouncements of politics and religion. Illustrating the complexity of the evaluation of speech genres, Hirsch also shows that while what men and women are expected to achieve sociolinguistically is quite different, a narrator’s strict adherence to prescribed dictates for language use along gendered lines is not sufficient to receive a positive evaluation. Not surprisingly then, Hirsch concludes that women’s speech forms, although appropriate in terms of their gender, are inevitably devalued because these speech forms signal that which is culturally perceived to be less important, less factual, and less precise. In other words, the Swahili prescriptions for

Representation, ownership and genre

men’s and women’s speaking are indeed different, but they are not at all equally valued culturally. So, whatever women say is never as culturally valued or as commanding as what men say. The beliefs about speech described above suggest that the prototype devalued speaker in Swahili culture is a woman, specifically a woman who tells tales. The several negative ideologies about one linguistic form – narrated stories – converge and bolster each other. Emphasis on the trivial and potentially fictional qualities of women’s speech merges with emphasis on its dangerous and disruptive qualities to create the impression that women’s speech is suspect, not to be counted on, and to be suppressed when it gets too close to home, literally. (Hirsch 1998: 67)

Hirsch’s findings are very important for the analysis that we are about to undertake in the chapters that follow here. Though the setting is quite different, the way linguistic ideology influences cultural and institutional evaluations of narratives and narrators is similar. While there is no argument against a connection between genre and gender as the indexical power of each to point to the other is likely to be inescapable and undeniable, my focus throughout the remainder of this book is not on differential ways of speaking between men and women. Instead, I show that Latina women’s accounts, once transformed from a personal story narrative, are acceptable to the legal institutions that serve as their interlocutors. Thus, the abuse account, as told by women, is positively valued only once cast in an official report genre. The fact that it must undergo transformations is evidence of the story genre’s negative evaluation. Polanyi’s (1985: 12–13) distinction between stories and reports provides a starting point for understanding how stories and reports, what I am considering to be separate narrative genres, differ along linguistic and ideological lines: Linguistic texts are produced to accomplish communicative aims. Stories are told to make a point, to transmit a message – often some sort of moral evaluation or implied critical judgment – about the world the teller shares with other people. Exactly what telling a story involves in this respect can be gotten at somewhat indirectly by considering the report, often linguistically identical to the story in terms of event and state information, but differing dramatically in impact. . . A report, unlike a story, is most typically elicited by the recipient. . . or in response to circumstances which require an accounting of what went on. The context of reporting supplies the framework in which the relevance of the state and events reported can be ascertained. In fact, the recipient may even assign relevance to very specific pieces of information whose importance escapes the narrator.

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Chapter 3

Polanyi’s definitions are useful starting points, but they are devoid of any ideological understanding of stories and reports. Hirsch, in contrast to Polanyi, highlights the role of linguistic ideology in the interpretation of women’s performed narratives, but her analysis does not deal with the way institutions broker knowledge, memory and power to determine not only who can speak, but also to determine the form in which a text can be produced. The protective order interview, as a mediating speech event, ensures that abuse is represented adequately according not only to legally relevant categories, but also in linguistically sanctioned genres that command authority. As texts with socio-political and historical connections, genres, like the persons, places, and times to which they make reference, can also be ranked hierarchically in both cultural and societal contexts. Two separate textual genres, when placed side by side, make clear the ability of one to perform some things in culture that the other cannot. Of the stories and reports examined here, only one of these texts has the ability to perform in an official way. Thus, rather than analyzing performance as a constellation of features or a way of telling a story, performance is seen as a textual property. When all elements are taken together, the success of the text rests on its ability to perform a cultural value. The remainder of this book is dedicated to understanding the conundrum that ensues when minority, working and lower, middle-class women’s stories fail to meet institutional needs of representation. As a measure or a means of inclusion of what I will refer to as the profane narrator, the U.S. sociolegal system provides the protective order interview. In this space, the problem of insufficient representation is solved through a process that lends credibility to an account by taking the story out of the report. In so doing, a linguistic conundrum is created: In order to gain authority, the text must undergo a series of changes. These changes inevitably lead the narrator right back to a position of danger. Her authority can be undermined by attacks on what she, alone, has presumably said.

Notes . The English translation of this title is, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian woman in Guatemala. . Substantial controversy has surrounded the content of the book (see Stoll at www.chronicle.com/colloquy and Wilson 1999), and its authorship as well. Some libraries catalog Menchú as the “author”, while others catalog Burgos-Debray. I use the citation convention found in Arias (2001).

Representation, ownership and genre . Burgos-Debray (Menchú/Burgos-Debray 1984: xi) in the introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchú, for example, states: “The voice of Rigoberta Menchú allows the defeated to speak. She is a privileged witness: she has survived the genocide that destroyed her family and community and is stubbornly determined to break the silence and to confront the systematic extermination of her people. She refuses to let us forget. Words are her only weapons.” Then, later in this same introduction, Burgos-Debray (Menchú/Burgos-Debray 1984: xii– xiii) writes: “Her story is overwhelming because what she has to say is simple and true” (emphasis added).

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Chapter 4

Telling and re-telling Latina narrators interacting with institutions

When a Latina victim of domestic violence decides to bring her account of abuse to the U.S. sociolegal system, she has a range of options available to her. She can call the police, phone a crisis center hotline, contact a shelter, make a visit to the D.A.’s Office, put a call into an attorney at legal services, or telephone some other social service agency in her community. Regardless of where she chooses to go initially, each of these places will require a narrative of abuse. At the same time, contact with any one of these institutions will result in a greater likelihood that the woman will be urged to continue on to another site. Once there, she will be asked to give her account yet again. Thus, while entering the system may take place at any juncture, once in, women are encouraged to become involved with other agencies, offices, individuals and interlocutors. Reaching out to one of these service providers for help necessitates institutional interaction through which women become both victims of their abusers and clients interacting with a system. In this chapter, I describe this system, and I analyze its component parts as interactive rather than total institutions (Goffman 1961). In every institutional space, as a linguistic representation of the past is produced, there exists the potential of altering the way domestic violence is defined within the system. Yet, as my ethnography of the protective order interview will show, the system is designed not to be receptive to change, but rather to alter those narrative representations that challenge it. That is, as Latinas’ narratives of domestic violence undergo a process of institutionalization, whereby any power that their diverse narratives might have to interact with and influence institutional memory is limited by the totalizing, albeit temporarily totalizing, effect of institutional interaction. Such interaction ultimately serves as a filter to restrict and remove the communicative resources that Latinas bring to the system.

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Chapter 4

Interactive institutions Goffman describes total institutions, such as asylums and prisons, as those entities in which the participants who comprise them are dependent on one another as each performs in the hopes of making the other (Goffman 1961: 7). The agencies in which women tell their accounts are not entirely total in the sense of Goffman’s definition. For the most part, clients are not required to live within them, they are free to leave them, and, in short they are not physically confined by them. However, Goffman’s concept of the total institution is instructive for understanding communicative behavior within institutional spaces that serve battered women. I define these spaces as interactive institutions, and I consider them to be similar to Goffman’s (1961: 7) definition of total institutions, in that the identities of those who participate in them are also mutually dependent. That is, each participant creates the other’s identity through interaction. These institutions are dynamically and dialogically produced not only in the narrative moment of each individual client, but through the multiple articulations of many clients and through the inter-institutional dialogue that takes place about these clients. In short, institutional memory plays a vital role in the creation of both client- and institution- identities as well as in the expectations of the two as they interact with one another. The institutions in which women narrate domestic violence are designed for the public good. They are service-oriented, social institutions with which people interact for only brief periods of time. As such, these institutions are interactional sites of narrative production, where the narrator, the interviewer and the institution (comprised of both of these participants) are each somewhat vulnerable to the other. Interactive institutions do not exist in isolation, but belong to and fit together as entities of a larger system. People approach interactive institutions with the idea that they will respond to their needs and their concerns. And indeed the purpose of these agencies is to pursue some form of action for their clients. However, even though a whole host of factors might be at play in a particular woman’s case, each institution has only a limited number of responses with which it might deal with a person’s requests for assistance. Unlike total institutions, which are highly structured to ensure around-theclock control and surveillance (i.e., of prisoners, patients or pupils), interactive institutions operate on a more contingent temporality. Thus, hours of operation, although formalized, are limited. Resources are allocated for sometimes serial, but not contiguous contact, and personnel and procedures are modularly open-ended. While people who work in or represent institutions have

Telling and re-telling

specific duties and exist to enact certain functions, on any given day, their ability to work in these capacities depends on the demands of the public they serve, and especially on whether there are clients to deal with. In this way, interactive institutions are dependent upon the public in their capacity to be effective, communicative, procedural or service providing entities. So, unlike ‘the asylum’ as studied by Goffman (1961), the institutions examined here are not an end in themselves, but rather a means used by people to reach their goals. At the same time, such institutions exhibit many features of the total institution that have an important bearing on the communicative and interactional behavior taking place within them. For example, procedures are routinized, personnel is structured in hierarchy, and services are categorized according to a formal-rational framework of bureaucracy. Client and service provider interaction is designated, specified, documented, and restricted to specific areas. For the most part, interactions are also organized according to the pre-allocated amounts of time that each task is supposed to take. Like their total counterparts, interactive institutions are bound to regulations and rules, and they operate with highly specialized principles of communication and action. Just as total institutions overemphasize or totalize certain aspects of the identity of their clients by placing limits on their behavior and controlling possibilities for action, interactive institutions can temporarily totalize client identities, behaviors and communication. By this I mean that the expectations and limitations of the institution may influence how a client is perceived with how what a client does and says is interpreted. But rather than making the other through social markers such as white coats and uniforms, or the structuring of activities including feeding, sleeping and exercise, interactive institutions accomplish the totalizing of client identity virtually through discourse alone. Situated between formal, rationalized and integrated structure and function on the one hand, and open-ended, client-dependent information-gathering procedures on the other, interactive institutions straddle a discursive power context. On one side, the system uses rules and pragmatism to limit the activities of its representatives; on the other side, these same service providers are expected to take some action based on the information that comes from their clients. This divide between representing and reconstituting the institution and serving the interests of clients makes for a precarious communicative field. Mumby and Clair (1997), following van Dijk (1993) describe this relationship between the structure and process of organizational discourse as a problem of revealing the connections between the power relations of participants. For example, organizational discourse in some institutions “simultaneously produces and hides ‘deep structure’ relations of power and inequality”

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Chapter 4

and can function “ideologically to produce, maintain, and reproduce organizational control” (Mumby & Clair 1997: 183). Applying this critical discourse approach to the concept of interactive institutions emphasizes the situation in which organizational structure is reproduced through communication and highlights the multiple relations of power and inequality as a co-constructive process or set of processes. In addition to interacting and engaging with the public, these various institutions are also integrated into a larger system. While the prosecution of a case has always relied upon the coordination of the various arms of the Criminal Justice System, there has been in the U.S. an overt attempt to coordinate services of prosecution, advocacy and safety for victims of domestic violence (see Gamache & Asmus 1999). In principle, the coordination of services, a model of operation first designed by advocates in Duluth, Minnesota and designated the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP), was meant to enhance communication between agencies serving the same victims as a measure of ensuring victim safety. Put more simply, the coordination of services was meant to keep cases from falling through the cracks. However, my ethnographic field experience in both Anytown and Someville uncovered the fact that often a coordinated system’s approach means little more than a written referral for a client to another agency for a different type of service (for critiques of the professionalization of services for women, see Gillian Walker 1990). Such referrals, however, are not insignificant as these interactive institutions, in a fashion similar to the total institution, also follow the lead of external information gathered and processed by other institutions or specialists to define and structure the identities of their clients. In contrast to the way it works in total institutions though, in interactive institutions to some extent, what clients say about themselves, their abusers and their situations sets the stage for authorities to structure the distribution of available services. For this reason, the action taken by interactive institutions is heavily dependent on the communicative abilities of the people who seek them out. What clients say aids service providers in shaping the way services are provided, the actions that can be taken to help them, the content and form of information disclosed, and the types of continued support, if any, service providers believe can be given. In short, interactive institutions depend as much on the voices of the people that seek them out as they do on the knowledge of the staff to act appropriately and effectively. It is in the context of this dependency that narratives of violence are produced, stored and even circulated among institutions (Briggs 1997; Cicourel 1992).

Telling and re-telling

Services for victims of domestic violence In the U.S. one of the most likely institutional responses to domestic violence is the issuance of a protective order. In 1976 Pennsylvania became the first state to introduce protective orders. By 1996 the protective order application process had been instituted in every state in the union, including the District of Columbia (Klein 1996). Klein (1996: 92) claims, “the issuance of these civil orders has become the chief means of protecting victims of domestic abuse in many jurisdictions”.1 It follows then that the most common discursive interaction that victims of domestic violence are likely to have with the U.S. sociolegal system will be with service providers in protective order application interviews.2 Despite the broad formalization of protective orders as a sociolegal response to domestic violence, the application interview is not conducted in exactly the same types of institutions throughout the country. In fact even authorities in Anytown and Someville, though offering similar solutions for battered women, do so from within very different types of legal settings. As stated previously, in Anytown protective order application interviews are conducted in a district attorney’s office, while in Someville these interviews take place in a law clinic.3 Irrespective of this difference, protective orders in both cities form the foundation of the legal response to Latina women’s complaints of domestic abuse. As such, other institutions serving victims of domestic abuse will routinely refer women to protective order interviews to obtain these court injunctions. Below, I describe the institutional settings in which women seek orders of protection in Anytown and Someville. Following this description, I sketch portraits of the wide variety of additional organizations and agencies that commonly encourage women to apply for protective orders.

Anytown: Protective order applications in a district attorney’s office In the United States each county elects its own state attorney to represent the people of the county in the adjudication of criminal activity, where criminal activity is defined as any act the state defines as a crime committed by a person or a group of persons against society. In some jurisdictions, these offices are called the State Attorney’s Office and in others, they are referred to as the District Attorney’s Office. In any case, these offices are structured as bureaucratic hierarchies where the top attorney is usually an elected official, who staffs the office with hand-selected section chiefs to oversee the various units of homi-

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Chapter 4

cide, family violence, theft, sex crimes etc. All who work in the office are state employees or state representatives – attorneys, advocates and paralegals – who attempt to prosecute all felony and any serious misdemeanor charges filed by law enforcement. In Anytown, this office is called the District Attorney’s Office (or, the D.A.’s Office). Historically this office had functioned primarily as the prosecutorial arm of the Criminal Justice System. Based on charges brought by law enforcement, prosecutors open and try criminal cases on behalf of the public. Less than two decades ago this particular office made a specific commitment to provide services to victims of domestic abuse. As part of its mission to address this issue, the D.A.’s Office included paralegal assistance to help women pursue these civil orders of protection to keep abusers away. A total of seven paralegals worked at the D.A.’s Office while I collected these data. At any one time, three or four of them would be in their offices to conduct interviews with clients, while the others would accompany clients to court, along with the assistant district attorney, who was responsible for trying these cases. So, at the D.A.’s Office, there are institutional representatives whose sole purpose is to assist women with applications and petitions for protective orders. The offices of these paralegals are very busy places. The majority of the people in the D.A.’s waiting room, sometimes as many as 25, are women who are waiting to see a paralegal. As is the case at a doctor’s office, the receptionist dispassionately calls out the names of the women who are trying to busy themselves by watching a television with the sound turned down, reading tattered magazines, or quieting their restless children. The receptionist engages clients in a brief screening to make sure that they are in the right place, and thus, in addition to facilitating the application procedure, this receptionist also prevents many clients who are not eligible for an order from waiting all morning for nothing. Even with a heavy caseload (i.e., 300 applications each month and roughly 4000 annually), the paralegals are highly efficient in processing applicants. As an interactive institution comprised of professional employees, the D.A.’s Office has designed a routinized and efficient process with a tendency toward formality in dealing with clients.

Someville: Protective order applications in a pro bono law clinic The Pro Bono Law Clinic, located in one of the courtrooms of the state court buildings in Someville, serves the same sociolegal function as Anytown’s D.A.’s

Telling and re-telling

Office. Unlike the D.A.’s Office though, the clinic is not funded by the state; rather it receives funding from the county’s bar association. The Clinic employs only two full-time staff members, namely, a directing attorney and her assistant. While these two will conduct interviews with clients if need be, their main job is to recruit, train and oversee more than one-hundred volunteer interviewers. This corps of volunteers consists of men and women ranging from attorneys or other types of professionals – most of whom come dressed in smart business suits – to a group of law students in casual attire. Most volunteers donate between three and six hours of their time each month to help survivors file for protective orders against abusive partners. By counting the intake sheets completed by clients prior to their interviews, I found that between 160 and 250 clients visit the Clinic each month. The entire courtroom, however, is not dedicated to domestic abuse or to the Pro Bono Law Clinic. In fact, several other legal activities take place at the same time women apply for orders. For starters, at 8:00 a.m. the doors to the courtroom open and the public files in. People take a seat in that portion of the courtroom that normally faces the judge’s bench. Sitting alongside victims of domestic violence are victims of harassment and other complainants who are trying to use the courts to resolve some civil dispute. In essence, two types of clients occupy the courtroom: (1) new litigants, who have come to begin their application for orders, and (2) litigants that have already filed their petitions, and are in the final stages of their legal experience. The latter group consists of those litigants that have returned to the courtroom for their scheduled hearing. Quite opposite of the ordered environment of the D.A.’s Office, is the courtroom where the Pro Bono Clinic is housed and utilizes every available space. Because of all of the traffic, the atmosphere, more than just occasionally, seems chaotic. Beside the cubicles in which volunteers conduct interviews with domestic violence survivors, there is another space from which the clerk calls the court’s daily schedule of hearings. In the afternoon, the clerk calls litigants who appeared in the morning to come forward to sign orders issued by the judge earlier that day. Additionally, two other legal aid agencies send representatives to discuss legal issues and concerns with indigent clients. Along with these services, child custody evaluators hold meetings with parents and their children in an office adjacent to the clinic. No portion of the courtroom is soundproof, giving way to the possibility of hearing more than ten conversations taking place simultaneously. The Pro Bono Law Clinic is sectioned off from the rest of the courtroom by transparent glass partitions. These partitions allow for victims to be seen by the entire courtroom audience as they talk to volunteer-interviewers. Compound-

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Chapter 4

ing this lack of anonymity is the fact that the area inside the partitions includes a set of adjacent desks where as many as four different interviewers may be speaking to their respective clients at any one moment. In this situation, victims and volunteers cannot avoid overhearing those who are seated next to them. A sharp dissimilarity between Anytown’s D.A.’s Office and Someville’s Pro Bono Clinic lies at the heart of issues of confidentiality and anonymity, which for all intents and purposes, are not a possibility for women at the latter site. The noise levels in the courtroom can get extremely high, even though a bailiff continually scolds the public when voices rise or children begin to cry. Many women are told to take their children outside if they demonstrate difficulty in keeping the little ones quiet. Even once in the middle of an interview, if a woman’s children are acting out, crying or yelling, the bailiff will insist the mother take the child outside. Volunteers begin seeing clients at 9:00 a.m., and they stop accepting new clients at 3:30 p.m., when the doors to the courtroom are locked. While not an everyday occurrence, weekly I saw women wait all day only to be told at 3:30 p.m. that they would need to come back the following morning. In the absence of a receptionist like the one who does the screening of clients at the District Attorney’s Office, it was also the case that some people waited several hours to be told they were in the wrong place. Thus, in addition to interviewing clients and writing affidavits, volunteers and Clinic directors also spend some of their time redirecting people and making referrals to other agencies. As an interactive institution, the Clinic differs in significant ways from the D.A.’s Office. It is less structured, more open, and there is a greater possibility that one will need to return the next day, not having been able to interact with representatives during the initial visit. While there is an element of formality and procedure, especially since these interviews take place within a courtroom, the Clinic atmosphere is much less methodical and uniform in comparison to the orderliness found at the District Attorney’s Office. The greatest disturbance to interviews at the District Attorney’s Office consists of the early morning vacuum cleaner outside the paralegal’s closed office door, while at the Clinic among other things, there is always the possibility of an unexpected interruption by the ever-present bailiff. Also, even though both application sites permit that women be interviewed in the presence of their children, the D.A.’s Office does try to avoid it, but the Clinic volunteers allow adult family members to be a part of the interview. Both children and other family members can contribute to the sense of confusion found in this interview setting. As mentioned previously, the interviewers in both of these settings fill out necessary paperwork so as to file a petition for an order with the court, and

Telling and re-telling

they draft an affidavit on behalf of the victims as part of the application. In both cities, within days judges read these affidavits and issue what are called temporary ex parte orders. This means that the judges act to fulfill the petitioner’s request until the respondents (in these cases the abusers), can appear to tell their side. Between applying for a protective order and returning for a final hearing on the case, victims may interact with several other agencies as well. However, this is not necessarily to say that they began their journey through the system at the protective order application interview. Thus, to better understand how Latina women’s accounts become part of and interpenetrate the sociolegal system’s institutional memory, an ethnographic description of the victim-services’ network is in order. Taken together, the eight other institutions that I describe below constitute one possible version of the agency landscape along which Latina women seek assistance in cases of intimate-partner violence. While other organizations also figure into this network, they are not included in the picture I paint here for the simple reason that I was not able to observe those organizations’ work with victims. The descriptions provided are based on my ethnographic observations, the agency literature that I collected, intake logs that I studied, and interviews that I conducted with agency employees in the field. While some of these organizations do not necessarily require a narrative of abuse in exchange for goods or services, others do, and all of them, at the very least, attempt to elicit an abuse narrative.4

The Women’s Shelter In general, women’s shelters are havens of safety for those who are in imminent danger of intimate-partner abuse. In the U.S. such shelters are staffed by both professionals and volunteers, many of whom have undergone specialized training to learn how to respond to survivors. Shelters are a relatively recent phenomenon. Though shelters are not part of the legal system, they do receive funding from both government and private sources. Some shelter residents wish to begin the process of permanent separation from an abuser through legal proceedings. However, not all women that use shelters are interested in pursuing a legal end. Some women may seek shelter services for a temporary respite from abuse. Anytown has only one shelter for battered women, and in it there are approximately 70 available beds, which are reserved for survivors and their children. This means that the number of battered women that the Shelter can

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Chapter 4

house is greatly reduced by the number of children that are admitted with their mothers. According to this shelter’s literature, it generally provides services to nearly 2300 individuals each year. Sixty-two per cent however, are children. The location of the Shelter is secret, and unless a client has been a resident before, there are only two ways to arrive at this site. A victim can call the police and ask to be driven to the Shelter, or she can call the Shelter directly, and a Shelter worker will arrange to meet her at a near-by library. Victimsafety is the reason behind the Shelter’s undisclosed location, and it is stressed to women that they should not tell even friends or family members where it is. The Shelter is further secured by surveillance cameras at each of its locked doors. Those who want to enter must identify themselves through an intercom system monitored 24 hours a day. The Shelter cannot reach out to victims by advertising its address and inviting victims to walk in. Instead, the Shelter is made available to victims through the advertisement of its toll-free crisis hotline telephone number. The majority of the clients arrives at night, at which time clients will experience an informal intake interview with a night-time Shelter worker. From an interactive framework, the Shelter’s criterion for evaluating client eligibility is quite basic initially: To receive a bed for the night, a woman need only communicate a perceived threat of violence. First thing the next morning, all new clients are assigned to case managers. These case managers work with each new client from her first full day in the Shelter until the day she leaves. During these first interviews, case managers ask victims to tell them why they came into the Shelter, and in so doing, they provide clients with narrative space. Once a client has told her story, the case manager discusses a variety of options that might be pursued for legal help, such as filing criminal charges, obtaining a protective order or filing for a divorce. Case managers also inform clients of where they can turn for financial assistance, such as food stamps, welfare, housing or schooling. The Shelter rules and regulations are discussed, and this generally takes place near the end of the interview. These interviews can develop along a variety of paths that lead to various types of abuse narratives. While most clients do offer narratives of abuse, services are not necessarily dependent upon the client providing a full account of what happened. To some extent, clients have a measure of autonomy in deciding how to tell their stories and how much information to include at the Shelter. Throughout the remainder of their stay, case managers meet with clients on a regular, but as-needed basis. Case managers do not require that the survivors

Telling and re-telling

meet with them daily, but they routinely make themselves available outside of their offices in communal living spaces, where clients can approach them to talk about their concerns or complaints. Subsequent to the initial-intake interview, clients approach case managers to talk about their experiences with detectives, employees at the D.A.’s Office or other social service agencies. Clients also seek out case managers to secure passes to be able to leave the Shelter during the day or to report on phone conversations with their families and friends, who often tell them of the alleged abuser’s most recent behavior. Sometimes case managers will need to summon their clients, because complaints have been made about them by either other Shelter residents or employees. As do many other shelters around the United States, the facility at Anytown attempts to provide an environment of total safety for its clients by making an array of services available on or near the premises. Women can send their children to a school not far from the Shelter. There is an on-site nurse to treat minor injuries and illness, there are counselors and psychologists to talk to, legal advocates who are employed by the Shelter to help victims understand legal processes, and there are divorce attorneys who make regular visits to see victims. The Shelter is a special type of interactive institution, because it incorporates elements of Goffman’s total institution, at the same time it attempts to provide women with a sense of autonomy, independence and respect. As in total institutions where the activities of life – sleep, play and work – are confined to a single space (Goffman 1961), the Shelter, presumably for the purpose of safety, becomes a temporary habitat where (almost) everything one needs to survive is provided. Yet, Shelter inhabitants, to a certain extent, form what Goffman (1961: 41–42) identifies as an echelon system in which “any member of the staff class has certain rights to discipline any member of the inmate sanction.” Of course, women are not called ‘inmates’, as Shelter staffers prefer more innocuous nomenclature such as clients or residents. Nevertheless women who seek safety are asked to rescind some of their independence in order to act in unison with their sister-residents.5 For the most part, residents eat at the same times, agree to participate in the rotation of chores, and observe the same curfew and bedtime hours. If residents are found drinking or taking drugs, their stay is supposed to be terminated. And, if during their stay at the Shelter, women choose not to return one evening, they are subjected to a procedure called exiting, by which they are asked to leave the Shelter for good.

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Chapter 4

The Center for Victims’ Concerns The Center for Victims’ Concerns – located within Anytown’s Police Department – employs case managers who work with all crime victims wishing to make a report or file a charge. Case managers are not police officers or detectives; rather they are social workers from a variety of academic backgrounds (e.g., social work, psychology, sociology), and they perform several different tasks. The official agency literature states that it is the case managers who “debrief victims after their interviews with detectives.” Most of the people served by the half dozen case managers are victims of domestic violence. Case managers, also known as victims’ advocates, talk with survivors, explain the dynamics of domestic violence to them, refer them to other agencies for assistance, field their questions, help them develop safety plans and discuss their options for pursuing other types of legal assistance. These case managers interview between three and ten new clients daily during the summer months. It is during this period when incidents of family violence and crimes in general escalate (FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1997).6 The Center’s statistics show that for a six-month period, from July to December of a recent year, some 500 clients visited the office. In addition to interviewing women who physically walk into the police station, case managers maintain contact with prior clients through phone calls or scheduled appointments. Their jobs also require that they call alleged victims – at a rate of fifty per month – whose names appear on patrol officer incident reports of family disturbances or domestic violence. These calls are part of an outreach program meant to assess risk and provide assistance to victims before the violence escalates. Case managers are required to attempt to reach these victims at least three times before they can consider a case closed. Unlike the situation at the District Attorney’s Office, when clients visit the Center for Victim’s Concerns, they rarely have to wait to be seen by case managers. During my ethnographic observation in Anytown, I found not a single service provider from any of the six other agencies, who referred their clients to the Center. Perhaps as a consequence, caseloads are relatively low at the Center in comparison to those of other agencies. And, the walk-in caseload at the Center is probably largely dependent on other agencies’ willingness to refer their clients to the Center for Victim’s Concerns. At the same time, it is not clear that clients, on their own initiative, would want to visit the Center, because there are no immediate or tangible services and no advertised goods that can be gained from the site.

Telling and re-telling

Center case managers conduct their interviews with clients in two small rooms in the basement of the police station. Under very bright fluorescent lights and encased within eight-foot high, particle board that divides one client’s interview from another, case managers generally begin with a request that each client discuss what has been going on in her intimate-partner relationship. After the client gives an account, the case manager launches into what might be considered educational discourse. The client is shown a packet of information regarding the dynamics of family violence. Included in this packet is a sheet of paper entitled, “The Cycle of Violence”. It depicts the general pattern of family violence on a three part wheel: (1) Tension Building Phase, (2) Explosion Phase, (3) Hearts and Flowers Phase. Under each of these headings, there is a list of specific actions and utterances that are meant to characterize what generally happens in each part of the cycle. From having listened to the details of the survivor’s narrative, the case manager is able to go over the cycle of violence with her in a manner that personalizes the wheel for her specific case. For example, case managers might say, “You mentioned that he does not give you money for yourself or for your children. And here, you see, economic control is a form of abuse.” The case managers at The Center for Victims’ Concerns are the only service providers that I observed and tape-recorded who consistently attempt to educate women about family violence on an individual basis. The Women’s Shelter, for example, held group sessions for residents and ex-residents, in which the commonalities found to be part of the battering experience are discussed, but individual sessions with case managers generally did not include a uniform educational component.7 From my observation, it seems that for purposes of securing a fuller disclosure of abuse, the educational component of the interview is quite effective. It is in this section that clients reveal additional information. As mentioned earlier, there are no immediate or tangible benefits that are well advertised for clients who have visited the Center. Yet, these case managers will obtain police reports free of charge for their clients. In Chapters 2 and 3 I argued that institutional memory has a forward-reaching effect for everyone involved. Such a memory or record, stored in the form of a police report, typically costs between $3.00 and $6.00. If more than one or two police reports were made, obtaining them can become an expensive endeavor for some clients.8 All evidence points to the fact that police reports carry a considerable amount of importance, because service providers in every institutional venue recommend to women that they make a police report for each incident. Often these same service providers even suggest that clients should approach the next institution with a police report in hand.

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Chapter 4

At the District Attorney’s Office, the paralegal’s training manual states that the decision to file for an order of protection on a client’s behalf is not contingent upon the client’s having filed a police report, though my observation shows that paralegals nearly insist that their clients do so. The following examples are excerpts from interviews that show how this presumably unnecessary condition is proposed by paralegal interviewers from the D.A.’s Office:

Excerpt 4.1. Paralegal’s insistence that client make a police report P:

. . .But, but, Ms. García, you need to start making police reports for everything. O.K.? Eh, it doesn’t matter whether a police officer goes out there and tells you that he can’t do anything. O.K. Yes he can do something. He can make a police report. O.K.? Even if he can’t go and arrest your ex-husband, he still has a right, you, you have the right to have a police report made. And if he refuses to make a report, then you call his sergeant. Because you are a citizen, O.K. And the police are there to do their job. O.K. And it doesn’t matter whether your husband is in the military or not. Or whether he’s an attorney, or whatever he is. He still doesn’t have the right to keep doing this, O.K.? But you need to go, today, O.K.? And make the report.

Excerpt 4.2. Spanish-dominant client is told she needs to make police reports P:

Lo que va a tener, lo que voy a necesitar que usted haga Señora Álvarez es ( ) en el departamento de policía y empezar a dar reportes de lo que sucedió esta, esta noche, “¿qué pasó?”. Y tal vez pueda incorporar también lo que sucedió en el mes anterior, o sea, los golpes que él le dio. Porque es necesario que nosotros tengamos reportes de policía para ir a corte en su caso. O.K. Yo le voy a dar mi tarjeta, con el teléfono para que usted me llame pa’tras cuando ya usted haiga hecho estos reportes de policía. Si es posible que lo haiga, o que haga ese reporte hoy, sería mejor. . . ((Translation of above)): What you are going to have, what I am going to need you to do Mrs. Alvarez is ( ) to the police department and begin to make police reports of what happened on this, this night. What happened? And maybe you can incorporate also what happened the previous month, I mean, the swings he took at you. Because it is necessary that we have police reports to go to court in your case. O.k. I will give you my business card, and you can call me back once you have made these police reports. If it is possible that you make them today, it would be better. . .)

The way these paralegals use language in the above examples does not encourage clients to make choices with respect to reporting violence to police. In both cases, it seems that paralegals’ willingness to help depends upon clients’ report-

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ing the incident to the police. We will examine the language these paralegals use to get their clients to make police reports in the next chapter. Here, however, I wish only to make the point that police reports are viewed as a premium among service providers employed by institutions that are heavily dependent upon one another for legitimacy. Suffice to say that the Pro Bono Law Clinic’s volunteers do not make such demands of the clients whose petitions they file. This might be because the Clinic is an organization that exists somewhat independently of, or at least peripherally to, the Criminal Justice System, whereas the D.A.’s Office is an integral part of that system, made up of law enforcement officers, detectives, and prosecutors who work together in complementary ways to adjudicate criminal offenses committed against the state. Arguably, the Clinic’s outsider relationship to the Criminal Justice System has benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, it is a loosely organized institution with volunteers who come and go and thus, who might not have a stake in what other agencies think of their work. The Clinic’s identity is not as intimately linked in dialogue with Someville’s Police Department in the same way the District Attorney’s Office is linked to Anytown’s Police Department. There are no track records of successful and unsuccessful petitions for protective orders that have been filed by the volunteers at the Clinic. On the other hand, as a somewhat independent organization, the Clinic provides a social service without having to worry about being co-opted by the system. It is not clear what type of legitimacy such an arrangement holds for the Clinic in this community. The orders are more likely to be secured without the force of prior discourse with the police, yet these same orders are to be enforced by police. Conversely, the District Attorney’s Office has a great deal of legitimacy with law enforcement precisely because of its direct communication with Anytown police officers. In this way, we see that these institutions interact not only with victims in the construction of identity, but also with and against each other in defining their institutional identity. Returning to the description of the Center for Victim’s Concerns, we find case managers who are quite aware of how their organizational identity depends on police. Because they are supposed to be victim-advocates, case managers find themselves in the difficult, sometimes nearly paralyzing situation of having to advocate for clients within the very organization or cluster of organizations that co-constitute their own institution’s legitimacy. While in the field, I saw that the terms advocate and advocacy, as they are used by service providers to refer to themselves and their work, are confusing and frustrating for both clients and other professionals working with the same population. Much of the

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confusion among Latina clients regarding the meaning of the word advocate, stems from the fact that in American English it glosses as a false cognate with the Spanish word abogado, meaning ‘lawyer’ or ‘attorney.’ Latina clients then, when sent to speak with an advocate, often think they are being interviewed by an attorney. American Heritage Dictionary (1982) defines the noun advocate as (1) “A person who argues for a cause; supporter or defender,” and (2) “A person who pleads in another’s behalf; intercessor.” The English meanings of the word are the ones with which some professionals and activists take issue at both institutional (macro) and interactive (micro) levels of discourse. By macro- and micro- levels of discourse, I mean at large and small instances of communication. Macro-level discourse refers to the social, societal, cultural or institutional level of communication. At these levels of social discourse, institutions establish their identity through mission statements, in their overall hierarchal organization of employees, in the ways they officially define abuse through policy and written laws. Macro-level discourse also refers to the ways in which institutions communicate with and treat other agencies that normally also fall within a social hierarchy of importance. Micro-level discourse, by way of comparison, takes place at lower or more local levels of communication. Normally, we can locate micro-level discursive acts within actual verbal interaction between service providers and clients and sometimes among service providers themselves intra-institutionally. An advocate or one who argues for, supports or defends another can operate in victims’ interests at either or both of these levels. Here we will take up the concerns of critics regarding advocacy at macro-levels of discourse for battered women, and later on in this chapter and in the following, we will examine the challenges service providers confront with respect to their advocacy work at micro-levels of interaction. Many people in my field sites confided to me that the term advocate is a misnomer, because the work that institutional professionals must do is more amenable to their institutions than it is to the needs of their clients. This situation seems somewhat unavoidable given the intricate ways in which these organizations all depend on one another. To truly advocate for a client, an institutional representative would need to call a colleague either within his/her own agency or in another agency to argue that what was done there was not in the best interest of the client. Put simply, it seems nearly impossible to have advocates located within the very system that they are supposed to struggle against. This situation of dependency causes instances in which case managers at the Center for Victim’s Concerns rarely call the Shelter to inquire of Shelter staff why a woman has been exited. They hardly ever call Legal Services to arm

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an argument that suggests that a woman’s divorce should be free even when she has not been able to obtain a protective order. Moreover, I never saw these case managers call a detective to suggest that s/he could have handled a case in a different manner. Instead, case managers at this agency focus on educating clients, on providing them with information and on listening to them. At the interview’s end, case managers help devise a safety plan, discuss legal options and try to answer any questions victims might have. The Center for Victims’ Concerns contains several important characteristics that make it a unique type of interactive institution. First, the case managers personalize each victim’s account through a general and ample definition of abuse as it is understood and depicted by those who study the complexity of domestic violence. They do this discursively by bringing out the formalized, academic understanding of abuse as portrayed in the “Cycle of Violence”. In going over the general, non-specific types of abuse, the case managers manage to glean a more specific, individual portrayal of each woman’s account. Although this agency’s literature states that its primary purpose is to “debrief ” victims after they speak to detectives – in other words, to provide a metadiscursive explanation of what it was that happened in their interviews with detectives – most of what these case managers do is actually quite different. Rather than providing a frame with which to decipher the victim’s prior interaction with institutional representatives, these case managers center on what will come next for victims. In so doing, their discourse with them includes a discussion about where and what they should narrate in the future. The second important and distinctive characteristic of the Center for Victims’ Concerns is that its case managers must wait for victims to come to them so that they can help to prepare them to communicate with other institutions in the system. As an interactive institution, it is quite distinctive from the others because it is designed almost exclusively on principles of advocacy, since it exists really for no other institutional purpose. Yet, because of the fact that it provides no tangible good or service within the system, and most likely, precisely because of its advocacy orientation, it has little real power within this system.

Critical Intervention Teams (CITs) Critical Intervention Teams (CITs) are a separate division of Anytown Police Department. Seven individual teams, each comprised of one uniformed police officer and one licensed social worker, make up the units. Each team is assigned to a specific police precinct located in one of the various geographical

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districts of the city. In contrast to the Center for Victims’ Concerns, where case managers work in the central police station, Critical Intervention Teams work from their cars or, as they say, “in the field.” In other words, CITs visit clients’ homes, and if possible they talk to both victims and abusers. These teams are supposed to respond to incidents that patrol officers and case managers from the Center for Victim’s Concerns consider special cases. Within seventy-two hours of a referral, a Critical Intervention Team ideally should arrange a visit. Similar to the work carried out by case managers at the Center for Victim’s Concerns, the Critical Intervention Teams also talk with victims about their personal situations, mention cycles of violence and the tendency of family violence to escalate. CITs then discuss how they may continue to interact with the family in the future. My field observations showed that the Critical Intervention Teams would drive victims into Anytown’s Central Police Station to make reports or even to the District Attorney’s Office, so that victims could apply for a protective order. This program was newly initiated only six months or so before I began collecting data. This novel approach to victims’ services seems an attempt to intensify institutional interaction with victims who might not, for one reason or another, have normal access to the sociolegal system. These service providers do not wait for the victims themselves to initiate a continuation of their interaction with the system, rather they seek to maintain victim participation by taking the institution to their homes. At the same time, given the special nature of domestic violence as a crime and the safety issues related to intimate-partner abuse, the Critical Intervention Teams’ interaction with clients may be restricted or influenced by the presence or proximity of abusers. Some victim-advocates urge the importance of recognizing that when a woman takes her private account into the public sphere, that is, away from her home, it is at a time when she feels most capable of doing so (Dunn 2001). This agency’s strategy to go to the victim despite its unique challenges, offers victims a new way of interacting and new levels of interaction with the system.

Legal Services Anytown Legal Services is a state and federally funded legal assistance organization that is staffed with attorneys who specialize in offering legal aid to indigent clients. This organization deals with a variety of cases focusing on issues ranging from housing and employment to social security, family law and disability. In accordance with an agreement with Anytown’s District Attorney, clients with protective orders seeking a divorce are priorities for the Legal Services staff.

Telling and re-telling

Women who have protective orders and file for divorce at Legal Services do so free of charge. Even their court fees are waived. Private attorneys charge considerably more, and women often will not attempt to file for divorce, because they simply do not have the money to do so.9 In a few cases, Legal Services attorneys will represent clients on protective order applications as well, taking only those cases that are referred to them by the District Attorney’s Office, which for one reason or another, has chosen not to file.10 Such cases tend to include conflicts of interest, or those cases in which women try to file after their abusers have already been accepted as complainants. Other women, who are referred to Legal Services have murky cases that personnel in the District Attorney’s Office has deemed too difficult to win.11 Murky cases that suggest a less-than-clear victory are those where there has apparently been what institutional authorities call mutual combat between the alleged victim and abuser. If the case does not involve complications, final divorce hearings generally are scheduled two months after their initial interview. Legal Services offices are dispersed throughout the city. Data for this project were collected primarily in Legal Service’s downtown office. One attorney in that office specialized in family law and divorces, and thus his caseload offered the most opportunities for tape-recording women with protective orders who were filing for a divorce (n = 24).12 Divorce cases are highly standardized, perhaps so as to serve people in greater numbers. The attorney with whom I worked most closely at Legal Services had two hundred open cases at the time this research was being conducted. Clients are scheduled for appointments at Legal Services, so the number of clients interviewed on any particular day varies considerably, because the attorneys set their own schedules. As an interactive institution, Legal Services is not a site in which narratives of abuse are directly elicited. Issues regarding child custody, child visitation and the division of property and debt are most often the topics of discussion in these interviews.13 In AnyState, one can file for a no-fault divorce, without giving a reason for the divorce petition. Even though violence may be the primary motive for a divorce, a narrative of abuse generally does not figure prominently in the case – especially if the divorce is uncontested by the husband. Also it might be that because the interviews take place some two months after separation and application for a protective order, there is less of a need to talk about violence. Hence, even though the primary function of Legal Services is not to capture and record accounts of abuse, given the legal needs (often urgent) among indigent clients with protective orders, Legal Services is a site of unsolicited, if infrequent narratives of violence.

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One issue around which unsolicited narratives of violence may occur is child custody, particularly in cases where spouses disagree with their victims’ demands. If for example, a woman requests primary custody and her estranged spouse refuses to comply, the woman’s attorney could use her protective order application to argue that the husband should not be a primary custodial parent. Undoubtedly, however, the abuser’s attorney will recommend that his client not petition the court for primary custody, because he will have little chance of winning this battle if the woman has a protective order. AnyState encourages divorcing parents to enter into amicable agreements on child custody issues regardless of purported abuse. In Anytown, court officials (such as court clerks and attorneys) strongly suggest that divorcing parents attend mediation sessions where agreements to child visitation can be reached. If the children have not been abused, the divorce attorneys will recommend that the woman request primary custody of the child and that she settle for standard visitation for the father.14 Even if survivors are not in favor of an abuser’s having standard visitation rights to the child, attorneys will strongly advise their clients to agree to them. Attorneys argue that the divorce will be easier to achieve, because the courts tend to frown upon a child’s not having access to his/her father.15 Legal Services is a site where women are encouraged to use family relationships in the context of the legal system to gain certain benefits for the future. Residual strategies of encouraging women to establish proof of paternity for their partner, for example, may provide the state with future opportunities to intervene more effectively in incidents of domestic abuse. If, for instance, a woman has set up visitation with her ex-husband and he abuses or threatens to abuse her, she may then have additional legal ammunition to take her case back to court.

Immigrant Survivor Project The Immigrant Survivor Project (ISP) is a law clinic run by attorneys, law professors and law students. Two directing attorneys oversee the project, and a secretary organizes the law students and the interpreters that work on individual cases.16 The ISP’s mission is to aid immigrant victims of intimate-partner violence who wish to apply for residency in the United States under the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. While a detailed review of the Act is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth noting that at the time the data were collected, immigrant women could petition Im-

Telling and re-telling

migration and Naturalization Services (INS) for legal status if they could show that (a) the abuser was a spouse, and (b) he was a legal resident who had the right to apply for residency for his family members. These two conditions were crucial elements needed by immigrant women to make an argument for legal residency. Attorneys representing battered immigrant women needed to convince INS that the abuser was able to control his wife’s mobility and economic situation, thereby rendering her completely dependent on him. INS required that this argument be combined with a narrative stating that the abuser made promises to file for his partners’ legal papers if she obeyed him and took seriously his threats to have her deported. Other requisite information in the INS narrative included a statement that if women went back to their countries of origin, there would be no protection for them against spousal abuse. As an interactive institution, this law clinic is a context for risky, yet potentially very fruitful business for Latina immigrant survivors. The aspects of the identity of a battered woman that this institution needs to make involve issues that go beyond battering itself, as other elements of legality and illicit behavior are brought into the mix. Attorneys explained to me that while they saw this ability to apply for immigrant women’s legal residency through the Violence Against Women Act as a step in the right direction, they found it perplexing and difficult in many ways as well. For one, attorneys could take only those cases that they are rather sure of winning, as obtaining anything short of legal residency only served to alert INS not only to the presence, but also to the whereabouts of an illegal person.

Someville’s Mediation Court Mediation Court is a social service component of Someville’s court system. Court mediators conduct interviews with victims and their abusive partners in order to help the couple come to mutually satisfying agreements regarding custody and visitation of their children. All protective order applicants who have children with their abusers are required to attend a mediation session with a counselor/mediator before the judge will hear the case. Once the mediator talks to the victim and interviews the father separately, s/he then talks to both simultaneously if the couple agrees. The three mediation counselors that agreed to work with me during fieldwork were Latinos, who spoke both Spanish and English, and they never needed to use interpreters with Spanish-speaking clients. I do not have data on the number of victims interviewed by court counselors. Survivors of do-

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mestic violence, however, comprise only a portion of the total clientele assisted by court mediators. These mediators also work with families who are involved with the courts for other reasons, such as child custody and divorce. While Mediation Court is another common site where victims of abuse can interact with service providers, these service providers do see different types of clients as well. Mediation services are that part of the sociolegal system that acts as an institutionalized reminder to abusers and victims that they are also parents. As such, its representatives interact with clients in the hope that they will be able to help them deal with each other respectfully with regard to their mutual children. From Mediation Court, protective order applicants and abusers are given a time to appear in court, where final orders will either be granted or denied.

The Protective Order Hearing The Protective Order Hearing is the final step in the protective order application process in both Someville and Anytown. Even at this late stage of the process, it is unclear as to whether women are fully aware of what to expect. Again, there are distinctions in how these hearings are carried out in different U.S. states. Regardless of jurisdiction however, it seems that everything leading up to this stage is designed so as to avoid a hearing all together. Hearings are held in both Someville and Anytown only if abusers appear in court and refuse to agree to an order. In other words, if abusers contest the order (i.e., if he is not in agreement with what it stipulates), the domestic couple appears in court to tell their respective sides to a judge. In Someville, generally the parties appear pro se, a legal term meaning that they represent themselves in court. Yet in Someville as ethnographic observation revealed, if anyone were to appear with an attorney, it was more likely to be the abuser than the victim. The judge in Someville, an Anglo male, presides over a somwhat specialized courtroom. It is specialized because he is designated as the only judge in the courthouse who will hear all the protection from abuse and civil harassment cases. The Anglo male judge speaks no Spanish, but must hear all cases. When cases of Spanish-speaking litigants appear on his calendar, a state-certified interpreter is appointed by the court for the survivor and/or the respondent. Statistics collected by this court’s central office indicate that during a six-month period in a recent year, the judge held 192 protective order hearings in Someville. In Anytown women are represented by one of the assistant district attorneys, and a presiding judge assigns cases as they are called from the docket to

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any one of the judges on the bench in civil court that day. The majority of Anytown’s judges are Anglo-Americans, but survivors may appear with their cases in front of the few Latino or African-American judges as well. These agencies of the sociolegal system are merely an example of the different kinds of sites and the varied types of interactions that Latina women may encounter. Seeing this system as a set of interactive institutions, the protective order hearing is ideally, but in practice, not necessarily the beginning of the last phase of interaction between institutions and victims seeking respite from abuse. At the hearing, a protective order is either granted or denied. If granted, victims can seek free divorces from Legal Services. But regardless of the outcome, there is relatively little more than the protective order that the Criminal and Civil Justice System offers to solve this social problem.

Interviewer influence and the chain of narrations Within each of the agencies described above, there is a need to hear an account of abuse from survivors that is relevant to the site of the telling, but at the same time, each individual institution hopes that in the others, a coherent account that stands the test of consistency can be created. These separate, but connected institutions taken all together form a greater narrative space where accounts are not only to be pertinent to the bureaucratic matter at hand, but they should also show uniformity across contexts. In light of these somewhat contradictory demands, survivors’ narratives become vulnerable to influence and alteration along this chain of production sites. The diagram below in Figure 4.1 is provided to illustrate two main points. First, it suggests the path a narrative takes as a client moves through the system. And second, it is meant to show how various institutions build on, take from, and sometimes ignore elements of narratives that were created in other places. The bold square is the protective order interview, where the survivor tells her story to the paralegal interviewer, and it represents the emergent oral text produced by the interviewer and the victim. The verbal exchange, or the oral version of the account, provides the source text from which the affidavit is written. The smallest circle (marked as “A”) represents the affidavit. The other circles characterize possible prior and/or subsequent dialogues between a victim and a host of other interlocutors who can leave their mark on the narrative. As we saw earlier, as part of their advocacy work, the case managers at the Center for Victim’s Concerns are able to listen to a story narrative of abuse and stress for the teller those points that legal authorities might consider more

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Immigrant Survivor Project

Patrol Officer Women’s Shelter

Center For Victims’ Concerns

A

Judge on P.O. Application

Assistant D.A.

Figure 4.1. Possible narrative path through the sociolegal system

reportable. Obviously, the account is likely to have been affected by this type of highlighting before a victim even arrives at the protective order interview. So, if the woman had not considered an act abusive prior to being told by an institutional authority that such behavior constitutes abuse, she might begin to incorporate the information of her newly acquired definition of abuse from that telling on.

Advocates doing inter-institutional gatekeeping Earlier in this chapter, I argued that advocacy can take place at both micro and macro levels of institutional communication. Additionally, the point was made that an individual service provider’s ability to advocate for his/her client is inevitably compromised by his/her reliance on other institutions for legitimacy and position within the very system against which they must sometimes fight either in or on behalf of their clients. At this point, we must complicate the equation even further by introducing the conflicting, but not necessarily opposite notion of gatekeeping, which is also ever-present in most of these institutional interviews. In each institution agency representatives, who are employed to help battered women, are required to play a role that is composed of the separate and somewhat contradictory parts of advocate and gatekeeper (Erikson & Shultz 1981; Fiksdal 1990; Grossen 1996; Grossen & Apothelez 1998; Scollon & Scol-

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lon 1981; Trinch 2001a). On the one hand, institutional service providers are hired to act for the benefit of the victim as her supporter, defender, and intercessor. On the other hand, these service providers are assigned the responsibility of determining which clients are eligible for the limited goods (e.g., bus tickets, free police reports and the like), resources (e.g., beds at the shelter), and legal services (e.g., protective orders or free divorces) that the institutions for which they work can provide. Gatekeeping is also enacted at micro- and macrodiscursive levels, as service providers regulate victim-passage through their own and through other institutions. I would argue though, that gatekeeping also takes many forms and has a range of consequences. In general, agency representatives that cooperated with the project would be characterized as advocacy-oriented. In most instances service providers were very determined to secure for their clients what their institutions could offer them. Indeed, the mission statements of the various programs, as well as the employee-titles (e.g., victim’s advocate, paralegal advocate, legal advocate) form just a portion of the evidence that could be put forth to argue that program directors and their employees consider the work they do to be of an advocacy nature. These programs hire people or solicit the help of volunteers, who are interested in working on the frontlines of social services to assist lay people as they navigate through the bureaucratic maze of institutions. According to both frontline service providers and their agency directors, these types of advocacy programs were established in response to grassroots organizations that raised community awareness about issues involving genderrelated violence such as sexual assault and domestic battering. Members of these grassroots organizations argued that victims’ advocates were needed for two major reasons. First, the individuals to whom advocates are supposed to provide assistance are survivors of some type of violence or trauma. Thus, because of their victim-status, these individuals are perceived by advocates as requiring some extra help and encouragement to complete institutional tasks. Second, people within the grassroots organizations argued that existing institutions such as police departments, district attorney’s offices and hospitals, either ignored or were less than responsive to the needs of survivors of gender-related violence. So, advocacy programs were put in place in order to give assistance and aid to victims both within and between agencies. As we have seen from the description of several different agencies, much of the advocacy work done for survivors of domestic violence involves making referrals to other agencies. The referral system gives way to the inter-institutional dependency that I spoke of earlier, because it creates the need for agency employees to cooperate with one another in order to provide complementary as-

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sistance for mutual clients. However, at times one can also note the existence of inter-agency animosity between employees from different institutions. And seemingly, one of the main factors feeding such resentment is the dual role of advocate and gatekeeper that service providers in each institution must play. When a service provider refers her client to another agency, there is yet another institutional employee who interviews the client. Once again a cocreated narrative is produced, this time containing information that this service provider needs to do his/her job. Often, because these agencies receive federal, state and municipal funding, they are restricted to work with only those people who meet institutional definitions of battered women. For this reason, some referrals inevitably result in dead-ends. The service provider, who referred a client to an agency that turns her away, then ideally must be able to turn around and advocate for the client in that agency that has determined that the client is ineligible for certain goods or services. It is at that point where there is no opportunity for the client to advance through the system that interagency cooperation seems to break down and may even create tensions and rifts between institutions. Over time, this type of inter-agency advocating can create an atmosphere of competition as opposed to collaboration, as both parties perceive that the other has called into question his/her knowledge of the job. This observation should be kept in mind as data are presented, because employees are constrained by rules, regulations and institutional definitions. In other words, their interaction with victims is largely defined by the possibilities and the limitations outlined by the institutions for which they work. But, once victims become involved with one of these institutions, it is highly likely that they will tell their stories in as many as five other agencies. This analysis, as well as the victims’ narratives themselves, are informed and formed by the interlocking nature of the various organizations that they enter in search of assistance. In the context of inter-agency cooperation and animosity, these types of data can address why clients disclose certain types of information to some agency representatives, while they refrain from disclosing information to others. For example, could it be that some service providers conclude that clients are eligible for services in a neighboring organization, precisely because the client revealed a particular incident? And what happens if the client does not offer the same information in the next advocacy/gatekeeping interview? Because interactive institutions are dependent on client information, they must deal with and shape themselves according to what clients need. However, as we will see, this situation creates a tendency on the part of interviewers to

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try to control what clients say, to formalize client expectations, and to constrain certain aspects of their identity, all the while making other aspects of their identity more salient. Total institutions depend much less on what their clients say or do in order to function on a daily basis. Quite dissimilar from institutions that both rely on and act on the actions and words of their clients, total institutions merely provide a regimen of services to be considered successful or effective. Yet, as do total institutions, interactive institutions also attempt to exact some measure of control over clients, particularly with respect to their linguistic behavior.

Getting access in the interactive institution Given the interactive nature of the institutions in this study, getting access as a researcher does not just mean getting in. My identity as an ethnographer interested in exploring the way Latina women narrate abuse made me, as were the institutions themselves, also dependent on the presence of clients. In addition to securing the permission and trust of paralegals, volunteers, attorneys, case managers, and shelter workers, I also needed to obtain informed consent from clients themselves. Degrees of cooperation and levels of willingness to collaborate with the project varied from agency to agency. During the first six months of data collection, I was taping in some agencies, observing in others, seeking out more cooperative venues and trying to convince certain program directors within individual agencies to cooperate more fully (i.e., to permit tape-recording rather than just observation). I also attended two volunteer training programs conducted by social service organizations that work with victims of genderrelated violence. Soliciting agency cooperation was a time-consuming endeavor, because most agency directors were slow to agree to cooperate. Excuses ranged from the argument that the presence of an outside observer would have a negative influence on clients’ willingness to disclose information, to the possibility that my data would include exculpatory evidence that, if subpoenaed, could weaken the prosecution’s case. For obvious reasons, larger institutions serving many victims daily were priority agencies for me. With the exception of interviews conducted by police officers, detectives and prosecuting attorneys, I was eventually able to tape-record interviews with victim-survivors in the other key agencies dedicated to dealing with domestic violence in both cities.

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Recruiting research participants: Getting consent Once I had obtained permission to tape-record in various institutions, individual women were approached immediately preceding their interviews with each service provider. In most cases, women were selected for participation according to the position of their names on the intake list. It was impossible to tape-record all the survivors visiting some agencies, because there were often, at least in the summer months, between five and twenty-five of them on any given day. By and large, most of the clients who I approached for the study were willing to participate. A few requested that I not tape-record, but said they had no problem with my observing the interview.

A typical day in the field On a typical day in the field, I would call the case managers at the Women’s Shelter and ask them to tell me how many women had entered the Shelter the night before. If there were Latina women who had come into the Shelter, I would go there first, obtain consent and tape their interviews with case managers. The Women’s Shelter was always a good place to start, because for women who went there, it was often the first or second point of contact with the sociolegal system. That is, women that slept at the Shelter the night before were usually brought there by patrol officers shortly after an abusive incident. Once in the Shelter, shelter workers and case managers would refer women to the police station to file charges with a detective, who might then send them to the Center for Victims’ Concerns to talk with an advocate or to the District Attorney’s Office for a protective order. In Someville, because the Domestic Violence Clinic was located in the State court building, I went there every morning for the 8:30 a.m. docket call. If none of the protective order cases that I had tape-recorded in the Clinic was going to court for a hearing that day, I would stay in the Clinic and obtain consent of survivors who had come to apply for a protective order to record them. If one of the protective order cases on my list was going to a hearing, I would accompany the couple first to Mediation Court and then on to the courtroom to tape the hearing. Just as survivors were given the opportunity to decline participation, so too were service providers. Because of the delicacy involved in collecting this type of highly sensitive data, I worked only with service providers who were not threatened by my presence or by the presence of a tape-recorder. Only occa-

Telling and re-telling

sionally, I refrained from working with some interviewers, even though I had the permission of the director of the organization to make recordings. One way to ensure that clients were comfortable while speaking in the presence of a recorder was to make sure that the service provider had no problems with my recording. At the D.A.’s Office, all of the paralegals participated in the study. However, there were a few times when one or two paralegals asked that I not sit in on a particular day. My only option was to respect such wishes. In the end, nine agencies eventually allowed me to tape-record, but the bulk of the data were collected at the Center for Victims’ Concerns, the District Attorney’s Office, Legal Services, the Women’s Shelter and the Pro Bono Law Clinic. At the macro-level of organizational interactions with lay people, institutional rules, routines and regulations function to put women in a place where they can be shaped into the type of clients (here, mainly victims of domestic violence) that these institutions can work with both individually and collectively. We now turn to this process of making the victim and, subsequently, to the institution’s making of help that takes place at the micro-level of conversation. It is at the micro-level where it becomes clear that institutional goals must be negotiated with the goals of clients. This process of negotiation involves not only the participants’ power to create identities like victim and client, but also their power to (re)create and transform meaning.

Notes . The role protective orders serve in deterring domestic abuse is quite difficult to gauge. As Buzawa and Buzawa (1996) suggest, it is impossible to tease out from the many violence deterrence programs those which work and those which do not. Such violence determent programs include, but are not limited to: (1) education of the public in strategies for conflict avoidance, (2) new legislation categorizing domestic violence as a criminal offense, (3) advertising a pro-arrest policy and (4) availability of police officers to enforce restraining orders (Buzawa & Buzawa 1996: 11). . But see Ptacek (1999) where it seems that in some jurisdictions, women are left to their own devices to fill out forms necessary to petition the court for a protective order. . In the following chapter, I describe the process of applying for a protective order in both of these sites in greater detail, analyzing them as speech events and looking closely at the way the discursive process is carried out to produce a narrative of violence. . Most of the descriptions of these agencies are from Anytown, as my data collection efforts in Someville were confined to the courts. . Citing MacLeod (1987), Profit (2000: 24–25) writes, “Shelters shifted from an ideology of feminism and empowerment to a professional service delivery model; from an acceptance

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Chapter 4

of funds from like-minded sources to the acceptance of funds from varied sources that required compliance with specific dictates; from collective models of working to a hierarchical organization; and from a philosophy of self-help among women to the hiring of primarily white, middle-class professionals. . .Abused women who, according to feminist ideals of the battered women’s movement, were viewed as experts on their own lives, became “clients” in need of professional expertise and intervention.” . FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1997 indicate that the total number of reported crimes tallied for years 1993–1997 shows that a higher percentage of crimes were reported in the month of July, while the lowest percentage of crime is reported in the month of February. . However, the Women’s Shelter did provide individual counselors and therapists to survivors, and it may be that clients were instructed in the dynamics of family violence in individual counseling sessions. . In both cities many clients reported to have absolutely no money on them at the time of their interviews. . Even private attorneys who work with indigent clients often charge as much as $500. . This is rare, however, because of the industry-wide constraint on the duplication of social services, since the District Attorney’s Office handles protective orders free of charge. . These cases require more individual attention than can be given by the assistant district attorney, whose docket includes between 15 and 30 protective order cases a day. . I also accompanied attorneys to court to observe divorce proceedings. . Because the majority of the people applying for legal assistance are very poor, few own property. Hence discussion of property between attorneys and clients is also minimal. . The interviews reveal that as a group, women are ambivalent about the father’s right to visitation. Some of them state that the alleged abuser is a good father, and they have no problems with standard visitation. Others are less enthusiastic about standard visitation. . In both field sites, service providers encourage women to have the paternity of their children established. In many cases, women seem reluctant to do this, often times fearing that the alleged abuser will then have more power to take the children. Service providers explain to women that in the eyes of the state, it is better to establish paternity and visitation, because any violation of visitation is prosecutable. Moreover, unless paternity is formally established, the children’s rights to the father’s resources remain dubious and unclear. One service provider would tell victims that they needed to establish paternity, because without it, if the father were to win the lottery, the child would have no rights to the winnings. . The interpreters who work in this clinic are volunteers. To my knowledge, the clinic never employs professional or certified interpreters. In one of the interviews that I taperecorded, the mother of one of the clinic workers was called in to interpret for a student attorney who needed to interview an immigrant survivor who spoke no English.

Chapter 5

The protective order interview A linguistic tug-of-war for representation

As hundreds of women apply for protective orders at the District Attorney’s Office and the Pro Bono Law Clinic each month in Anytown and Someville, the institutional interviews in which they engage serve as a communicative means to a particular legal end. At the same time, these interviews also function to define, for both individual women and for society at large, what domestic abuse is and how it should be responded to. Despite the fact that this task involves certain variations, within the process of such definitional work, these institutions manage to maintain their own authority and to determine how abuse ought to be officially represented. So, while Goffman’s total institution is about the overemphasis of certain aspects of its clients’ identities by structuring client behavior, the sociolegal institutions such as the D.A.’s Office and the Pro Bono Law Clinic structure their interaction with women so as to be able to discursively construct for them a particular identity, namely that of victim of family violence as the state defines it. Furthermore, these institutions have the final say in how victims’ accounts should be fashioned and framed before they can be stored as institutional memory. Ostensibly service providers are employed to assist women, but as we saw in Chapter 4, they are also expected to block and facilitate the passage of women in accordance with their determinations of them as eligible clients. On the one hand, interviewers perform their duties by establishing that which is legally relevant and linguistically appropriate. But on the other hand, women come in search of help with their own ideas as to what counts as abuse as well their own notions regarding the most adequate ways of representing it. When battered women meet with service providers, and it becomes clear that their definitions of abuse and their narrative methods of depicting it diverge, the need for negotiation and compromise arises. What is not always clear though is whether the linguistic work that service providers do with clients instructs them to ‘talk the legal talk’ or whether such linguistic work imposes on clients a legal/linguistic standard that is foreign and uncomfortable for them.

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Chapter 5

Take for example, the excerpts we examined briefly in Chapter 4 (Excerpts 4.1 and 4.2) repeated below for ease of reference in Excerpts 5.1 and 5.2.

Excerpt 5.1. Paralegal’s insistence that client make a police report P:

. . .But, but, Ms. García, you need to start making police reports for everything. O.K.? Eh, it doesn’t matter whether a police officer goes out there and tells you that he can’t do anything. O.K. Yes he can do something. He can make a police report. O.K.? Even if he can’t go and arrest your ex-husband, he still has a right, you, you have the right to have a police report made. And if he refuses to make a report, then you call his sergeant. Because you are a citizen, O.K. And the police are there to do their job. O.K. And it doesn’t matter whether your husband is in the military or not. Or whether he’s an attorney, or whatever he is. He still doesn’t have the right to keep doing this, O.K.? But you need to go, today, O.K.? And make the report.

Excerpt 5.2. Spanish-dominant client is told she needs to make police reports P:

Lo que va a tener, lo que voy a necesitar que usted haga Señora Álvarez es ( ) en el departamento de policía y empezar a dar reportes de lo que sucedió esta, esta noche, “¿qué pasó?”. Y tal vez pueda incorporar también lo que sucedió en el mes anterior, o sea, los golpes que él le dio. Porque es necesario que nosotros tengamos reportes de policía para ir a corte en su caso. O.K. Yo le voy a dar mi tarjeta, con el teléfono para que usted me llame pa’tras cuando ya usted haiga hecho estos reportes de policía. Si es posible que lo haiga, o que haga ese reporte hoy, sería mejor. . . ((Translation of above)): What you are going to have, what I am going to need you to do Mrs. Alvarez is ( ) to the police department and begin to make police reports of what happened on this, this night. What happened? And maybe you can incorporate also what happened the previous month, I mean, the swings he took at you. Because it is necessary that we have police reports to go to court in your case. O.K. I will give you my business card, and you can call me back once you have made these police reports. If it is possible that you make them today, it would be better. . .

In reviewing these excerpts again, we must question whether such demands of victims serve exclusionary ends. Are these paralegals using police reports as a way of controlling victim-access and admittance to their own institution by making clients form associations with those other institutions upon which the District Attorney’s Office depends for its own social and legal legitimacy? If indeed this is the case, then the legal/linguistic work that these paralegals do at the local level of interaction is of a gatekeeping nature. But, seen in a different

The protective order interview

light, the paralegals’ telling women ‘exactly’ what they must do in order to be successful within the legal system could be viewed as a blatant act of advocacy. If knowledge is power, then making women aware of the importance the system places on police reports would be highly advantageous to them in their pursuit of legal solutions. Elsewhere (Trinch 2001a), I discuss advocacy and gatekeeping as they relate to empowering women to make their own choices and conversely, forcing on them the options that the system can currently offer. The dichotomy of empowerment and imposition is referred to as victim- versus system- oriented intervention (Mills 1999; Shepard 1999). Victim-centered services are those that see women as experts of their individual situations, encourage women to devise and personalize safety plans of their own, and help restore women’s confidence by validating their feelings and concerns. A system-oriented approach to victim-services prioritizes the needs of the institution in its work of processing cases, securing court victories and probably serving as many people as possible. Although gatekeeping cannot be equated with victim-blaming, or the phenomenon identified by women and activists, who claim that victims undergo a “second attack” when they report gender-related violence, a classic politeness analysis (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987) of the orders, requests and demands paralegals make of their clients may shed light on how women come to walk away from their institutional interaction with the idea that they themselves are responsible for not having brought the violence to an end sooner. As is well known in the field of pragmatics, Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) suggest that human beings interact with one another in ways that protect the positive and negative aspects of their face. Positive face is a person’s desire to be perceived in the best possible light by others, while negative face is a person’s desire not to have his/her actions inhibited in anyway. Empowerment is the action of investing someone with might, force and maybe even knowledge of her rights. These actions can be achieved through a variety of means, one of which would be by linguistically enhancing a victim’s positive face, augmenting her sense that others perceive her as good, responsible, intelligent and capable of making decisions. Though not necessarily its polar opposite, gatekeeping, as an act that bars entry or access to a desired end, can threaten negative face and feel like victim-blaming. Often gatekeeping makes ‘assistance’ and ‘aid’ dependent upon some concession to which the victim must agree, even after she has stated in one way or another that she has been unwilling to undertake such a step in the past. A paralegal’s demand that a client make a police report could put a client’s negative face, or her desire to move about the world unimpeded, at risk. Par-

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Chapter 5

alegals seem to intuit the menacing nature of this imperative, as is evidenced by the ways in which they mitigate the potential face-threatening force of their demands. In the above examples, the two different paralegals attenuate the rather demanding requirement of reporting to police by deconstructing the clients’ reasons for not having done so. In Excerpt 5.1, for example, the paralegal picks up on the following two salient points, which the client introduced earlier as justifications for her not having reported the violence to police: (1) police say they cannot do anything about the violence, and (2) the abuser is a military man, and officers respond to him as if he were part of their fraternity. By breaking down the client’s reasons for not reporting, the paralegal tries to create a balance between blaming her for not having done so in the past and empowering her to do so in the future. Had the paralegal only suggested that the client’s not having made a police report was wrong, the client might be left with the feeling of being blamed for her own victimization. But, by making reference to the obstacles to reporting put forth by the client and by providing plans to move them out of the way, the paralegal both co-constructs the client’s version of reality (i.e., that the police are not always helpful), at the same time she works to co-create new possibilities. This newly created unencumbered path to making police reports puts the onus of recording on the police. Moreover, the paralegal tells the client in not so many words about the importance of leaving traces of her abuse in institutional memory, because making a report in and of itself, is indeed something. In Excerpt 5.2, the paralegal takes a very different tactic to mitigating her order that the client make a police report. This time the client gives no reasons for not making reports, and rather than probing for whys and why nots, the paralegal assumes that making a report is not a problem for the client. At the same time, this paralegal also assumes the responsibility for the demand. In essence, the paralegal makes it sound as though she cannot go forward with the client’s case without a police report. In contrast to Excerpt 5.1 where the burden of recording violence is placed on the police and the need to report is placed on the victim with statements like, “But you need to start making police reports for everything. . .” in Excerpt 5.2, the paralegal frames the police report as something she herself needs. In fact the first utterance, “Lo que va a tener, lo que voy a necesitar que usted haga Señora Álvarez es ( ) en el departamento de policía y empezar a dar reportes de lo que sucedió. . .” or in English, What you are going to have, what I am going to need you to do Mrs. Alvarez is ( ) to the police department and begin to make police reports of what happened on. . ., amounts to a self-repair. The paralegal begins by saying, “What you are going to have. . .” and ends by saying, “. . .what I am going to need you to do. . .” In neither case is

The protective order interview

the client held directly responsible for making or for not making police reports, but such discursive techniques undoubtedly function to persuade women to do something that they would probably have not done otherwise. What remains unclear, however, is whether clients see the paralegal as an advocate, that is, someone who provides them with the necessary information to be successful in the sociolegal system or as a gatekeeper, someone who they feel they must obey, in order to gain passage to the next step. If the latter is the case, we may begin to understand why some women feel they are at odds with the system, but we must keep this question in mind throughout as we look at how the interviewers interact with clients. In the pages that follow, I describe the protective order application interview of the District Attorney’s Office. It will be shown that the application interview is structured in such a way so as to control both what clients say as well as how they say it. Additionally, I describe clients’ norms and ways of narrating domestic abuse.1 My mapping of this interactive site of narration ultimately suggests tension between Latina women and institutions as the former attempt to cast their abuse experience in a personal story genre, while the latter verbally wrestle with them to represent the abuse in an official report genre. Embedded in this linguistic struggle for representation are language ideologies regarding the distinctive communicative techniques available in the two genres to produce accounts of domestic abuse as truthful, authoritative and credible. The linguistic resources that act as icons for credibility are not isolated linguistic utterances that make an otherwise uninteresting sea of narrative discourse come alive. Rather, every element in the two distinct narrative genres comes together with others that belong in that genre to create performative texts as wholes. The imposition of the preferred set of structures, which point to or stand in for cultural notions of logic and authority, serve to get women protective orders at the same time they serve to reinforce the identity, role and stature of the legal institution. These roles and identities are further reinforced by the fact that the report genre is the one that remains in the institutional archives.

Initiating the process of applying for a protective order To get into Anytown’s D.A.’s Office, all visitors must enter the courthouse through the front doors. Upon entering these doors, the women and the children they often bring along must pass through the metal-detecting machines –

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Chapter 5

common to airports – and they must put their purses and diaper bags on the conveyor belt, so that the security guards can examine them via X-rays. Once past the guards, the women take the elevator up to the third floor and follow the signs to the Domestic Violence Section of the District Attorney’s Office. Inside that office, they find the small waiting room. The waiting room is a liminal space that is separated from the Domestic Violence Section by a window made out of bulletproof glass.2 The three secretaries, who sit behind this window, greet women as they come in, and they begin processing them as clients of the office. When the women tell the secretaries that they want a protective order, they are given a set of intake forms and told, “Take a seat and fill these out.” These intake forms serve to initiate the women into the communicative process that will create them as legitimate victims of domestic violence. The intake form consists of a four-page Domestic Violence Questionnaire. Pages one through three of this form require from clients only one-word or phrasal answers to a series of questions about themselves and their abusers. On page number four of the form (shown in Figure 5.1), however, there is room for the women to write about abuse in more detail. Page Four begins with a fill-in-the-blank section that recapitulates the relationship information from the other three pages. In other words, it begins with a section where the victim introduces herself, the abuser and the nature of their relationship. Directly below this, there is a space to write about the most recent abusive incident. Then, in a second space, there is room to write down a mini-account of the penultimate abusive incident. Like the overall orientation section’s fill-in-the-blank style, each of these two sections also begins with a series of words followed by blank spaces. Thus, the space left for women to write in is either preceded or followed by written cues that indicate what types of information they should include. The way the last two incidents are written with such prompts ensures that each will have its own temporal orientation. Following the template for the who and when of the last two incidents, there are three or four lines available to write about each of these incidents. Immediately after these blank lines, is a sentence asking the victim to describe what happened at the end of the abusive incident by circling one of the following four options: “The police were/were not called. Abuser was/was not arrested.” At the bottom of the page, victims are asked to write “in two or three sentences” about other acts of violence that have occurred that they feel put themselves or their families in danger. In addition to being yet another link in the chain of textual productions of these accounts of abuse, these forms serve to begin binding the domestic vio-

The protective order interview

Figure 5.1. Domestic Violence Questionnaire, page four 1) In your own words, briefly describe the reasons you need protection from the abuser. (Abuser’s name) _____________is my (kinship term)______________. We have (X number of) ______________children together. We lived together for (length of time)_________________. We separated on (date) _______. On (date) __________, at (time) _________, (abuser’s name) ___________ (Describe the last incident)___________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ The police were/were not called. Abuser was/was not arrested. 2) On (date)_______, at (time)________, (abuser’s name) ________ (Describe second to last incident)_____________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ The police were/were not called. Abuser was/was not arrested. 3) Describe in two or three sentences other harassment or threats or other acts which place you in reasonable fear of future family violence. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________

lence narrative to the specific genre of legal discourse required by the law. This institutional processing practice is similar to the one described by Conley and O’Barr (1998) that they conclude serves to formally frame litigants’ disputes in small claims court. Notice however, the form that they describe, is quite short and the information it requires – names, addresses, dollar amounts and a perceived reason for the dispute – is very simple: “Plaintiff ’s name and address,” “Defendant’s name and address,” and “Plaintiff ’s claim: The defendant owes me $__________ for the following reasons: _______________________.”

Even though this form “imposes a framing of the dispute” that “results in the formalization of the dispute” (Conley & O’Barr 1998: 87), the small claims court form does not impose a Labovian linear structure on the event in question in the same way that the Domestic Violence Questionnaire does. From the Domestic Violence Questionnaire Form, we see that the report genre requires a representation of domestic abuse in an Aristotelian (or Labovian) narrative structure that delineates events in the past as having observable and identifiable beginnings, middles and ends. It is also constructed in such a

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Chapter 5

way so that the abuse that is narrated is presented as evidence for the institutional presumption that women have concluded that what they need is protection. Hence, the opening sentence, written as a classic example of pragmatic presupposition (i.e., where the negation of the matrix clause in no way negates the truth of its complement): “In your own words, briefly describe the reasons you need protection from the abuser.” Calling their former or current partner an ‘abuser’ further presupposes that the only logical solution to domestic problems is separation – curiously called ‘protection’ by the institution.3 According to the forms, domestic violence reports include two recent, violent incidents whose beginnings can be pinpointed with specific dates and times and whose actants can be identified as abusers and victims. These forms also presuppose that abusive incidents end when the police are called or when the abuser is arrested. Consequently, from the moment the client enters the office, there is an attempt, on the part of the legal system, to condition her abuse narrative. Once clients have finished filling out the forms, they return them to the secretaries behind the bulletproof glass and wait in their seats, busying themselves with activities common to waiting rooms until a paralegal comes calling for them. In the meantime, the secretaries take the information that women include on the forms and run it through their computers to see if either the client or the defendant has a history within the legal system. If secretaries find that clients have made police reports or that their abusers have a criminal record, they print this information for the paralegals. Once all of this preliminary work has been done, the secretaries call paralegals to come and fetch their first clients of the day. Turning now to an analysis of the interview as a speech event, we see how the affidavits are both a result of that speech event as well as a separate speech act, with both illocutionary and perlocutionary forces.4 The structure of the affidavit, as we will learn, is both the effect of and the motivation for the way in which the interviews are carried out.

Eliciting a report Protective order paralegals generally begin these interviews by introducing themselves to clients and then nearly immediately, they try to take control of the communicative situation by informing clients of how the talk should flow. Paralegals use two primary strategies to alert women to the interview structure. The first of their techniques consists of explicit statements or comments,

The protective order interview

pragmatic tools analyzed by sociolinguists and pragmaticists as metalanguage (see Mey 1993; Verschueren 1999). The second method by which paralegals make the structure of the interaction clear to clients is through what has been defined by Gumperz (1982) as contextualization cues such as tempo, prosody and pitch – or those signals in the discourse that alert participants to what is being done. In interviews where paralegals use metalanguage, they tell clients at the outset what the format of the verbal exchange should sound like with utterances such as the one in Excerpt 5.3 below:

Excerpt 5.3. Explicit statements used by interviewers to explain structure P:

C: P:

C:

O.K. Maria, my name is Amy, and what I’m gonna do is, ask you some questions about yourself and your boyfriend. O.K.? First I’ll just need some basic information for our records, and then I’ll ask you to get into more detail so I can find out what’s been going on between the two of you. O.K. O.K.? If there’s something that you don’t understand, or if you have questions about anything, just go ahead and stop me, and I’ll answer them, O.K.? ((types .12)). Sorry the computer booted me out, so. . .let me get back in (.04). O.K., tell me about 203 South Negley? It’s an apartment? It’s a house.

In the above excerpt, the paralegal’s speech can be characterized as full, clear expression of her desires and expectations for the communication between herself and the client. First, she tells the client that she intends to do some questioning, to which the client need only reply with ‘basic’ information. Only after such essential and fundamental information is secured will the paralegal ask the client to elaborate on particular events that have taken place. The client is told that she too, can ask questions, but that her querries ought to be limited to that which she does not understand. In this brief passage, the paralegal lets the client know who talks when, what kind of talk each participant is allowed to embark on, what type of information (e.g., basic vs. detailed) should be given and at what points during the interaction it will be appropriate to give it. In the following example shown in Excerpt 5.4, the interviewer relies almost exclusively on contextualization cues to inform the client of how the interview should run. Her style is no less directive than that of the paralegal in Excerpt 5.3. But, rather than explicitly stating the rules of the interview, the paralegal, in Excerpt 5.4, merely enacts them.

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Chapter 5

Excerpt 5.4. Contextualization cues used by interviewer Text 1A P: R: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

They’re having fun out there ((to me, the researcher)). Mhmh5 O.K. Señora ((surname)), Um, el Señor ((surname)) es su ex-novio, ¿Verdad? Mhmh ¿Vivieron juntos por (.03) quince meses? Más o menos. ¿Más o menos? ¿Él tiene problemas usando drogas o tomando alcohol? Alcohol. ¿No drogas? Que yo sepa, no. Usted gana aproximad, aproximadamente mil tres cientos por mes. ¿Verdad? Más o menos, a veces es más, a veces es menos. [¿Él no trabaja? No. I mean, I mean, él trabajaba al principio, y, y, después se fue yendo pa’ bajo pa’ otro otro trabajo. [Oh. O.K., ¿Con quién vive él ahorita? Con sus papás. (.06)

Translation of above: P: R: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

They’re having fun out there. ((to me, the researcher)). Mhmh O.K. Mrs. ((surname)), um, Mr. ((surname)) is your ex-boyfriend, right? Mhmh You lived together for (.03) fifteen months? More or less. More or less? Does he have a drug or alcohol problem? Alcohol. Not drugs? As far as I know, no. You earn approximate, approximately one thousand three hundred dollars a month? Right? More or less. Sometimes more, sometimes less. [He doesn’t work. No. I mean, I mean, he worked at the beginning, and, and, afterwards he started going downhill and went from job to job. Oh, O.K., who does he live with now?

The protective order interview

C:

With his parents. (.06)

In the above example, the paralegal jumps into the preliminary questions that are seeking that ‘basic’ information, which the previous paralegal named as such. Here, this paralegal does not even formally introduce herself. Her style is cordial and concerned, but formal, serious and very business-like. Moreover, the paralegal signals that she is ready to perform her job as interviewer, by verbally creating a boundary between fun and games and business. In the first line, she turns to me (the researcher), upon hearing laughter outside the door, and comments on her co-workers’ boisterous conversation and laughter. She then abruptly changes her demeanor to take a more professional stance as she directs her attention to the client with her utterance, “O.K.” In this instance, “O.K.” functions as a point of transition from a jovial and intimate frame to one of occupational status and distance. The paralegal marks her shift into her interviewer-identity not only through prosody, but also topically and through her language choice as well. She goes from talking about ‘fun’ to a friend to talking as an interviewer to a client. At the same time, her bilingual ability (and mine) allows her to emphasize this shift by switching out of English when talking to me and into Spanish to interview the client. Moreover, the paralegal succeeds in limiting the scope of the client’s answers to one-word by her use of leading questions that end in tags, which require the client to say only “yes” or “no”. When this client’s answers indicate some measure of ambiguity, as is the case in her responses to the paralegal’s questions, “Not drugs?” and “You earn. . .one thousand three hundred dollars a month?”, the paralegal presses on without asking for any clarification or expansion. Without explicitly detailing the interview form for the client, this paralegal also manages to get her message across through a combination of contextualization cues that inform the client about who will ask, who will answer and the types of answers that are preferred. The paralegals in both of these interviews attempt to control what the victims say from the very beginning of the interview. The interviewers speak to victims from overlapping frames in which they act as both elicitor and recipient of the events that are to be narrated. In so doing, paralegals begin to reinforce the institutionally preferred narrative template that had already been laid out in the intake sheet. Undoubtedly, the fact that such great care is taken by the D.A.’s Office to elicit a report is perhaps evidence enough that the institution, although desirous that the victim cast her account of abuse in a report genre, actually expects to hear something else.

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Chapter 5

After this introduction, not just to one another, but also to the rules and obligations of the speech event, paralegals proceed with this initial interview phase, and their questions ask victims about abusers’ drug and alcohol consumption habits, whether alleged abusers own weapons, and the nature and length of their relationship and separation. Not surprisingly, these questions directly parallel the initial questions found on the Domestic Violence Questionnaire Form. This phase of the interview serves as an institutional datagathering period, and client answers to these questions are stored in the form of statistics kept by the D.A.’s Office. Often, though not always, the paralegals transition out of this initial phase and into the middle of the interview by asking clients some form of the question, “What is it that you want our office to do for you?” Once women answer, interviewers then invite them to talk about their experience of domestic abuse. The invitation to narrate however comes with restrictions. Paralegals ask survivors to talk about recent abusive incidents, beginning with the most recent incident first, mirroring the Domestic Violence Questionnaire Form. While clients are talking, paralegals either write what appears to be notes longhand, or they type these notes on their computers. In all, they ask clients to tell them about two or three incidents of violence, and they elicit from clients a statement of fear. When paralegals deem that a complete account of abuse has been told, they inform clients of the action that will be taken in their case. This announcement delineates another division, this time between the middle part of the interview and its final part. If paralegals decide to recommend women for protective orders, they use the last part of the interview to provide a brief explanation of the next steps involved. But, regardless of whether they recommend clients for a protective order, paralegals always use the end of the interview to give clients information and referrals to other agencies. For those women who are eligible for and in need of a protective order, paralegal interviewers draft affidavits. In some cases, the paralegals will draw up an affidavit immediately after the interview, so that clients can read it, make corrections and sign it without having to return to the office. In most cases, however, paralegals schedule future appointments with clients, so that they can return to read and sign affidavits. Clients are given an opportunity to make changes on the document before they sign it. By signing the affidavit, the client then swears that everything in it is “true and correct.” This written version of the abuse account is then sent to the assistant district attorney, who reads it to decide whether to accept or reject the case. If she accepts the case, the paralegal

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files the affidavit with the Court, where a judge then reads it and determines whether to grant temporary ex parte orders until the date of the hearing. Let us now turn to an examination of the constitution of the affidavits, so that we may understand the motivation behind the makeup of the interview. Once it is clear that there is a specific, required, even standard structure, for representing abuse in institutional memory, we will then examine how victims diverge from this official report genre.

The affidavits A sample affidavit is shown in Figure 5.2. These affidavits also nearly replicate the format of the intake form examined earlier in this chapter. All of the affidavits are written in the first-person. They are organized in the linear fashion that corresponds to what I have argued that Labov and Waletzky (1967) describe as being “normal” to narrative. All affidavits begin with a skeletal narrative outline that starts off with an orientation and ends with a resolution. From the initial orienting frame, the affidavit’s first set of readers, namely the assistant district attorney and the judge, can learn of who the parties to the case are. Additionally, they can see immediately from the relationship claimed in those clauses whether it is possible to interpret the violence that follows as family violence under the law. Immediately after the overall orientation, there is a complicating action that generally contains two or three recent incidents of abuse. At this point, there are slight departures from the strict Labovian narrative structure. First, the complicating action consists of two fully elaborated events that amount to separate and distinct episodes of violence. In other words, they are themselves mini-Labovian narratives that could be further boiled down into simple past tense clauses indicating the main violent action contained within them. The other major parting from the Labovian narrative involves the inversion of temporal ordering, because in the affidavits, as on the intake forms, the most recent abusive incident is written about first. So rather than a strict first a, then b, sequential structure, there is a b happened and before that, a happened too ordering. While these texts have most of the components that would lead one to consider them a narrative, they stop short of including in their complicating action the very element that Labov and Waletzky (1967) claim defines a discursive chunk as narrative: sequential ordering. In the case of the affidavit’s overall structure, it seems that maintaining temporal juncture for the purely referential or even teleological function of narrative is trumped in these legal narratives by the paralegals’ need to show women as a

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Figure 5.2. Example of sample affidavit State of AnyState County of AnyCounty Before me, the undersigned authority, on this day personally appeared Vania Díaz, who being by me duly sworn on oath stated: “I am the Applicant in the above and foregoing Application for a Protective Order and the facts and circumstances contained therein are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.” There is a clear and present danger of continuing family violence and of other immediate and irreparable harm if a Temporary Ex Parte Protective Order is not granted, as shown by the following: Overall Orientation Clauses: Victor Díaz is my ex-boyfriend. We lived together for eight months. We have known each other for three years. We separated in January 2001 although we did date on and off. I have one minor child in my home. Linear mini account: On October 5, 2001, Victor was sick and had stayed at my house so that I could take care of him. I got home and asked him if I had any mail and he said he didn’t know. I went outside to check the mail and he grabbed me by the hair and banged my head against the window. I got scared and I ran to the store and called the police. When the police arrived, Victor was arrested for Assault-Bodily Injury. I sustained some redness to my right eye as a result of this assault. He is still at the AnyCounty Jail. Linear mini account: In June 2001, Victor grabbed me by the head and banged my head against the wall. The sheet rock to the wall was damaged and I sustained a large bump to my head. I called the police and a report was made. Linear mini account: In January 2001, Victor told me to go upstairs because he had my birthday present. As I got upstairs he pointed a gun at me and told me that he was going to kill me. I pushed the gun away several times but he continued to tell me that he was going to kill me. At one point the gun fell and I walked downstairs. Some people that had come to my party began leaving. When all the people were gone, Victor pulled out a knife and threatened to cut my throat. His cousin was also there and managed to talk him out of hurting me. I did not call the police and did not file charges. Overall Evaluation: Victor is very irrational and I fear for what he may be capable of doing to me in the future. I am afraid that he may carry out his threats to kill me. It is for this reason that I am seeking legal protection. Participant Signatures: Sworn and subscribed to before me on this ((date)) of April, A.D., ((year)). ________________________(signature line for client) Vania Díaz ___________________________(signature line for paralegal) Notary Public, State of AnyState

The protective order interview

credible victims. In other words, a believable applicant is one who has just recently experienced family violence. The report genre then is designed to show the woman as recently victimized by her abuser. By putting the last incident in the sequence first, the affidavits communicate the plausibility of the woman’s claim by providing evidence that suggests a sense of urgency on her part, which in turn is supposed to indicate that the court should act immediately. This is not to say, however, that temporal sequencing plays no part in these affidavits. Since each incident of abuse is not in fact boiled down to a singular violent action, but instead is elaborated in a linear mini-account of the events, sequential ordering is also a key element in constructing the women as credible narrators and as viable victims of violence. Specific abusive incidents also begin with an orientation, including date and/or time of day. The complicating action of these mini narratives is written in simple past tense forms that do suggest that what is written about first happened first. Further evidence revealing the institution’s preference for certain types of endings is found at the close of each of these mini-narratives. In the D.A.’s Office the affidavits almost always conclude, as do the narrative spaces on the intake form, with a segment indicating whether the police were called or the abuser was arrested. Sometimes, there is also mention of whether victims sustained bruises. Near the end of the document there is an overall evaluation, which, it should be remembered, typically serves to establish the narrator’s point of view. This telling is meant to have a perlocutionary effect on both the assistant district attorney who needs to accept the case as part of her trial load and the judge. The overall resolutions then, rather than being the outcome of the series of events narrated, are really a plea for legal help.

Latina women storytelling Very few women provide an account of their experience with domestic violence in report form. The ideal victim, narrating within the report genre, would sit quietly, allow the interviewer to draw only the necessary information and events out of her, speaking only when spoken to, and answering questions when asked. In most cases, however, the oral narrative genre unfolds over the course of several narrative turns, or periods of talk in which victims describe, mention and/or recount abuse.6 Survivors make use of narrative turns to recount either discrete or contiguous episodes of abuse with different narrative resources. Narrative resources are linguistic strategies that narrators employ to create the narrative genre that carries their account in a social situation. Narra-

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tive resources suitable for a story genre are not identical to those needed for a report genre. These resources vary along lexical, syntactic, discursive and compositional levels, and they always depend on the particular type of narrative genre being created within a pragmatic context. The women in this study fill their narrative turns with three distinct narrative-types or narrative resources. The first and most frequent of these narrative resources is structurally similar to the model described by Labov and Waletzky (1967) and obviously preferred by the legal system as we saw through our examination of the intake forms and the final affidavits. Below, an example of a linear narrative is provided in Excerpt 5.5:

Excerpt 5.5. Example of linear narrative-type7 Text 11A P: C: P: C:

P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

O.K., can you explain what led to this, I mean, what happened to this last incident, the one that happened on the ((date))? I mean, how, how. . . Es que salí del trabajo Mhmh And I think he was waiting for me, porque mientras yo no salía, él no se ahh to catch my bus, and he was there and he told me to go with him. Y p’os yo no quería, y me dijo que si yo no me iba a ir con él, que me iba a matar a, a mis, a mis muchachos. Y (so que) me fui con él. [Mhmh Y luego comenzó a, a estrujarme de la camisa, sólo que, tan pronto que él paró en un stop sign, yo me bajé, y él se bajó y comenzó a caminar tras de mí. Y empecé a correr y venía detrás de mí. Pero no me dejaba irme para mi casa. Sólo que, unas, una gente, unas negritas que estaban ahí fuera, me, me dijeron que me fuera pa’ dentro de sus, de su casa. Fue cuando él se fue. Y luego después que estaba yo adentro, él comenzó, él inició pam ((knocking sound)) pa’ la casa, de la, de la señora. Um más que la señora le dijo que se fuera, si no ella lo iba a chulear. Mhmh Si no que fue cuando llegaron los policías Mhmh Pero me ‘tuvo estrujando. No, quería que me fuera, dijo que si no [Mhmh si no, me iba, él, él a tener que me iba a matar a mi y a mis hijos. ¿Por qué? No sé (.02) por todo lo que pasó.

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P: C:

Mhmh Más que el policía dijo que no le podían hacer nada.

Translation of above example Text 11A P: C: P: C:

P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

O.K. you can explain what led to this, I mean, what happened to this last incident, the one that happened on the ((date))? I mean how, how. . . Um I left work. Mhmh And I think he was waiting for me because while I didn’t come out, he didn’t ahhh, to catch my bus, and he was there and he told me to go with him. And well, I didn’t want to, and he told me that if I didn’t go with him, that he was going to kill me, and my kids. And (so) I went with him. [Mhmh And then he began to, to pull on my shirt, except that as soon as he stopped at a stop sign, I got out, and he got out and started to walk behind me. And I began to run, and he came after me. But, he didn’t let me go home, so, some people, some black girls that were outside told me, me, to go inside their, their house. That was when he left. And later, after I had gone inside, he started, he started pam ((knocking)) on the door of the, of the lady’s house. Um, but the lady told him to leave or she would mess with him. Mhmh But that’s when the police arrived. Mhmh But he was pulling on me. No, he wanted me to go, he said that if I didn’t [Mhmh If I didn’t, he was going to, he, he was going to have to, that he was going to kill me and my children. Why? I don’t know (.02) because of everything that happened. Mhmh But the police said that they couldn’t do anything to him.

This sample linear narrative is given in the code-switching variety common to Mexican-American bilinguals in the United States. Code-switching refers to the alternating use of two languages within the same communicative exchange (Valdés 1982: 209). The data in this corpus indicate that code-switching is uncommon in these official settings, even though most of the clients at the District Attorney’s Office are Mexican-American, bilingual women. For the most part,

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paralegal interviewers signal their ability to speak and/or understand Spanish with pragmalinguistic cues such as the use of Spanish phonology when uttering Spanish surnames (less common is the use of Spanish phonology for first names), street names, and the names of places in the city such as la plaza or el mercado. Nevertheless, there is still an overwhelming preference among the participants for the use of either English or Spanish.8 In areas where Spanish-English bilingualism reaches societal proportions, the majority of the people within the community possess varied degrees of native proficiency in both languages. The interviewer in the above excerpt, a forty-year old Mexican-American woman who is new to the job, is able to understand everything that her client says, but she herself resists speaking to the client in Spanish. In areas of widespread societal bilingualism, group membership is not only marked by one’s ability to speak Spanish. Speakers may indicate belonging by the way they speak English as well. For example, in English Latinos have distinctive intonation patterns, vowel mutations, and consonant variants such as the devoicing of final consonants [d] ∼ [t]. Latinos also exhibit group membership through their lexical choices, particular syntactic constructions and their ability to pronounce Spanish words with Spanish phonology. Any combination of these linguistic features would be good indicators that a service provider will understand Spanish even if she does not appear to speak it routinely.9 In the above linear narrative, orientation for the event is provided by the interviewer who finds its date on either a police report or on the intake form. Because the narratives examined here emerge in an interview setting, it is not unusual that they are opened by the interviewer whose task it is to elicit them. Within these interviews, orientation clauses, are often provided by the interviewers, and they function as elicitation devices. The woman narrating the linear narrative-type above in Excerpt 5.5 begins with the complicating action of the incident with her utterance, “Es que salí del trabajo”, or I left work. In so doing, she names what happened first and then, in a temporal sequence, she recounts the series of events that took place, and she does so apparently in the order in which each actor did or said something. The narrative clauses are given in simple past tense verb forms, the temporal ordering remains undisturbed by interceding free clauses, such as those containing stative verbs that provide background, but do not advance the action – as in the utterance “And I think he was waiting for me.” The free clause merely orients the scene of the event, because it is not in temporal juncture with the clause, “Yo salí de mi trabajo.”

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Before the woman reaches the resolution, or the outcome of the event, she incorporates what Labov and Waletzky call an evaluative device with her utterance, “Pero me ‘tuvo estrujando. No, quería que me fuera, dijo que si no (P: Mhmh) si no, me iba, él, él a tener que me iba a matar a mí y a mis hijos” or in English, But he was pulling on me. No, he wanted me to go, he said if I didn’t (P = Mhmh), if I didn’t, he was going to, he, he, was going to have to, that he was going to kill me and my children. It is likely that the woman offers this justification for her actions, so that she will not be blamed for having gone with him in the first place. The evaluative clause supports her claim of victimization, because it emphasizes that she had no choice except to get in the car. With the evaluative device, the survivor also suspends the action of the events, and is thus able to create tension and suspense between the complicating action and the resolution of the events narrated. She concludes her narration by repeating that the police said that they could do nothing about the abuser’s assault – a point that the victim had attempted to introduce at the beginning of the interview as well. In fact, within the first seconds of this interview, while the paralegal was going over the intake forms, the woman told her that she had already signed papers; but that the night of the attack, when she showed them to the police, the officers dismissed them as being useless. The paralegal, after examining what the woman brought to the interview, told her that what she had was a warning letter and not a protective order. This exchange of information then prompts the client to ask, “So, ¿cómo puedo agarrar ese papel que me dijo la policía?” or So how can I get one of those papers that the police told me [that I needed for them to be able to do something?]. The paralegal responds to the client’s question with the following utterance: “Bueno, ah, let me, let me review your paperwork, O.K.? And then we’ll see if you qualify for a protective order, O.K.?” Clearly this client enters the office with a solution to her problem in mind. Still, the paralegal informs her that she might not be qualified to attain it. When the woman is prompted by the interviewer to narrate the most recent event, she reorganizes her discourse, as it becomes obvious to her that the solution that she foresees for her problem is better stated as a resolution to the narration of an abusive incident than it is as an introduction to the interview. It is only through narrating the events of the most recent incident that the paralegal can conclude that this client is eligible for an order. Even though linear-type narratives are the preferred discourse level resource for the affidavit, and perhaps the most common resource employed by women, the way that women produce linear narratives often does not meet with the way service providers want to hear them. For example, many women

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do not produce orientation clauses for abusive incidents with numerical dates, times or years (Trinch & Berk-Seligson 2002). This finding corroborates those of O’Barr and Conley (1996), which indicate that in small claims court, narratives that incorporate precise orientation clauses with specific times and dates meet with more success than those narratives that lack them. At the very least there are references to specific numerical times and dates on every one of the affidavits drafted at the D.A.’s Office. Sometimes, there are references to specific times and dates in several different places in an affidavit. Most of the affidavits contain orientation clauses that introduce a particular date with the prepositional phrase, “On or about”. Occasionally, the words “approximately” or “around” will qualify or hedge the statement of time as well. Somewhat less frequently, we find references to occurrences that happened within a given month for which no exact date is retrievable, as is the case in the affidavit shown above. The extensive use of this type of time-marking invokes the plausibility of the account by providing a semblance of exactitude. At the same time it serves to imbue the record with a matter-of-fact authority, because the temporal references signify the existence of a concrete experience as well as the pretext of a fully retrievable memory and cognizance of that experience. In the legal system this type of knowledge is influential and persuasive, because the appearance of precision lends merit to the narrator’s claim regarding what occurred. Though official orientations usually contain some sort of period specificity, Latina women show more variety when orienting their personal stories. Women that come with police reports, for instance, or those who have experienced very recent violence or abuse, can and do supply precise numerical times and dates. The dates of recent violence can be easily remembered, and the dates of more distant events can be located within the institutional record of the police report. But, because domestic abuse normally occurs over a long period of time, some important incidents of violence cannot be as easily dated. In such cases, some Latina women organize time in the past by referring to significant events in their lives. This evidence regarding a different norm for expressing orientation is consistent with Briggs’ (1986) finding that his Nuevomexicano informants talk about the distant past by framing events with occurrences that have historical importance for their communities, such as “Around the time of the big flood. . . .” Like the male informants in Briggs’ study, a common tactic among Latina women who need to discuss abusive incidents in the distant past is to incorporate orientation clauses that mark time according to their children’s lives. For example, the interviewer, in Excerpt 5.6 below, has just asked the client if

The protective order interview 

she had had a protective order when the alleged abuser broke her nose in six different places. The bold type shows how the woman, when unable to come up with an unequivocal date, frames the event according to the age of her child.

Excerpt 5.6. Example of how some victims orient distant accounts of abuse C:

P: C: P: C:

P: C: P:

But then the dispatcher called back and said “it is active, she does have one on him” You know. And I kept telling him, “I do have one, it’s in the house” you know, “it’s in the house”. So they, they went back and they took the kids and they arrested him. But this was back, it’s been like four years, I think. I’m not sure if it was ‘96 or 1999, but I remember because mija ((my baby girl)) was little. Or, the, the baby, but she’s five years old now. O.K. But I remember I came through this office. (.58) Let’s see if I can pull it up real quick. (.14 seconds). Ninety-three, do you think that’s all the time it hap, it was? I think, because I know I had a restraining order, and, mija was born in ’93 and she was still a baby, but I know I had a restraining order on him, (.01) and it was during that time that something really bad happened. Now this incident where he fractured your nose and so forth like that, this is not the same one? No. It’s another one?

Knowing that narrators are generally doing more with their tellings than providing a linguistic recapitulation of the past, we can re-analyze these orientations as strategies that victims use to index not only a reference to time, but perhaps also to make salient particular aspects of their identity. The mention of historically relevant or important events directs listeners to a parallel occurrence to the events in the life of the narrator. By positioning oneself and one’s narrative in a historically important moment, narrators can also work to show listeners that they are competent cultural informants (as might have been the case in Briggs’ study). By saying “mija” or my baby girl, the client not only orients the event temporally, but also juxtaposes the fact that her husband broke her nose to the fact that she is a mother. In other words, not only is she saying that she is her abuser’s wife, but also, she is able to make the point that she is the mother of his children. She may be using the orientation clause here to perform the culturally sacred identity of mother, which is in jeopardy in this battering relationship.

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Because the events listed in the affidavit require definite dates, the women’s way of orienting events by using their children’s lives as a yardstick with which to measure time is unacceptable. For this reason, service providers often need to do some verbal mathematical calculations with the victims. Such calculations include asking women to provide children’s present ages, and their ages at the time of the event. The interviewers will then subtract the ages to come up with the year in which the incident occurred. In this way paralegals are able to frame events on the affidavit with at least approximate numerical dates. Often the orientations women provide serve as reminders that domestic abuse normally occurs over a long period of time, since survivors recount incidents in the distant past for which they may have even had the abuser arrested or for which they had previously obtained a protective order. Orientations that show the longevity or cyclical nature of an abusive relationship reveal the complexity of these intimate unions, especially in situations where the couple has mutual children. Such relationship intricacies are important for describing a woman’s experience, and arguably are the impetus for the compound narrative – that is to say, a narrative that is made up of more than just the linear narrative-type women provide.10 The Labovian linear and temporally sequenced narrative-type is the most common in the corpus. However, two other narrative-types are also frequent patterns used by Latina women. When service providers try to elicit a discrete event to include in one of the linear mini-narrative slots for the affidavit, they often encounter what Polanyi calls generic past time, or generic present time narrative-types.11 Polanyi (1985) defines generic past time narrative-types as narratives that indicate that an event used to or would recur at unspecified times in the past. Polanyi (1985: 11) states, “[t]he meaning of an event in a generic past time narrative could be glossed as ‘It would always be the case that at this exact moment in the proceedings, Event X took place.’ ” The following example in Excerpt 5.7 is representative of the generic past time narrative-type and significant sections are shown in bold. The woman in this example begins her generic past time narrative after a seven-second pause in the conversation.

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Excerpt 5.7. Example of generic past time narrative-type (.07) C:

P: C:

P: C:

Este carro que traigo apenas lo compré hace poquito. Y este, él no quería que yo comprara carro. Él quería llevarme y traerme al trabajo. Quería, dónde quiera que yo iba, él quería mirarme. Mhmh Pero, yo necesitaba algo para mí misma. A veces, que me tenía que, salgo a las nueve, a veces, tenía que esperarme hasta las diez, diez y media, once allá fuera sola. ¿Hasta que él llegara? Hasta que él llegara. (.04)

Translation of above example of generic past time narrative-type (.07) C:

P: C: P: C:

This car I have, I bought just a little while ago. And um, he didn’t want me to buy a car. He wanted to take me to and from work. He wanted, wherever I went, he wanted to keep an eye on me. Mhmh But, I needed something of my own. Um, sometimes, that I had to, leave at nine, sometimes, I had to wait until ten, ten thirty, eleven outside alone. For him to arrive? For him to arrive. (.04)

Above, the client is filing against a person she refers to as an “ex-boyfriend,” yet they separated only one day before the interview. Still, in this narrativeturn, she categorizes her ex-boyfriend’s controlling her comings and goings as a thing of the past, something that used to happen from time to time, but that now will cease to occur. This notion is communicated through her use of the temporal adjective “a veces” or in English, sometimes, that marks the acts she is about to describe as having happened more than once, or every now and then. She also begins with the imperfect, “tenía” and then switches to the habitual present with “Salgo” meaning I leave, and reiterates the Spanish temporal adjective, “a veces”. Yet in other narrative-turns, this same client uses what Polanyi calls generic present time narratives. More common in the data than generic past time narrative types are these generic present time narrative-types, defined by Polanyi (1985: 13) as “always at this exact moment in the discourse, Event X takes place.” Women use generic

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present time narratives to talk about the abuser’s habitual behavior, creating a narrative that has a past, present and a future. The verbs in these narratives are not only cast in the habitual present tense, but they are also situated in clauses that are framed by temporal adjectives such as “always,” “every time,” “each time,” and “never.” Excerpt 5.8 is illustrative of a generic present time narrative. It is taken from a divorcee’s narrative to show that although generic past time narratives refer to habitual and continual abusive behavior in the past, generic present time narratives indicate for the recipient that the speaker believes that what has happened before on more than one occasion, if the circumstances are right, will undoubtedly happen again.

Excerpt 5.8. Example of generic present time narrative-type C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

For the protective orders, (does there physically have to be ( )) ( ) um, he has been abusive towards you, right? During the time that we were to, together. O.K. And that’s what I’m afraid of, that he’s going to come back. Right. He says that we’re not divorced. He says that you’re not divorced? That according to, that according to God’s eyes that, we’ll, we’ll be married forever. So, I’m his forever. That you’re his property? That I’m his forever. That we were married under the eyes of God (and that that piece of paper means more than anything). Did he ever threaten you with any weapons? When we were together.

This client’s narrative and particularly, the way in which she refers to the ongoing nature of her abuser’s attempts to dominate her are crucial for understanding how women try to represent their experience linguistically. First of all, having been through the protective order application before, the client has apparently learned of the importance the legal system places on physical violence – hence her question about whether a protective order can be obtained in the absence of physical violence. Once assured by the paralegal that past physical abuse can be considered, the client states her current fear that such abuse could happen again by saying, “. . .that he’s going to come back.’ Even though she has done what is necessary to remove herself from the violent home by appealing to legal order through protective orders and finally through divorce,

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her ex-husband appeals to an even higher law. For her, the threat of his control looms in his statement that they are not divorced – and therefore, his control is on-going and unstoppable. Anecdotal data that I collected from an immigration attorney in the field corroborates my finding that Latina survivors, when talking about domestic violence, broaden the scope of their narration to include narrative types in order to relate abuse and events in terms of constant and consistent behavior. This immigration attorney told me that Central American women are interviewed several times before a final affidavit is drawn up on their behalf to be sent to Immigration and Naturalization Services. Several interviews are conducted with these women, precisely because they tend to utilize this generic narrative-type exceedingly frequently in their stories of abuse. The attorney suggested that survivors of domestic violence speak this way, because when they are finally ready to seek a legal remedy, they most likely are very angry, and thus they focus solely on the negative aspects of the abusive relationship. According to my informant, these multiple interviews are held, because INS officials are not inclined to accept affidavits written in absolute terms. The attorney reported that INS employees find it hard to believe that a person would stay with someone who, for example, always beat them, or never allowed them to leave the house. So, in stark contrast to the way that generic present and past time narrativetypes widen the lens and time frame of abuse, linear Labovian narrative-types do not only recapitulate past events, but they also encapsulate a specific or discrete past event. However, all past events are not discrete occurrences. Based on these data, it seems plausible to state that the Labovian narrative model is only “normal” for narratives of unique past events, that is, for events that happened once, and will seldom, if ever, be repeated. The narrative data above suggest that some past occurrences are habitual, and thus they might have to be expressed as such. Kalcik (1975) also argues against the linear and temporally sequenced narrative-type as being normal to narrative structure. She focuses on yet another narrative resource for representing encapsulated events. This resource is known as the kernel narrative-type, and according to Kalcik, “. . .a kernel story is a brief reference to the subject, the central action or an important piece of dialogue from a longer story. . .” When domestic violence survivors employ kernels relating abuse, they in effect are recounting episodes. Kalcik (1975: 7) states, “a kernel may not be developed if no one expresses an interest or asks questions. . ..” Excerpt 5.9 depicts how Latinas introduce kernel narrative-types into the discourse of the interview.

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Excerpt 5.9. Example of kernel narrative-type P: C:

P:

No? (.05) Qué es lo que quieres que hagamos por tí? Solamente que no, no, no quiero que se vaya por la casa porque cada vez que se acerque a la casa es para, para pelear conmigo, o para quitarme la bebé. Y yo sé que es su papá, pero, no, no, una vez se la llevó, y ya no me quiso regresar. ((.21 types)) Nomás tienen una niña juntos?

Translation of above example of kernel narrative-type P: C:

P:

No? (.05) What do you want us to do for you? Just that I don’t don’t don’t want him to come around the house because each time that he comes to the house it’s to, to fight with me, or to take the baby. And I know he is her father, but, no, no, one time, he took her, and he didn’t want to give her back. ((.21 types)) Do you only have one little girl together?

In the above example, this victim fills her narrative-turn with two narrativetypes, a generic present-time narrative and a kernel narrative. The generic present time narrative begins with “cada vez”, or every time, indicating, as we have seen previously the linguistic representation of the abuser’s behavior as recurrent. In contrast to the broad coverage of “cada vez” is the kernel that starts in the middle of the next line with “una vez”, or one time, which marks a clear and distinct episode of abuse. There is no orientation, no complicating action, no resolution and no coda. Here the client merely mentions the climax of the incident with her kernel, and evidently she places the onus of determining whether the incident is worthy of conversation on the interviewer. The kernel in the example above is never developed by the interviewer. The paralegal allows the kernel to lie fallow in the discourse immediately after the client mentions it, and she never returns to it during the course of the interview. It can be assumed that the interviewer does not consider the incident to be worthy of full development. Whether kernels are developed into full-fledged narratives does seem to depend on the impulse of the interviewer. Excerpt 5.10 (Part I) provides an instance in which a woman introduces a kernel that the paralegal ignores early on in the interview. When the client is allowed to embark on longer narrative turns, we see how the paralegal herself returns to the kernel previously mentioned by the client.

The protective order interview

Example 5.10. Victim’s introduction of the kernel Part I (.04) P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

No tienen niños, ¿verdad? Con él, no. Pero ¿tiene de usted? Sí. ¿Viven aquí en. . . Viven aquí, y también la amenaza que me hizo fue de, de ellos. ¿Qué tantos niños tiene? Tres. O.K., ¿Me los puede apuntar aquí, por favor? ((hands her paper)) Y los días de nacimiento. ((typing .30, victim writing))

Translation of above example: Part I (.04) P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

You don’t have children right? With him, no. But you have your own. Yes. They live here in. . . They live here, and also the threat he made was towards, toward them. How many children do you have? Three. O.K., Could you write their names here please? ((Handing her the paper)). And their dates of birth. ((typing .30, victim writing)).

In Excerpt 5.10 (Part I), the client takes advantage of the paralegal’s question about her children to bring up that her ex-boyfriend used them to threaten her. The paralegal opts to ignore the woman’s kernel narrative-type about the threats the abuser made toward her children, and she does not probe to inquire further about those threats. Instead of immediately participating in the development of the kernel, the interviewer ignores it, and continues asking the ‘basic’questions she is required to have the victim answer during the beginning of the interview. Later on in the interview, however, it is the interviewer who reintroduces the kernel as an elicitation device, so that it may be further developed. This is illustrated in Excerpt 5.11, Part II of the example below.





Chapter 5

Excerpt 5.11. Interviewer re-accesses kernel introduced by victim earlier Part II P: C:

¿Qué les hace a los niños señora? Usted mencionó a sus niños, temprano. O.K., él, lo único que me dijo fue ayer. (.01) Ayer cuando me habló para el trabajo. Que dijo que iba a mandar a alguien para mí, y que después de mí, serían mis niños. ((types 1.0+))

Translation of above example: Part II P: C:

What does he do to the children ma’am? You mentioned your children earlier. O.K., he, the only thing he said to me was yesterday. (.01) Yesterday when he called me at work. He said that he was going to send someone to get me, and then after me, my children. ((type 1.0+))

Once the kernel is reintroduced by the interviewer by way of indirectly reporting the client’s earlier speech, the client supplies an orientation clause indicating that the threat directed to her children was made the day before the interview, and then she linguistically unravels the complicating action. In this case, the victim stops narrating before providing a resolution or a coda, because it is clear that the threats the abuser made toward the children occurred at the same time that the abuser made his last round of threats toward the client. The resolution to this incident, that is, that she called the police, is not reiterated, presumably because she had already narrated this part of this incident earlier. Interestingly, when the paralegal elicited the narrative of this incident, the victim declined to reiterate that the abuser had threatened both her and the children. It might be that this client chose not to offer the information about the threats to the children again, because the paralegal had shown no interest in it the first time the victim brought it up with her earlier kernel. So kernel development does not require that the kernel be immediately accessed and drawn out into a full-blown linear narrative the moment it is uttered. Paralegals can and often do return to the kernel to develop them in that space of the interview they like to reserve for narration. This portion of the victim’s account of abuse is introduced three times in the discourse of the interview before it is fully developed. These narrative styles will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8 where connections are made as to how they relate to discrepancies in victims’ accounts. What is important to note here, however, is that these narrative-types do not coincide with the

The protective order interview

reporting requirements of the affidavit. Herman’s (1992) description of trauma narratives may shed some light on why survivors of domestic violence tend to narrate in these compound narrative forms. The author argues: For survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma, it is not practical to approach each memory as a separate entity. There are simply too many incidents, and often similar memories are blurred together. Usually, however a few distinct and particularly meaningful incidents stand out. Reconstruction of the trauma narrative is often based heavily upon these paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many. (Herman 1992: 187)

Participants’ goals: Telling stories vs. eliciting reports According to Polanyi (1985: 13), a key difference between a report and a story lies in the fact that reports are recipient-elicited. Her distinction however, makes it sound as though narrator and recipient play these roles unproblematically. These interviews show a linguistic battle of wills ensues between victims and interviewers as the former are committed to telling their stories while the latter are required by their institution to elicit a report. As the interviewer must write an affidavit that will convince first the assistant district attorney and then the judge to take certain action in the case, she seeks to produce a performative text. These eventual participants will make their decisions to grant the client access to a protective order based solely on the information included in the affidavit. While paralegals may not view themselves as what Goffman (1981: 145) terms ‘authors’, they in fact act as not only animators of the narrative utterance contained in the affidavit, but as co-authors of it as well. This occurs given the nature of the protective order application process, as it is a complex speech event in which both participants co-construct a performative text, ideally one that will have a perlocutionary force within subsequent interactive spaces of the legal system. Co-authorship and co-performance, then, are crucial points that are necessary for understanding why the story genre and report genres appear to be in competition in the interview. The paralegals and the victims are trying to negotiate the adequate textual format for the abuse narrative from their respective positions in the context of the interview and the institutional dialogues in which they know (or do not know) themselves to be engaged. One possible explanation for these divergent conversational demands may be that participants do not share the same knowledge regarding who the intended audience of the account will be. Paralegals, for example, know what





Chapter 5

will convince higher judicial authorities of victims’ needs for protective orders. It is likely that they also know how to perform in order to have their professional decisions validated. Women are asked to answer questions and to narrate before they are told that their accounts will appear in the form of a sworn statement, so that two other people can read it. Usually it is not until the end of the interview that paralegals reveal to victims that they will need to sign a statement about the abuse they disclose. In many cases, victims are seldom told who future readers will be, since paralegals often refer to the judge only vaguely as “the court,” an entity or institution, rather than a person. In fact, as we will see in one of the following chapters, in most of the interviews examined in the D.A.’s Office, paralegals make no statement at all about the “judge” as the intended reader of the affidavit. The following example shown in Excerpt 5.12 illustrates how paralegals conceal the identity of the affidavit’s future readership.

Excerpt 5.12. Language that conceals intended readers of affidavit P:

C: P: C:

Mira te voy a dar esa cita para que vengas a firmar un papel diciendo ah, lo que ha hecho ((abuser’s name)), por qué necesitas, ah, una orden de la corte, para que no se acerque. Um, necesito meter un papel, y por eso necesito hacer la cita para que vengas a firmarlo en, en ese tiempo. Te puedo citar para el viernes, ¿Puedes venir viernes? [Mhmh ¿En la tarde? ¿Y mañana?

Translation of above example of language that conceals intended readers P:

C: P: C:

Look, I’m going to give you an appointment to come and sign a document saying ah, what ((abuser’s name)) has done, why you need, ah, a court order, so he doesn’t come around. Um, I need to file a document, and therefore, I need to make the appointment for you to come and sign it, at that time. Um, can I make an appointment for Friday, can you come on Friday. [Mhmh In the afternoon? And tomorrow?

In the example above, the interviewer does not inform the client of the fact that the affidavit will be seen by someone else. Unless the victim has been told by an employee in another social service or law enforcement agency that she will sign an affidavit, including a report of abuse that will be read by an assistant district

The protective order interview

attorney and a judge, she most likely will not know what is being done with her oral account until the end of the interview. This postponement of important legal information about the protective order process may explain why victims prefer the story-genre for the narrative of abuse over the report genre. It may be that victims perceive the paralegal to be the only recipient of the story. Though it would not be unreasonable for victims to believe that her audience begins and ends with the paralegal, Conley and O’Barr (1998) find that some lay litigants, usually women, tend to use conversational storytelling in legal settings, whether formal or informal, and regardless of who intended interlocutors are. The researchers conclude that the types of narratives required by the courts are acquired by speakers who have had frequent experience in business transactions and legal interactions. If Conley and O’Barr’s conclusions are correct, then it may be that some of these women do not possess the report genre in their linguistic repertoire, and therefore, they can only narrate with competence in a story genre. While it is not completely clear why these Latina women narrate the way they do, in this institutional interaction, paralegals make a plain attempt to structure the interview and the victims’ responses to achieve the speech activity of reporting. We will see, however, paralegals are able to do this only to a limited extent. Because the clients are not powerless in the interaction, they do not simply follow directions on intake forms or even merely follow the implicit or explicit interactional rules reinforced by the paralegals’ speech. The chapters that follow describe how clients initiate narrative-turns and fill them with the narrative resources they see fit. Furthermore, rather than always answering questions, we will learn of how Latina clients tend to ask them too. From these interviews, it appears that the institutionally preferred narrative-type is the linear Labovian narrative, as it is the narrative-type after which the affidavit is fashioned. From the moment the client enters the liminal space of the waiting room at the District Attorney’s Office, there is an attempt on the part of the legal system, carried out by tools such as intake forms and people such as institutional representatives, to condition or even institutionalize the abuse narrative. However, the data show sites of resistance, where clients are reluctant to conform to the institutional structure. Such shows of obstinacy at least hint to us that these Latina clients are not passive victims who allow the paralegals to define domestic violence for them. Instead of allowing their accounts to be confined to an institutional report, as the analysis will continue to show, the Latina women who participated in this study are constantly trying to negotiate their own textual genre of representation for the abuse they suffer.





Chapter 5

As a cultural speech event, the protective order interview exists as a public space where women can be made into clients and victims and where interviewers can have their professional identity confirmed. As we turn to an examination of the ramifications of this process, I suggest that the construction of women’s authority gets caught in between competing narrative ideologies. As a discussion of transformations between the oral and written narratives unfolds, a parallel discussion further delineating the two distinct narrative genres will also take place.

Notes . Some findings regarding the way clients speak and the interactional trouble their speaking causes are reported in Trinch and Berk-Seligson (2001). . Victor Turner (1967) describes ‘liminality’ as a period of transition, usually in the context of ritual. It is a time in which social subjects belong to neither one category of their identity nor another. Women standing before the bulletproof glass with an account to tell are at this point, neither inside nor outside the sociolegal system. This waiting room, as we will see, is a geographic space in which the process of bringing women inside is begun. . Merry’s (2001) article points out that current modes of dealing with crime entail and utilize spatial dimensions. She talks, for example, of ‘drug free zones’ and of course of protection from abuse through separation. The point is that rather than dealing with crime through punishment, there is an effort on the part of U.S. law enforcement to control crime through space and through spatial relationships. . Protective orders are not the only option available to paralegals to help women, who visit them. Paralegals generally offer to send warning letters to abusers if applicants allege only harassment, threats to take children and/or vague threats of violence. In the Pro Bono Law Clinic, threats to take children generally count as a type of domestic violence though, so it is included in the affidavit as a type of abuse. The warning letters state that a complaint has been made against the abuser and that if a certain behavior continues, criminal charges may be filed. . R = researcher. . Tannen (1984) also uses the term “narrative turn” to analyze how narratives are told by conversational participants during dinner conversation. To my knowledge, she does not provide an explicit definition, yet her use of the term seems clear. I believe that Tannen uses this construct as I do (see Trinch & Berk-Seligson 2002), because her charts show that there are fewer full narratives in her data set than there are narrative turns. Also, Tannen states that the number of narrative turns taken by participants is more reflective of the participants’ volubility than the total number of narratives found in the data set would be. . Spanish-language translations: Transcription conventions:

The protective order interview In all sample data [ ((date))

() (so que) (.02) Italicized words in English translation

P = paralegal, C = client, I = interpreter (unless otherwise noted). A single left-hand bracket indicates that two utterances are overlapping. Double parentheses indicate that material has been changed to protect confidentiality. These double parentheses are also used for researcher’s commentary within texts. Single empty parentheses indicate that the sounds on the tape were inaudible. Utterances enclosed in single parentheses indicate transcriber’s doubt. Numbers enclosed in single parentheses refer roughly to the duration of a pause in seconds. Signify that words were spoken in English, as in a code-switch, in the original.

. The speakers may have been influenced by my presence, as I am an out-group member (see Álvarez 1991; Gumperz & Hernández-Chavez 1975; Poplack 1982 on issues regarding narrative performance and code-switching in the presence of out-group members). Nonetheless, this woman did code-switch when I was present and so did several other women over the course of the year’s data collection. Most participants, however, selfidentified as bilinguals – and some even stated that they prefer to use both languages at the same time when speaking. In the interview setting, either because they were in an official institution or because the out-group researcher was almost always present, they refrained from switching back and forth between English and Spanish. However, Mexican-American service providers switched between Spanish and English in front of me and when speaking to me all the time when they were not interviewing clients. . It is often the case that Mexican-Americans disclaim their ability to speak Spanish, complaining that they have only heard it in the home and have always responded in English. Clearly, however, many have a passive knowledge of the language, and in my field site, I met people whose passive Spanish grammars enabled them to talk with clients who codeswitched and even spoke Spanish. They told me that eventually, they themselves became proficient in speaking the language out of necessity. . Herman (1992) provides an excellent explanation of the coercive tactics batterers use to keep their victims in a perpetual state of obedience to them despite the fact that there are no physical barriers impeding an escape. Her analysis of domestic abuse equates it with states of captivity, by showing the parallels between the control techniques used by abusers with those practices exercised over victims in situations of extreme power imbalances like in prisons, concentration camps, slave labor camps, religious cults and brothels. Herman (1992: 74) explains, “a single traumatic event can occur almost anywhere. Prolonged, repeated trauma, by contrast, occurs only in circumstances of captivity.” . The term “generic” here does not refer to genre; it is meant to modify an event that falls into a time frame of no particular specification.



Chapter 6

Disappearing acts Power, control, opposition and omission

In the previous chapter we analyzed the speech event of the protective order application interview and the communicative strategies employed by paralegals to reinforce its expected structure. We examined the victims’ norms and ways of narrating abuse (in linear, generic and kernel narrative types) and the structure of the affidavit. Now, we shift the focus of the investigation to the ways participants construct the oral narrative text in order to produce the affidavit. In this chapter, I show how the interviewer is an active participant in the construction of these narratives of abuse. Duranti (1997: 314) points out that when an analysis moves from the traditional speaker/listener model to one that encompasses particular types of participant frameworks, the notion of authorship must also be re-conceptualized to account for the recipient’s collaborative responsibility of shaping the message. This collaborative and collective nature of encoding and decoding messages is true not only of ritual encounters where a person speaks on behalf of another or on behalf of a group, but also of more ordinary speech events, where individuals seem to be speaking and acting for themselves. (Duranti 1997: 315)

Conceptualizing the protective order application interviews as speech events through which legal and social meanings of abuse are negotiated by the interviewer and the victim is not sufficient enough to describe how the affidavit is constructed. It is important to examine the interviewer’s participation closely because it is she who has the social, institutional, and thus linguistic power not only to influence (Polanyi 1996) but also to alter the victim’s account. I describe the contextual, linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms used by the interview participants to interpret and record violence as co-collaborators in the negotiation of its meaning. We will see that the context of the protective order interview is a place where the individual’s account of abuse is in fact, institutionalized. The women’s personal accounts are made into or given the characteristic of the institution. First, I link the programmatic framework developed by Briggs and

 Chapter 6

Bauman (1992) to the protective order interview context in order to describe how the oral narrative and the written affidavit emerge as two distinct texts. Following this discussion, I compare victims’ oral stories with what is written in the affidavit to determine what gets left out of the official report.

Textual production Each manifestation of the narrative emerges through processes of contextualization, entextualization and decontextualization (Bauman & Briggs 1990). “Contextualization involves an active process of negotiation in which participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding assessments of its structure and significance in the speech itself ” (Bauman & Briggs 1990: 69). In other words, this framework implies, at least on some level, that both victims and paralegals should have the capacity to be aware of what the other is doing or trying to do through her use of language in the interactional moment. While it is likely that both participants realize that the end goal of the interaction is something other than a simple exchange of information, it is possible that they are not reading and/or interpreting each other’s contextualization cues. The notion of contextualization, originally proposed by Gumperz (1982), shifts the meaning of “context of the speech event” from a description of its physical surroundings to an analysis of how context is constituted by the language of the participants. We have already seen in Chapter 5 how interviewers both explicitly and implicitly, through contextualization cues, spell out the rules of the interview. To understand the process of entextualization, it is worth quoting Bauman and Briggs’ definition in its entirety so as to clearly demonstrate how I use the construct of text: Entextualization is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. A text, then, from this vantage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable. Entextualization may incorporate aspects of context, such that the resultant text carries elements of its history of use within it. (Bauman & Briggs 1990: 73)

Bauman and Briggs argue that entextualization happens simultaneously with the processes of decontextualization and contextualization. Such a view blurs the boundaries of these processes, and thus suggests that narration in the protective order interview consists of layers of social (inter)action that involve more than just the setting in which the interviewer and the interviewee talk.

Disappearing acts 

Jacquemet’s (1996) definition of these narrative processes, however, establishes their clear boundaries by framing it with the notion of narrative performance. He argues, “narrative performance consists in decontextualizing an event from its occurrence in a particular space and time, and entextualizing it in new surroundings within a more controllable set of truth values” (Jacquemet 1996: 131). Jacquemet’s description assumes that before the time of narration, an event occurred. In the new context, there is some indication that the event is worth recounting as performance. Jacquemet states, “[a] narrative performance, i.e., a story, is thus an interactively negotiated and managed discourse which uses the resources available in its relevant sociopolitical environment (be this a council meeting, talk show, or a courtroom trial)” (1996: 132). For the protective order interview, I interpret this to mean that victims of domestic violence, for example, will not be able to point to the rooms where violence occurred in the home, or to physically gesture toward property that the abuser has destroyed. In the interview setting, women have to rely on descriptions and explanations when recounting certain events. Those who come to the office with bruises, scrapes, scratches and the like, however, are able to and often do rely on gestures and visuals as part of their narrative performance. In these cases, for example, their marked bodies collaborate in the constitution of the sociopolitical space or the context of the telling. In protective order interviews, victims and interviewers decontextualize some event(s) (namely, those incidents in which violence or abuse occurred) from a time prior to their interaction, and they proceed to entextualize these incidents according to the local demands of truth, importance and relevance as governed by the speech event. Returning to the example of a victim’s bruised body, we see how the protective order interview’s set of truth demands can differ dramatically from those of other agencies serving battered women. In the Women’s Shelter, for example, there is no necessity or requirement to collect visually verifiable evidence for the types of violence narrated whereas in the protective order interview, when victims report or merely point to their bruises, interviewers in the District Attorney’s Office record this truth with Polaroid cameras. The pictures are then included in the application along with the written narrative of violence in the affidavit. The decontextualization of the event(s) within the verbal exchange between the paralegal and the client is the textual source of narrative material from which the affidavit is constructed. The affidavit comes about as a recontextualization (or recentering) of the oral narrative text as it emerged and was negotiated within the interview. Bauman and Briggs (1990: 75) state,

 Chapter 6

If we now consider what becomes of text once decontextualized, we recognize that decontextualization from one social context involves recontextualization in another. For present purposes, we consider the decontextualization and recontextualization of texts to be two aspects of the same process, though time and other factors may mediate these two phases. Because the process is transformational, we must now determine what the recontextualized text brings with it from its earlier context(s) and what emergent form, function, and meaning it is given as it is recentered (emphasis added).

This programmatic framework sets up the problem for a comparison of the two versions of the abuse account that focuses specifically on those “other factors” that mediate the transfer of information from one text to another. The two types of texts under examination here are extracted from overlapping institutional dialogues between victims and legal authorities. The oral narrative text, as stated earlier, is defined as “the totality of the telling of a particular victim-witnesses’ version of the events at issue, even though that telling may occur as an interrupted, rather than a coherent sequence” within the interview (Conley & O’Barr 1990: 197).1 This definition attributes knowledge of the events at issue to the victim, while at the same time, it accounts for the way the narrative text emerges in interaction, namely through interruptions and successive narrator-initiated or recipient-elicited narrative-turns. The second narrative text emerging from the protective order interview is the affidavit, which is both an “object of interaction” and a “form of interaction” (van Dijk 1997: 3). Van Dijk (1993: 3) argues, just like talk, [written] texts also have ‘users,’ namely authors and readers. So we may also speak of ‘written communication’ or even ‘written interaction’ although the participants here do not usually interact face-to-face, and the readers seem to be more passively involved in the interaction. . . This does not mean of course that when reading and understanding they are less active than listeners.

The affidavit then, while a product of the verbal exchange between the victim and the interviewer, also doubles as a form of communication in which the victim can be heard by higher judicial authorities, but at a moment later in time. As I described in Chapter 4, I observed nine distinct sites of narrative production, each potentially a place where the same victim may tell her story in the course of her abuse reporting experience. The affidavit is part of this chain of narrations, and it serves to link the victim and her account to the institutional arena. What is interesting about an affidavit is that it allows for a victim’s account to enter institutional space in the absence of the victim herself.

Disappearing acts

And thus, the affidavit, returning to Jacquemet’s (1996) definition of the textmaking processes, becomes a new sociopolitical space for the telling again, with its own set of truth demands. The oral narrative and the written affidavit are two distinct genres or generic representations of the same account of abuse. That is to say, the differences between these two forms of packaging go beyond, as Tannen (1982) has shown, differences often associated with written and spoken modes (also see Chafe 1979; Ochs 1979; Ong 1982; Richards 1983) As we have seen, Bakhtin (1986: 60) calls speech genres “relatively stable types” of utterances in specific spheres in which language is used. Eggins and Martin (1997: 236) state “linguists define genres functionally in terms of their social purpose.” Thus each genre is a unique way of using language to achieve specific culturally established tasks, and “texts of different genres are texts which are achieving different purposes in culture” (Eggins & Martin 1997: 236). While Bakhtin defines genre as the “thematic content, style and compositional structure. . .inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and. . .equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of communication” (Bakhtin 1986: 60), in the protective order interview two genres are in competition for representative primacy. Of course, it is not the genres that compete, but rather, the conversational participants, who possess different ideas and ideologies about how the event of abuse is best represented. While the victim’s goal appears to be to tell a personal account, the interviewer’s task is to bind the victim’s story of abuse to the genre of legal discourse required by the setting. In the previous chapter we saw that the narrative types used by victims are often at odds with the linear compositional structure required in the affidavit. But the disjuncture between written and oral accounts arise from the fact that narrators have many different narrative resources, linguistic styles, themes and topics. Style is often associated with the concept of register in the sociolinguistic literature, particularly as it relates to studies on law and language (BerkSeligson 1990a; Stygall 1994). Eggins and Martin (1997: 234) write, “[t]he concept of register is a theoretical explanation of the common-sense observation that we use language differently in different situations. More technically, contextual dimensions can be seen to have an impact on language by making certain meanings, and their linguistic expressions, more likely than others.” Register and genre, according to Eggins and Martin (1997: 234), “are technical concepts employed to explain the meaning and function of variation between texts.” Thus, expecting that language will be employed differently in different situations, but at the same time recognizing that narrative is a co-production, it



 Chapter 6

can be predicted that oral and written accounts of the abuse story will be both similar and dissimilar. Alterations of the account occur at various levels as the interviewer and the victim attempt to negotiate what each puts forth as the “adequate” textual genre for the account of abuse. These levels are “lexical, syntactic, prosodic, sequential, etc. – which are all mobilized for accomplishing the interactional work of institutions” (Drew & Sorjonen 1997: 3), and in this case, of the individuals who interact with them. Thus, the negotiation process unfolds in an arena of intertextuality where the goals of interaction are also in competition. Bakhtin argues that spoken utterances can only be understood in the context of what came before and what comes after them. He maintains: . . .an utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication, and it cannot be broken off from the preceding links that determine it both from within and from without, giving rise within it to unmediated responsive reactions and dialogic reverberations. But the utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communion. . .from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created. As we know, the role of others for whom the utterance is constructed is extremely great. . .The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response. (Bakhtin [1952–1953] 1986: 94)

Bakhtin (1986) and Briggs and Bauman (1992) anticipate, but they do not explicitly deal with, how institutions tie accounts of events to specific speech genres. The question presented by Bauman and Briggs (1990) regarding the elements that the new recontextualized text brings with it from the original decontextualized text provides for only a portion of the answer. We must also ask, What has been left out? Following Bakhtin’s theory to its logical conclusion, the potential forces shaping the narrative are infinite; but some, are more likely to be more important than are others. Table 6.1, for example, illustrates the multiple community members and agencies with whom battered women come in contact and from whom they receive referrals to the District Attorney’s Office for a protective order.2 Table 6.1 depicts that out of 2669 women who applied for a protective order during a nine-month period, slightly more than one-fourth of them (n = 620) stated that they came to the office on their own initiative. In most cases, clients state that city police officers (n = 1801) refer them to the D.A.’s Office for a protective order. To a lesser extent, service providers in other social agencies

Disappearing acts 

Table 6.1. Where women come from when they apply for a protective order Referrals to the District Attorney’s Office for protective orders are made by:

Number of women (n = 2669) who state they were referred by this agency:

City police officers Women’s Shelter Legal Services, Private attorney or local University Law Clinic Rape Crisis Center Local Hospital/Family doctor Victim’s advocates employed by city police department (both professional and volunteer) Judges, magistrates, and/or clerks of court Self-initiated visit/military employer (6)

1801 33 14

Not stated on intake logs who referred client Phone interview, victim called the D.A.’s Office Probation officer Private investigator County Sheriff ’s Office Children and Youth Services Housing Authority Criminal Prosecutor

0 1 4 5 620 (436 of whom were Hispanic women) 142 33 2 1 1 7 2 3

like the Women’s Shelter, Children and Youth Services, and the Housing Authority have recommended that these women apply for orders. With respect to the account of abuse, this table serves as a reminder that just as the assistant district attorney and judge become eventual interlocutors for the account, so too are these prior interlocutors to whom the victim told her story before the protective order interview. If the protective order interview is understood only as a purposive interaction, that is, a discursive means to a legal end, then ideally, it should serve to link the survivors’ discourse of abuse to a legal genre in an effective way so that it may be efficiently and easily understood by its intended recipients. “When discourse is linked to a particular genre, the process by which it is produced and received is mediated through its relationship with prior discourse” (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 147). Prior discourse is meant to refer not only to the verbal interaction between interviewer and interviewee, but also to the social and historical links that the affidavit has to the larger category of legal documents like it. The written account in this setting derives its meaning not just from its structural and thematic content, but also through its association with the

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meaning engendered by being cast in an affidavit. In other words, the written affidavit, as a speech genre, is not only diachronically linked to the verbal interaction between interviewer and interviewee, but it is also structurally, functionally and performatively linked to the historic and social meanings attached to affidavits. Understandably, this association with such prior discourses brings with it a set of both advantages and disadvantages. When the two texts are viewed diachronically, as if one textual genre came before the other, Briggs and Bauman (1992: 142) state, the fit is never perfect: “The process linking particular utterances to generic models thus necessarily produces an intertextual gap.” In other words, by casting the oral narrative as it emerges in the interview into a written affidavit, a space of some undetermined distance between texts is produced. Philips (1998) states that the notion of intertextual gap raises the question: How closely related are the “two genres dealing with the same information?” She argues: If the gap between genres is small. . .then there is a sense of oneness between them, the sense that one is being produced in another. . ..When the gap is larger, there is more of a sense that something different is happening, and here one genre can be seen as transforming another and as involving innovation and creativity. (Philips 1998: 48)

The goals and expectations of the participants contribute to the creation of narrative gaps of various lengths. In the case of protective order interviews, it is not simply a question of either “large versus small” gaps, but rather, it is a problem of the dynamics of the telling combined with the divergent and competing goals of the speakers, which influence how closely the written narrative approximates the legal genre in the affidavit. In protective order interviews maximization and minimization of genre gaps can occur simultaneously. We will see how the imposition of genre can foster the need to employ these paradoxical strategies in order to produce contextually relevant, yet seemingly referentially consistent versions of the same account. But, when viewed in the broader context of the construction of witness testimony, this transformation may (to borrow a phrase from Eggins & Martin 1997) place meaning “at risk”. From the larger corpus of 90 District Attorney interviews that I collected and analyzed qualitatively for this book, I have selected twelve interviews and their affidavits for this part of the analysis in order to show how changes are made systematically in a quantitative way. These twelve interviews and affidavits represent a purposive sample. For the following reasons, these twelve interviews make up this sample for the quantitative analysis: (1) they represent all seven of the paralegals employed by the District Attorney’s Office to

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conduct these interviews at the time data were collected; (2) they include an equal number of interviews that were conducted in Spanish (n = 6) as those that were conducted in English (n = 6); and (3) these twelve interviews resulted in affidavits that I was able to find in the files kept by the D.A.’s Office.3 Thus, the next part of the analysis is based on an examination of twelve oral narratives, co-produced by interviewers and interviewees and captured in my recordings/transcriptions. These 12 oral narratives are compared to their written counterparts that are located in the affidavits.

Disappearing discourse The comparison of these 24 texts begins with an investigation of the broadest type of alteration: those inconsistencies between the two texts that result because entire incidents that women bring up are deleted from their written reports. In this section, we will examine the particular events in victims’ stories that disappear from the official discourse of abuse. In order to do so, we revisit the structure of the interview, as discussed in Chapter 5, to be able to see where incidents of violence and abuse that fade from the interaction in the report had actually appeared in the interview. Table 6.2 summarizes the communicative activities that paralegals attempt to accomplish in these parts. In the first and last sections of the interviews, the group of twelve victims embarks on a total of forty-two narrative turns in which they try to describe the abuse they have suffered. Forty of those narrative turns occur in the first part of the interview, and only two occur in the last. Table 6.3 provides an accounting of how many times women take narrative turns. It is important to note that women initiate almost as many narrative turns as interviewers elicit. However, twice as many interviewer-elicited turns produce information that gets placed in the affidavits. The numbers also show that the structural parts of the interview correlate with whether a narrative turn is successful in making the affidavit. These patterns raise the following question: Under what circumstances do clients take narrative turns whose content disappears from the official documentation of abuse? I answer this question by looking at which turns are successful in getting material placed in the affidavit in the three structural parts of the interview.

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Table 6.2. The structure of the interview revisited Beginning

Middle

Interviewer: – brings client to office.

Interviewer: Interviewer: – invites client to narrate – tells client what her the last incident of abuse. recommendation to the assistant district attor– asks client for a nar- ney will be (accept/reject ration of penultimate application/other). incident of abuse. – explains the subsequent – (to a lesser extent) steps in the application asks for a recounting of the process to client. antepenultimate incident of abuse. – arranges for client to return to sign the affidavit. – types notes of what client says on her computer – gives client a pamwhile client is talking or phlet about the process and narrating. tells her to reserve questions until the next meeting. – may read documents (either intake sheets, di- – escorts client out of vorce decrees, or police office. reports brought to interview by victim).

– formally introduces herself to client. – asks client questions for the D.A.’s Victim Database. – asks about the nature and length of relationship with the alleged abuser both to construct the first paragraph of affidavit and to establish client-eligibility for a protective order according to the state family code. – asks client what she wants the D.A.’s Office to do for her.

End

– asks if client is afraid of the abuser.

Table 6.3. An accounting of narrative turns that appear in the affidavit Interview Parts:

Beginning Middle End

Total # of narrative turns Total # of narrative turns elicited by interviewers Total # of narrative turns initiated by clients Total # of client-initiated turns appearing in affidavit Total # of interviewer-elicited turns appearing in affidavit

40 1 39 13 1

45 37 13 4 36

2 0 2 0 0

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Disappearing acts in interview endings The end of the interview is that part where the interviewer, for the first time during the encounter, speaks in large discursive chunks, especially as she explains how the case will proceed through the system. In most interviews, this is the first time during the encounter that the interviewer performs an explanatory speech act about the protective order and the process involved in obtaining it. This material is complex and most likely, difficult to understand for those who are unfamiliar with the courts and the legal system. To the observer, the paralegal’s explanation seems to take up a long conversational space, but if the client does not ask questions, these explanations last only two or three minutes. The interviewer then tries to bring the interview to an end by giving the client a pamphlet containing information about the subsequent steps in the legal process. Often paralegals tell clients that during their next visit, they may ask questions. In light of the interviewers’ routines and responsibilities, the one-speakerat-a-time constraint for ordinary conversation identified by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) may be the reason why victims take so few narrative turns at the end of the interview. After all, this is the structural part in which the interviewer expects to do most of the talking. However, as Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974: 729) note, while rules of turn-taking exist in speech events such as ceremonies, trials and interviews, the parameters established for taking turns at talk in these settings differ markedly from the allocation of turns in ordinary conversation. In their model, the rules of turn-taking and the one-speakerat-a-time constraint apply democratically to all participants. We see in these interviews how the democratic one-speaker-at-a-time constraint for ordinary conversation does not apply. Perhaps it is the paralegal’s decision-making capacity (i.e., her role as gatekeeper) that gives rise to a power imbalance, which allows, as we will see, the paralegal the right to interrupt and manipulate the client’s speech while her own is almost never impeded.4 But, in this final section of the interview, interviewers can control the clients’ discourse just by talking themselves. Thus, contrary to what service providers consider advocacy, where they reveal information about the protective order and possibly make referrals to other agencies, the linguistic activity, which makes up the end of the interview,5 may in reality be an act of linguistic gatekeeping. At this point in the interaction, protective order interviews exhibit the type of gatekeeping interaction that Scollon and Scollon (1981) identify as being common to Western interview models, where the subordinate has exhibited him/herself fully for

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the superior who takes on the role of spectator. It is the subordinate (in this case, the victim), who performed her story in order to prove her credibility, her need for a protective order and her sincerity in wanting to carry out the necessary steps to obtain it. All of which has been done for the interviewer to make a determination and tell the client how she will or will not proceed through the system. Throughout the first two sections of the interview, paralegals reveal very little about the process involved in getting an order and about what it is that a protective order will do to help keep the victim safe. It is only once paralegals determine that their clients need a protective order that they begin to talk to the clients about them. This suggests that interviewers require a narrative performance from clients before they expend explanatory effort on them. At the end of the interview then, there is a double constraint on the victim’s narrating. The one-speaker-at-a-time rule is reinforced by the fact that the speaker at the end of the interview is also a gatekeeper. These constraints appear to function to keep women silent at the end of the interview, perhaps so that it may be brought to a close. The data show that there is much less likelihood that incidents of abuse will be discussed in this section. One might posit that this is the case, because at the end of the interview, the client has already been told whether she will be recommended for an order. Below, evidence from the Pro Bono Law Clinic though, suggests that this reason is not sufficient to explain why women refrain from narrating in this section. So, the low number of narrative turns taken at the end of the interview in the D.A.’s Office probably has more to do with the way paralegal’s structure the interviews than with whether women are finished narrating abuse. Nonetheless, even in the D.A.’s Office, the data reveal that some victims do manage to narrate at the end of the interview. For this data set of twelve interviews, only two of the women attempt to introduce narratives at the end. Nonetheless, neither of the women is successful in getting the incidents she mentions to appear in the affidavit. Thus in these two cases, the oral narrative is altered by way of omission of entire incidents as it is transferred to the written affidavit. The text in Excerpt 6.1 is an example of a narrative turn taken by a survivor in the final part of the interview. The information that this narrative turn produces is nowhere on the affidavit.

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Excerpt 6.1. First example of victim-initiated narrative turn at end of interview P:

C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

Y durante el tiempo que se estamos esperando para ir a corte, es el tiempo que los sherifes le tienen que servir con papeles al Señor ((surname)). Para darle no, noticia que él se tiene (que) quedar lejos de usted, porque usted ya puso esta demanda, demanda, en contra a él. ¿Está bien? Pero sí tenemos que ir a corte. ¿Y usted está preparada para ir, usted cree que puede ir a corte? (uhuh) O.K. Um [Otra cosa es que yo no creo que él vaya, porque él, este, ahorita, está en, en probation, y no ha ido a, a las citas. ¿Por qué está en probation? Por una causa parecida, así, pero. . . [¿A ésta? De años atrás. O.K., lo que necesito que haga señora es que regrese para mi oficina.(.04) Uh, puede ser, ah, mañana en la tarde, o el viernes en la mañana para que firme los documentos para la orden de protección.

Translation of Spanish language in Excerpt 6.1 P:

C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

And while we’re waiting to go to court, is when the sheriffs have to serve the documents to Mr. ((surname)). To no, notify him that he has to stay away from you, because you filed this suit, suit against him. O.K. But, we do have to go to court. And are you prepared to go, do you think you can go to court? (uhuh) O.K. Um [Another thing is that I don’t think that he’ll go, because he, um, now, he’s on, probation, and he hasn’t gone to, to the meetings. Why is he on probation. For a similar case, like this one, but. . . [To this one? Many years ago. O.K. what I need you to do ma’am is to return to my office, (.04) Uh, it can be, ah, tomorrow afternoon, or Friday morning to sign the documents for the protective order.

It is unclear from the information given by the victim above whether the alleged abuser is on probation for an incident that involved her or for a similar incident involving another woman. If the latter scenario is the case, it might be

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that this kernel narrative type is not included in the affidavit, because the interviewer considers it to be a hearsay narrative. Hearsay is a legal term “applied to a species of testimony given by a witness who relates, not what he knows personally, but what others have told him, or what he has heard said by others” (Black’s Law Dictionary 1990:722). In these cases, the term hearsay implies that victims learned of events they narrate from third parties. While service providers in other settings (e.g., the Women’s Shelter, the Center for Victims’ Concerns) may make use of hearsay narrative types in their work with victims, in the context of the protective order interview they are the least desirable from a legal perspective, and thus, they rarely occur in the paralegals’ affidavits. Some Latina women may use hearsay narratives to make their case and to establish their need for a protective order in much the same way that O’Barr and Conley (1996) find that some lay litigants do in small claims courts. Often lay litigants are confounded by the notion that “the law states a preference for what a witness has seen over what a witness has heard” (O’Barr & Conley 1996: 117). The employment of these hearsay narrative types suggests that some Latina women, like the participants in Conley and O’Barr’s (1990) and Merry’s (1990) studies, possess their own notions of what constitutes evidence. Whether the tendency to rely on hearsay narratives is culture-, gender- (Conley & O’Barr 1990) or class-related (Merry 1990), knowledge obtained from third-party sources counts for these women as important information that points toward danger. Merry (1990: 5) argues that legal consciousness is “the way people understand and use law,” while “consciousness. . .is the way people conceive of the ‘natural’ and normal way of doing things, their habitual patterns of talk and action, and their commonsense understanding of the world.” For survivors of domestic violence, it may be that information received from a third party, although considered to be hearsay by the legal system, constitutes a natural and normal way of knowing about impending danger. Ptacek’s (1999) analysis corroborates my own with respect to the fact that many women apply for protective orders after already having left the abusive relationship. Contrary to popular beliefs about what will stop abuse (i.e., leaving a relationship), many women continue to encounter violence and harassment even after they leave an abuser. In my field site, out of 2669 women who applied for a protective order during a nine-month period, 1066 stated that they were filing against an ex-partner. It may be then, that hearsay narratives, in the case of battered women, are actually of great relevance to both the assessment of risk and to the victim’s case in general. Presumably if clients have left a relationship and are not in direct contact with abusers but have only heard

Disappearing acts

from others of abusers’ plans, they may have to take such information very seriously. Returning to the notion of empowerment (see Chapter 5), one could argue that if women are narrating, they are providing information in an anticipatory way that they believe to be important or even key to possibly bringing about a significant change in their lives. But hearsay narratives are not the only events recounted by victims that are excluded from the affidavit. Excerpt 6.2 below shows the other narrativeturn introduced by a client, even after she has been told that she will be recommended for a protective order. The information that is excluded in the affidavit is shown in bold.

Excerpt 6.2. Second example of victim-initiated turn at end of interview P: C: P: C: P:

C:

P: C: P: C:

P: C: I: C: P:

If for some reason, you can’t come in tomorrow, go ahead and call me and let me know and I’ll reschedule. O.K. All right? And that’s it. And if he keeps making phone calls should I, (.01) and like ( ) [Just document them. Um, if he makes any threats and you have an audio cassette, or ((voice mail)), go ahead and save them on there, when you make a report that way the officer can at least listen to them. O.K. Because see what he does with my ((voice mail)) is he calls and says, something about, “Why are you keeping the kids away from me?” You know. “Why are you doing this to me?” You know, he makes it seem like I’m the one that’s out to hurt him. Mhmh. And I’ve told him several times, he’s a good father, he’s just, you know [Mhmh [putting things in the kids’ heads. You know, to where it’s hurting them and it’s affecting them. Mhmh. But I mean, I don’t keep him from the kids. Mhmh. (.02) Well, when you, when you’re gonna start going through your divorce procedure, they have a class that both parents have to take, O.K? Mhmh And it basically helps um, helps both parents um, help their children, in that sense, cope with the divorce. O.K.? Uh, it focuses on the children, rather than

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C: P:

[on us? [on the relationship, it’s not ah, a rec, reconciliation class, it’s basically uh, techniques um, it’s it’s certain techniques in addressing, problems that the children are going to have that you’re gonna have to face together. And it helps you cope with them. O.K. . .

Regardless of the rules imposed by interviewers, either with explicit utterances that detail for victims how the interview should flow or through contextualization cues, the victims’ verbal behavior suggests that they either choose to disregard the rules of the interview or that they prefer to follow a different set of conversational rules. The fact that two victims narrate in this highly constrained section of the interview proves that clients do not always obey the social, structural or conversational constraints of the speech event. While some clients are inclined to violate social and structural constraints on narration at the interview’s end, most clients are even less likely to comply with interview rules at its beginning. The twelve clients take a total of forty narrative turns at the beginning of the interviews. Information from only fourteen of those forty (or thirty-five per cent of them), however, is recorded in some way in the affidavits. Put differently, twenty-six distinct abusive incidents discussed by survivors in the first part of the interview are not written into the affidavits. Excerpt 6.3 depicts an example of a narrative introduced by a victim during the question-answer series at the beginning of the interview. This is one of the few cases in which a victim-initiated narrative given at the beginning of the interview is ratified by the paralegal with a question that solicits even more information about the victim-introduced topic. The paralegal’s questions, to which the victim responds with a generic present time narrative, are shown below in bold. The victim initiates this portion of this two-part narrative while the interviewer is typing on her computer. Her narration, prompted by the preliminary questions regarding the couple’s income, maintains topical coherence as she embarks on the theme of how the abuse has limited her employment possibilities. About five seconds of silence pass before the interviewer and the interviewee begin to talk almost simultaneously. The interviewer relinquishes the floor, and the client says the following:

Disappearing acts 

Excerpt 6.3. Interviewer’s response to victim’s unsolicited narrative P: C: P: C:

P: C:

P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C:

Twenty-eight years. (.05) You [It’s so funny ‘cause, I can’t apply anywhere, like I was, the school district, I’ve been wanting to get back in, [Uhuh [‘cause during the divorce, I know like, he was like he would make phone calls and, I worked for two weeks, and I just loved my job. [Mhmh [And, when he finds out that, you know, that I, he found out that I applied (I think) he called the school, ( ) to hire me. And it’s like everything, “Just forget it, we don’t want any problems.” How does he find out? I, uh, my son. Mmm. I think it’s my son. He kinda feels bad, and he doesn’t want any proble, my son doesn’t want any problems, so he kinda just tries to, you know, talk to his dad, just to calm everything down, but I told him to stop it. [Yeah. [It’s never gonna get better ( ) [So he gets information from your son? Right? He forces information from my son.

In the example above, the interviewer ratifies the narrative with a question or a probe for more information. This is an exceptional case, because the more common and frequent reaction of the interviewers to these self-initiated narrations in the beginning of the interviews is either to ignore or to interrupt them and to continue on with the scheduled questions. From among the forty narrations counted in this part of the interview, I found that only ten were ratified (or acknowledged linguistically) with either a supportive device or another response-type. I consider any adjacent response referring back to the narration as having ratified it. In the other twenty-nine cases of victim-initiated narrative turns, paralegals do not acknowledge such victim-narratives. The paralegal’s lack of interruption to take the floor could in fact be considered a cooperative device inasmuch as their very silence and willingness to let the victims narrate – even when victims are not supposed to – is a way of com-

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municating support for an utterance (see Schegloff 1982). In these cases, however, such silence sounds odd and, if anything, it appears to communicate disapproval. Given the topics of violence and abuse, the fact that these narratives are more often than not ratified only with ‘cooperative silence’ is interesting when we compare the paralegal’s reaction to how an interlocutor in ordinary conversation would react. Sarat and Felstiner (1995) find this use of silence commonly employed by divorce attorneys when their clients offer narratives that attempt to draw the attorney into a moral judgment of the soon-to-be-exspouse’s behavior. Sarat and Felstiner (1995: 144) define the divorce attorney’s linguistic behavior as passively resisting the client’s expansion of the conversational agenda to “encompass a broader picture of their lives, experiences and needs.” This description of the behavior of divorce attorneys is strikingly similar to the linguistic behavior of the paralegals. As Sarat and Felstiner (1995: 145) describe: “Client and lawyer are like performer and bored, but dutiful audience – the lawyer will not interrupt the aria, but she will not applaud much, either, for fear of an encore.” So while silence can be cooperative, the paralegals’ silences, as they are combined with abrupt topic changes following victimutterances that are packed with emotional and sometimes extremely violent material, do not resound of cooperation. In fact, it seems that interviewers utilize silence to discourage interviewees from taking narrative turns. What is interesting, however, is that the interviewers are not always successful in dissuading victims from narrating at the beginning of the interview with these silent cues. Some victims either ignore the silencing techniques used by paralegals to avoid an “encore,” or, they may simply interpret interviewers’ silence during their narration as cooperation. Whichever may be the scenario, that survivors initiate narrative turns enables us to locate evidence that they have their own ideas about reporting and recording violence. In addition to silence, paralegals also employ response types that serve the dual role of ratifying victim narrations and bringing them to an end. In one instance an interviewer is counted as having ratified a narrative turn taken by a victim with a coda (a narrative component used to bridge the gap between the resolution of a past event and the present conversation (Alvarez 1991)). Excerpt 6.4 below illustrates how interlocutors can employ codas, just as narrators can, to bring a narration to an end.

Excerpt 6.4. Example of interviewer’s use of a coda P: C:

[O.K. Ha Have the children witnessed the abuse? Yes, well, two weeks ago when he did what he did to me, and I got cut, my little girls, well he threw me down, and I guess I kind of like blacked out. My

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P: C: P: C: P:

little girls got off the van to come and get him off of me and he pushed them all, and was, the girls told me that he had told them a lot of bad things and he had pushed them all off, you know [O.K., for [And that’s what they were afraid of, because he had never done [that before [something to them like that [Eh, for statistical purposes, what is your monthly income?

Here, as shown above in boldface, the victim begins to provide the coda, but the service provider quickly offers the remaining part, arguably in an attempt to stop the narrator from continuing. Codas then, are available to both interviewers and interviewees as structural/functional devices that serve to bring the narrator back into the present conversation. For this interviewer the coda “that before” functions as a supportive device for the victim, but it also accomplishes her own goal of encouraging the client to wrap it up, so that she may restore the interview structure. My assertion here that the interviewer employs the coda to restrain the victim from continuing to narrate is supported by the change of topic the interviewer introduces immediately afterwards, when she asks, “Eh, for statistical purposes, what is your monthly income?” The information presented by the client in this narrative turn is nonetheless reflected in the affidavit because it refers to the penultimate abusive incident. Even though the client’s narration is unwelcome in the first part of the interview, its content gets placed in the affidavit because the last, penultimate and to a lesser extent, antepenultimate events are routinely recorded. Therefore, almost any constraint that keeps information given by clients at the beginning of the interview out of affidavits is likely to be overridden by the fact that the interviewer will request a telling of the preferred incidents (last, penultimate and antepenultimate) in the middle part of the interview. Perhaps the only exception to this rule, as will be seen below, is when the last, penultimate or antepenultimate incidents contain information recounted in a hearsay narrative. The case shown in Excerpt 6.4 above is quite typical of these interviews. The interviewer ignores the utterance, as it occurs out of place, and she requests that the victim redraft it in the middle portion of the interview that is reserved for narration. In Excerpt 6.5, this same victim narrates again in the beginning of the interview, first in a generic present time narrative and then in a more or less linear narrative-type. Neither of these events appears in the affidavit. The paralegal’s

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topic shift is given in bold to show how they ignore client concerns and push on with their own agenda rather than ratifying the woman’s narrative.

Excerpt 6.5. Narrative-turn that yields no information for affidavit P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C:

[Good, O.K. And as far as his income, what would that be like? He, he, I can’t tell you exactly. Or more or less? But he makes, a lot of money. See, he does all the new homes. All the new Roger homes, he does all like that. [He’s got a contract? [Fort Pitt cement thing, that new mall that they did? He does all that. He makes very good money, but I never, I don’t see it, he doesn’t show me stuff, nothing, but I know that he makes at least two thousand to three thousand a week. He does make money. But where it goes, I don’t know. What is his educational background? He graduated from high school and he is a master landscaper. O.K. ((shuffles papers .02)), Oh, O.K., that’s just some of the questions that were also on the form. [Yes. O.K., let me type this. ((Begins to type)) And you know, about wanting to get my children’s clothes and some things from the house. . . Mhmh Would that be possible? I know I can’t go there now, ‘cause my daughter went one day, it was dark and, ‘cause a cousin’s staying there, Uhuh And none of the trucks were there, and she said that when she walked in, which was, wasn’t too long ago, Mhmh she walked in, he was in the room and he turned on the light, and he told her, What was she doing there, and so she couldn’t get my clothes, because then she would be saying that she knew where I was at. And she told him, “I don’t know” and she said that he had spray-painted our, see, we just had a house built and we just barely moved in on the ((date)), and she said that he had spray-painted all the house black, and put a lot of writing on the walls about me, my ((painting)), he spray-painted it black, [( ) [our (walls), he spray-painted sad faces on them, and he

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P:

C:

P: C: P:

[What you can do though, is go with a police escort, either you or if, somebody else is gonna go, just go with a police escort to get some of your belongings and um, basically [Because he’s not going to let me get in there. He took my medication, I, I hyperventilate and I have real bad nerves, they had to call and ask the doctor to give me more medicine because he took everything. My glasses, just everything. Do you know whether he uses any drugs? ((must shake her head yes)) What type of drugs?

After the survivor’s first narrative, a generic present time narrative about the amount of money the abuser earns, the interviewer gives no approval of the narrative utterance and merely moves to the next question on her interview schedule. The interviewer so much as tells the interviewee not to narrate. Her utterance, “O.K., let me type this,” indicates that the client is not following the rules of the interview, and thus the interviewer has been unable to complete her task of filling in the victim-database information. Nevertheless, the woman begins to narrate again in spite of the interviewer’s request. In the second narration, the client gives a hearsay narrative that in essence, is the most recent incident of abuse because the client has just learned from her daughter that the abuser destroyed some of her property. It seems then that the constraint on hearsay narrative types appearing in the affidavit is stronger than the interviewer’s need to record the most recent abusive incident. The interviewer’s interruption, shown in bold, is counted as having ratified or approved of the narration because she offers a full-blown response. Notice, however, in reality, the paralegal’s response to the narrative is not directed at it. Instead, the response she gives refers back to the victim’s question about being able to retrieve her clothes. Presumably, the victim offers the narrative to support or justify her question. Yet, once the question is answered by the paralegal, the client continues to list all the possessions taken by the abuser. In light of this fact, it becomes difficult to determine if the client gives the narrative in support of her question (which, incidentally, she asks out-of-turn), or if her question is meant to justify her narrating out-of-turn. In the following example, a client gives two kernel narrative types immediately after she is asked why she has not made any police reports of the abuse. The kernels are shown below in bold. Neither of these kernel narrative-types offered in the beginning of this interview is ever developed. The interviewer, rather than probing the kernels so that a more fully developed account may

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be drawn out, ignores the utterances and proceeds with her task of asking the preliminary questions required by the database.

Excerpt 6.6. Undeveloped kernel narratives P: C:

P:

¿Hay alguna razón por la cual usted no ha llamado a la policía? Porque, a mi me da lástima. Me da lástima porque como ya es tan viejo. Tiene sesenta-y-un años. Y es que, yo creo que él necesita ayuda, me parece a mí que incluso se, a él le falta la mente. Porque, algunos de nosotros y no tengo, pelea, y me dice muchas cosas malas. Y luego agarra a uno de mis perros a golpes con un cordón. A él no le gusta andar con el perro, pero sí puede andar, y maneja carro y todo. O.K. ¿El usa drogas o toma alcohol?

Translation of above excerpt P: C:

P:

Is there a reason why you have not called the police? Because I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for him ‘cause he’s so old. He’s sixtyone years old. And um, I think that he needs help, I think that he’s even lost his mind. Because some of us, and I don’t have any fight in me, and he tells me many ugly things. And then, he hits one of my dogs with a cord. He doesn’t like to take the dog for a walk, but he can walk, and drive a car and everything. O.K., does he use drugs or drink?

As does the narrator above, over the course of data collection, several women talked about how alleged abusers would hurt, hit or threaten to kill their domestic animals. In this corpus of twelve, two women, the one in the above example and one other, offer such narratives. Service providers confirm that this is a common form of abusive or controlling behavior enacted by former or current intimate partners in battering relationships. These threats are not unlike the threats abusers make towards the victims’ children or their possessions. However, this type of behavior is not recorded as abuse or violence in the affidavits for these two victims. The constraints imposed by interviewers at the beginning and the end of the interviews suggest that the rule is no narration in these structural parts. We have seen that survivors break these rules and narrate anyway, albeit to different extents; but even so, most of their narrations in these sections are deleted from the official discourse of abuse. The institutional(ized) structures of the speech event and the roles of its participants are not necessarily capable of predetermining one hundred per cent of the time who speaks, what they get to say and

Disappearing acts 

the length of time they are able to hold the floor. While the interviewers have the social and institutional power that legitimates their right to try to set the interview agenda, we are able to locate sites of resistance where interviewees try to have their say. Yet, the importance of interview structure and the social role of the interviewer cannot be denied with respect to the final representation of the victim, the abuser and the alleged abuse. Since the rules are so clearly identifiable in the first and last section of the interview, it is tempting to think that if the no-narration rule is broken, the punishment is to ignore the source of the rule-breaking act, in this case, the narrative. However, as we will see below, this is not the whole picture.

Disappearing acts from the middle section of interviews When the success of narrative turns in the middle section of the interview is compared with the success of those turns that occur at its ends, initially it appears that great differences emerge. For instance, narrative turns taken by women in the middle section produce far more information that makes its way to the final affidavits than do turns they take in the other two sections. While a correlation between the interview’s component parts and the success of a narrative turn to produce information that gets represented in the affidavit definitely exists, section of the interview is not in fact the strongest predictor in determining what will be written into or left out of the affidavit. Of all narrative turns taken by clients throughout the interview, we see that the commonalities of those that make it to the affidavit and those that do not lie in who initiates the turn. Client-initiated narrative turns are less likely to be included in affidavits than accounts of abuse elicited by interviewers. The data reveal that women are really only marginally more successful in the middle section at initiating turns that produce affidavit-worthy narrative material than they are in the other two sections. For example, of the thirteen narrative turns initiated by the clients in the middle section, only four are considered important enough by interviewers to include the information they yielded in the affidavit. Yet, in this middle section, interviewers elicit thirty-seven different accounts of abusive incidents from the twelve survivors in this sample. Of those thirty-seven incidents, ninety-four per cent (or thirty-five of them) are recorded in the affidavit. Given that ninety-four per cent of interviewer-elicited narrative turns produce information used to write the affidavit, while only thirty-five per cent of survivor-initiated turns have narrative substance that is transferred to the

 Chapter 6

affidavit, it appears that what victims consider to be important is deemed by interviewers to be either irrelevant or insignificant for the report. In this way, the institution maps itself and its definitions of violence and domestic abuse onto the women’s accounts and leaves virtually no room at all for the narrators to map themselves onto the institution. We see yet again then, within the same communicative context or sphere of communication, the two narrative genres of story and report can be placed in competition by narrators and their interlocutors who have divergent conversational goals. So, though we cannot argue with Polanyi (1985: 13) who finds that the recipient of the report “may assign relevance to specific pieces of information whose importance escapes the narrator”, as this observation seems to hold true for recipients and storytellers in these protective order interviews, these data speak to the possibility that storytellers in a reporting situation introduce information whose importance may escape the recipient.

The consequences of disappeared discourse The importance victims place on the events they narrate is worth considering because incidents of abuse that do not appear in affidavits still can be brought up by victims in future judicial settings. The absence of an incident in an affidavit that is conveyed by a victim in court might well result in the questioning of her credibility by a judge or a defense attorney. Women’s self-initiated turns, particularly in the beginning portion of the interview are often prompted by questions that center around contentious issues for couples in battering relationships. The initial questions also relate to substance use, and studies have shown that drugs and alcohol, while not the cause of abuse, certainly correlate with its occurrence (see Ptacek 1999). Victim-initiated narrative turns also occur in periods of silence when the interviewers are reading documents, typing notes on their computer keyboards, or filling out paperwork. In the Domestic Violence Training Manual, the prosecuting attorney is instructed that if the case should go to a trial, then the incidents of family violence about which the victim ought to speak on the witness stand should be those that appear in the affidavit.6 This evidence from the training manual corroborates my claim that the District Attorney’s Office indeed attempts to bind the story of abuse to a report genre by attempting at every possible link in the chain of narrations to restrict what victims will talk about. These instructions indicate that the D.A.’s Office is aware of different

Disappearing acts 

norms and ways of narrating and that its solution to this problem is to try to make what women say conform to what the legal system needs to hear. Although crucial information might be missed by the interviewer in these dyadic interviews, at least victims possess the linguistic ability to get the interviewer’s attention by starting to narrate since the language of the interviewer and the interviewee is identical. From the larger data set gathered for this project (which includes interviews collected from the Pro Bono Law Clinic as well), however, there is a case where a monolingual Spanish-speaker was interviewed by a monolingual English speaker who relied on the assistance of a bilingual, volunteer-interpreter to conduct the application interview. While a full-fledged analysis of the role interpreters play in the creation of these multiple texts is beyond the scope of this chapter, an example of a protective order application interview conducted with an interpreter from the Pro Bono Law Clinic (see Chapter 4 for a description of this setting) provides a lucid example of the possible consequences of disappearing discourse. In this three-party interview below, the client (C) cannot as easily pull the interviewer (V, for volunteer) off task (i.e., from either typing or reading documents) through narration as can clients who speak the language of the interviewer. It is the presence of the interpreter (I) as well as all of the conversational participants’ willingness to shift roles that create this communicative conundrum.

Excerpt 6.7. Interpreter acts as interlocutor7 C:

V: I: V: I: C: I: V:

Yo, um, también, eh, quiero pedir la custodia permanente de la niña. ((Abuser’s name)) tiene ( ) biológicamente. Y yo est, y yo estaba siempre con la niña, ( ) y la niña es suya, pero nunca me pasó la ( ) de la niña. ( ). Entonces, eh, no quisiera que él se ( la custodia ( ) para mantener la niña). Él nunca me ha dado dinero, jamás. (.13) Has she had any litigation re, concerning her child in ((state where woman used to live)) or any other state? ¿Alguna ( ) ya tiene en ((State)) o en algún otro estado ( )? Concerning custody? Con custodia. Usted pidió custodia en ((State)) o en [No, no, no, no no. Acá, quiero pedir acá, ahora. No, no custody. No custody, no child, there’s nothing.

 Chapter 6

C:

No, en ningun lado. (.19) ((Assistant Director comes over to the interviewer’s desk)). Assistant Director: Where did they live? V: ((State)) Assistant Director: Since? How long have they been here? V: Six months. I: Six months. V: So at this point, where it says, should I also do a declaration under the Uniform Child Custody Act, ‘cause we, we didn’t check box two. (.13) Assistant director: ((reading off computer to herself)) ( ) V: On the right. I’m in the right column. (.02) Assistant Director: ‘Cause it’s six months to establish jurisdiction, so as long as they’ve only been here six months. Where’s the guy, is he here, too? V: Yes. I: Yeah. He has come. (.05) Assistant Director: We’re not gonna do um, the declaration in Uniform Child Custody. V: Oh, so I want to check this one? Assistant Director: No, cause we can’t. (Leave that one blank). Keep going, you got one (line coming ( )). ((Interviewer is scrolling through documents on his computer screen)). V: O.K. ((There is a five-second pause in the conversation as the interviewer and the Assistant Director are busy reading the documents on the computer and trying to determine which forms would be appropriate to ask the judge to grant the client custody of her child. It is during this pause that the victim begins talking to the interpreter about what happened before the couple came to the United States)). C: En ((Latin American country)) estuvo terrible, por, eso, ah, le tuve que hacer varias denuncias. Eh, estuvo en la cárcel. Estuvo preso. Por eso V: [He doesn’t live here right? I: No, no, no. C: En ((Latin American country)) con un revolver me amenazó cuando yo estaba embarazada de la nena, tres meses. Ah, yo me entero a los tres meses que estaba embarazada porque me empezaron a tratar por una infección.

Disappearing acts 

I: C:

I: C:

V: I: C: I: C: I: C: I: C: I: C:

V: C: V: I: V: I: V: I: V:

[Mhm Eh, y después, me sale, eh (el test), eh estoy embarazada. Entonces, eh, le dije, le digo, eh, “Estoy embarazada.” (No quiero más que ( ) acá) Le dije, pero “Jo, ya hablé con los médicos, es peligroso con la bandía.” “No me importa.” ((Gasp)) Entonces él (de allí) agarró sus cosas, y yo llego del trabajo, y él estaba sacando sus cosas, le digo, “adónde vas?” Me dijo, me dice, “Me voy.” Le digo, “¿Adónde?” “No voy a decirte.” “(No te vas a pagarme) de todo lo que me debes.” Él me debía mucha plata. Él me estuvo sacando mucha plata, muchos años, me dejó sin nada. Yo tenía negocio, tenía carro, tenía cuenta en el banco, ( ) cuenta internacional. Tenía mi casa. Y él no tuvo nada. Me sacó todo. Is her work, um her apartment, does she manage the apartment? ¿Usted es la manager, no? Sí. Yes she lives there. Ah, si tú ( ). Contracto, ah [No, está bien, porque eso va a servir por cuando ya (la tenga hecha) Eh, entonces, él saca un arma y me dijo, “Yo no tengo que devolver nada.” [Mhm “Yo me voy ahora.” Y sacó un arma y la apunta a mí y me dice, “Si no me dejas ir te pongo un tiro en la panza.” ((Gasp)) Entonces, (estaba mi hija (con su mejor) amiga) él sale corriendo, y yo llamo a mi hijo y a la policía, la policía lo ubica, y lo agarraron del arma. Se lo llevaron preso y va a la cárcel. [And( ), Oh, I’m sorry ((for interrupting)). () Does your daughter have a school? No. The little daughter, Liliana? Yeah. No. How about a vehicle. Excuse me? Does she have a car that she wants him to stay away from?

 Chapter 6

Translation of Spanish language in Excerpt 6.7 C:

I, um, also, uh, I want permanent custody of my daughter. ((Abuser’s name)) has ( ) biologically. And I, it’s, and I was always with my daughter, ( ) and she is his, but he never gave me anything ( ) for my daughter. ( ). So then, uh, I wanted that he (the custody ( ) to take care of my daughter). He never has given me money, never ever. (.13) V: Has she had any litigation re, concerning her child in ((state where victim used to live)) or any other state? I: Is there ( ) in ((State)) or in some other ((State))? V: Concerning custody? I: With respect to custody? Did you ask for custody in ((State)) or in C: [No, no, no, no, no. Here, I want to ask for it here, now. I: No, no custody. V: No custody, no child, there’s nothing? C: No, nowhere. (.19) ((Assistant Director comes over to the interviewer’s desk)). Assistant Director: Where did they live? V: ((State)) Assistant Director: Since? How long have they been here? V: Six months. I: Six months. V: So at this point, where it says, should I also do a declaration under the Uniform Child Custody Act, cause we, we didn’t check box two. (.13). Assistant Director: ((reading off of the computer to herself)) ( ). V: On the right. I’m in the right column. (.02) Assistant Director: Cause, it’s six months to establish jurisdiction, so as long as they’ve only been here six months. Where’s the guy, is he here, too? V: Yes. I: Yeah. He has come. (.05) Assistant Director: We’re not gonna do um, the declaration in Uniform Child Custody. V: Oh, so I want to check this one?

Disappearing acts 

Assistant Director: No, cause we can’t. (Leave that one blank). Keep going, you got one (line coming ( )). ((Interviewer is scrolling through documents on his computer screen)). V: O.K. ((There is a five-second pause in the conversation as the interviewer and the Assistant Director are busy reading the documents on the computer and trying to determine which forms would be appropriate to ask the judge to grant the client custody of her child. It is during this pause that the victim begins talking to the interpreter about what happened before the couple came to the United States)). C: In ((Latin American country)) he was terrible, that, that’s why, uh, I had to make many reports. Uh, he was in jail. He went to jail. That’s why V: [He doesn’t live here, right? I: No, no, no. C: In ((Latin American country)) with a revolver he threatened me when I was pregnant with my daughter, three months. Uh, and I found out I was three months pregnant because they were treating me for an infection. I: [Mhm C: Uh, and then, it comes out ( ) that I am pregnant. So, uh, I told him, I say to him, uh, “I am pregnant.” (“I don’t want any more ( ) around here”). I told him, but, “Oh, I talked to the doctors, and it’s dangerous with the gang.” “I don’t care.” I: ((Gasp)) C: So he (from there) got his things, and I get home from work, and he was taking his things, and I say, “Where are you going?” He told me, he says, “I am leaving.” I say to him, “Where? Aren’t you going to tell me? (Aren’t you going to pay me all that you owe me?” He owed me a lot of money. He was taking so much of my money, for many years, and he left me with nothing. I had a business, I had a car, I had a bank account, ( ) an international account. I had my house. And he had nothing. He took everything. V: Is her work, um, her apartment, does she manage the apartment? I: You are the manager, right? C: Yes. I: Yes, she lives there. C: Uh, if you ( ) the contract, uh I: [No, it’s O.K., because this is going to be useful once (he has it done). C: Uh, then, he takes out a weapon and he said to me, “I am not going to give you back anything.”

 Chapter 6

I: C: I: C:

V: C: V: I: V: I: V: I: V:

Mhm “I am leaving now.” And he took out the weapon and he points it at me and he says, “If you do not let me leave, I am going to put a shot in your belly.” ((Gasp)) So, (my daughter was there (with and her best) friend), and he leaves running, and I call my son and the police, the police find him, and they grabbed his weapon. They arrested him at gunpoint, and he goes to jail. [And ( ), Oh, I’m sorry ((for interrupting)). () Does your daughter have a school. No. The little daughter, Liliana? Yeah. No. How about a vehicle? Excuse me? Does she have a car that she wants him to stay away from?

In this particular case, as the interviewer engages in conversation with the Clinic’s Assistant Director regarding the legal process involved in applying for child custody through the protective order application, the victim begins a narrative turn. The woman’s narration is indeed ratified in this instance, but a problem arises because the linguistic acknowledgement of her narrative and its content is provided by the person who is supposed to render the woman’s Spanish into English. While it is unclear whether the woman intends for the interviewer to hear the narrative, it is unmistakable that her narrative turn in no way succeeds in getting the attention of the interviewer. In this case, all three parties to the application interview participate in allowing the role and the conversational purpose of the interpreter (i.e., as interpreter) to shift to the role of an interlocutor whose purpose it is to listen. The interpreter’s ratification serves not only linguistically, and even empathetically, to acknowledge what the victim says, it also serves to ratify what I argue is the participant role of storyteller that most victims want to take in these interviews. Again, we see that despite institutional intentions to structure the interview and to make participation roles predictable, these roles are problematic in their own right, because they do not exist outside of interaction. Thus, it is the participants who inhabit these roles, who in face-to-face interaction, constitute them through their language use. With an interpreter available to catch narrations that occur out of

Disappearing acts

turn, victims can assume their role as storytellers in an unfettered way. And interviewers can assume their desired roles as the elicitor of a report. In the example above, the two narrative genres of story and report occur simultaneously, and neither intrudes upon or impedes the narrative trajectory of the other. The interpreter in her role as a listener co-constructs the story, because she quietly and cooperatively gives her full attention to the client. She refrains from interrupting and reacts at the right moments with sociolinguistically acceptable responses that validate the worth of the victim’s narration. Unlike paralegals in the D.A.’s Office that listen silently and abruptly shift topics in their pursuit of more reportable information, this interpreter shows incredulity, disbelief, and even outrage, at the events the victim narrates. Even though the interviewer does not understand what the victim is saying, in a way, he also enables the victim’s storytelling role. Notice how he even apologizes for having to interrupt the flow of her discourse to ask her questions for the report. His questions are strikingly similar with respect to their mundane and routine nature to those asked by the paralegals in the D.A.’s Office. In the case above, neither the interviewer nor the interpreter bothers to tell the victim not to narrate when the interviewer is preoccupied with something else and unavailable to sift through her narration. Nor, however, does the victim insist that her narrative be interpreted into the language of the interviewer. It might be argued that the presence of the interpreter is convenient in some interviews for several reasons. Not only are interpreters necessary so that monolingual English speakers can understand Spanish-speaking clients, but also because they could facilitate the process for victims of domestic abuse who may want to use the interview as a cathartic space to unburden themselves through narration. Additionally, interpreters such as the one shown above eases the burden of service providers who may feel tension because of the interactional trouble that arises when they seek one type of information and victims insist on providing something else. The fact that the interviewer in the transcript above never asks the interpreter about what the client is saying might suggest that he believes that the only worthwhile information is that which he himself elicits. However, the data suggest that there exists the danger that monolingual interviewers can miss crucial information if they rely on an interpreter to act as the linguistic filter through which presumably non-important information will be sifted out. The interview in Excerpt 6.7 above produced this very danger. The victim tells the interpreter that while she was pregnant and living with the abuser in her country of origin, the alleged abuser held a gun to her stomach and threatened to kill the unborn fetus. The interpreter never makes this information





Chapter 6

known to the interviewer. Consequently, this part of the narrative does not become part of the official report in the affidavit. Three weeks later at the hearing, the victim began to narrate this incident in court. Having just heard about it for the first time, the judge interrupted her to ask why this “egregious accusation” was not included in her sworn affidavit. The victim responded that she did not know why it did not appear, but that she was sure that she had mentioned it. To recover whatever credibility she felt had been challenged by the judge’s question, in the middle of the hearing, the victim pointed at me (the researcher) and said that I had been there and had tape-recorded the whole thing.8 This chapter has described evidence to support the claim that victims are not merely making reports, but rather that they come to an interview to tell a story of abuse. Even when the rules of the interview are laid out for them, Latina women do not wait for their interlocutors to elicit accounts of abuse. Therefore, just as the questions asked can have an impact on the final narrative form and context, so too can the genre in which the narrator casts the account. Thus, one type of alteration between the victims’ oral stories and their written accounts occurs when women narrate out-of-turn, that is to say when they narrate in portions of the interview where they are not supposed to, and when they narrate events or incidents that paralegals have not elicited. When victims break the rules of the interview structure and the rules of the report genre by volunteering information that they think is important, parts of their accounts are susceptible to alteration either through deletion of entire incidents of abuse or, as I will show presently, through transformations of these incidents. We see then how the narratives of survivors of domestic violence are altered in the broadest fashion as entire incidents and events introduced by these Latina women are ignored by interviewers.

Notes . Throughout I use the term “account” in the most general and non-technical sense to be able to refer to what is said in the interviews – and to the incidents that are or are not reported in the affidavit. . As was the case in Chapter 1, the data here consist of nine-months worth of client intake information, and not twelve-months worth, because of changes made in the District Attorney’s Office regarding data collection. Certain data were not available for the first four months of the year. I made these data records by gleaning information from both in-take logs and the District Attorney’s computerized Victim Database in which paralegals enter information about both victims and defendants. Although in-take logs for an entire year are available, the first month for this sample begins with the month the computerized Victim

Disappearing acts

Database was installed. The last month represented in these records was my final month in this particular field site. . There are instances in the data where clients that I recorded were recommended for a protective order, but whose final affidavits I could not locate a month or so later. It may be that these affidavits were misplaced or that they were never completed. . These interruptions made by the paralegals of the victims’ narrations may prove to be an analytical starting point for understanding how the interviewer’s dual role of advocate/gatekeeper influences the interaction. In addition, it could be hypothesized that in more “advocacy” oriented institutions, the interviewers will interrupt victims’ narratives less frequently. . The supervisor of the paralegals told me that the D.A.’s Office considers “making referrals” to other agencies to be advocacy work. . A full citation for this training manual, an in-house publication produced with a photocopier, would reveal the field site. . This interview introduces the need to add new transcription conventions. They are: C: V: I:

is still used for “Client” is used for “Volunteer interviewer” who in this interview does the work of the paralegal is used for the “Interpreter” who, in this case, is a 27 year old, native, Spanishspeaking Latin American woman. This woman is a volunteer in the Clinic. As was stated in Chapter 4, most of the time in the Clinic, a state certified interpreter does this job, but there are cases when interpreting is done by either Clinic volunteers or by a client’s family member or friend.

Assistant Director is used to refer to the Clinic’s “assistant director.” She is not an attorney, but she works under the Clinic director who is. The assistant director is, however, aware of the state’s family code. Italicized text in the translation (Translation of Spanish language in Excerpt 6.7. Interpreter acts as interlocutor) refers to my translations from Spanish language dialogue to English. Where there was English spoken in the original, the text is in normal type. . It is unlikely that this victim expected the interviewer to consult the tapes after the interview. My informed consent forms as clearly as possible explained to the participants that I was making recordings for the purposes of academic research and not on behalf of the Clinic. It is more likely that victims see the interpreters as collaborators in their abuse narratives as opposed to simply a linguistic translator who will render what they are saying into the language of their interviewer. For one, the interpreters in many of these cases at the Clinic act like collaborators in the construction of the oral and written account of abuse. Above, for example, the volunteer-interpreter answers the questions of the Clinic’s Assistant Director as if she were conducting the interview. Thus, it might be that the woman expected the interpreter to tell the interviewer about this incident at some later time.



Chapter 7

Disfigurement and discrepancy Taking the story out of the report

Critical legal scholars complain that the voices of lay litigants are at best stifled and at worst silenced by the hegemonic discourse of the law. Yet, despite this important observation, such theoretical musings, as Conley and O’Barr (1990) point out, have not managed to uncover the voices of lay individuals. Throughout this book, the criticism of this shortcoming does not lie with critical legal jurisprudence, but rather with the legal system’s overt attempt to make the accounts of lay litigants conform to narratives that the adjudication process can deal with. In the case of protective order interviews, while this transformation certainly facilitates the short-term goal of getting women injunctions, it begs the question as to whether it amounts to any broader, long-term benefits for women. At first glance, the affidavit appears to be a viable mechanism for the representation of women’s experience with domestic abuse. As we saw in the last chapter, however, when the affidavits are compared with their corresponding oral interview transcripts, we are confronted with a problem of representation. When examined beside the spoken discourse, we are forced to ask whose account is in fact represented in the final affidavit? While story and report are, of course, constructs, they do serve as a framework through which we can systematically analyze the differences between lay and institutional voices. By making these comparisons, we can discover what lay voices sound like before they are subjected to the discourse of the law. In so doing, we can see what gets filtered out, posit why this might be so, and discuss the consequences of this filtering process for both individual women and for society at large. Intersecting with the concept of institutional memory, this approach additionally allows for an examination of how lay voices, if represented, could change what the system has routinely considered to be domestic violence. We could then hypothesize that as the legal system’s perception of domestic violence changes, perhaps too, its solutions or remedies to the problem would as well. This question is taken up in the second part of this chapter.

 Chapter 7

Figure 7.1. Recap of the resources that comprise stories and reports Characteristics of domestic violence stories: Characteristics of domestic violence reports: 1. Oral text, the result of a teller-driven ac- 1. Written text, the result of an interviewercount that takes place during a verbal, face- elicited account that is designed for a thirdto-face exchange with interlocutor party to read and interact with 2. Victim and interviewer are co-authors of 2. Interviewer is sole author of written text oral text 3. Narrator is animator and principal of oral 3. Interviewer is animator, while narrator is text principal 4. Overall structure is variable and seemingly 4. Overall structure is homogenized, specialdependent on life-experience of victim ized, slightly modified Labovian narrative 5. Comprised of several (3+) episodes

5. Comprised of two or three episodes

6. Episodes are expressed in linear-Labo- 6. Episodes are expressed maily in linearvian narratives, generic past and present- Labovian narratives time narratives, and kernel narratives

Before continuing this examination of the different communicative resources that are embodied in stories and reports, revisiting the characteristics that constitute these distinct narrative genres, as thus far uncovered in previous chapters, might be helpful. Figure 7.1 includes a summary of resources that comprise each separate genre. Domestic violence stories develop in institutional settings, to a certain extent, in the same way stories do in ordinary conversation. They are produced as interlocutors interact with narrators through question/answer adjacency pairs (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974), the interlocutor’s cooperative silence (Jaworski 1993) his/her use of back-channeling devices to indicate comprehension (Labov 1982) or willingness to allow the state of talk to continue (Schegloff 1982). But unlike the experience narrators find in everyday conversation, the storytelling that women do in the protective order interview sounds as if their interlocutors are attempting to derail the account through a combination of incessant elicitation and pregnant silences. That is, rather than responding in a fashion strictly designed to aid the trajectory of the victims’ accounts, interviewers either impose a report genre or at the very least, they attempt to elicit a report alongside the victims’ stories. In Chapter 6 we saw that incidents introduced or initiated by victims are more often than not omitted from the final record. Looking into the content of these omissions, we see how this type of alteration serves to define for vic-

Disfigurement and discrepancy

tims, and for institutional memory, what the state is willing to consider to be family violence. Both within the interaction as well as within the powerful position of representing violence for the record, paralegals send signals to victims that their definitions of abuse are at odds with the state’s. Excerpt 7.1 below shows how clients’ definitions contrast with this state’s legal definition. The client in this instance puts forth, as part of her abuse story, evidence that her partner has threatened to take her child away from her. Notice how the paralegal, representing the state, responds to this information.

Excerpt 7.1. Ignoring victim’s definitions of violence P: C: P: C:

P: C:

P: C: P:

[He called you where? At your house? At my cousin’s house, yes. At your cousin’s house. Where I’m living at. And um, I told him that it was over. I didn’t want anything to do with him no more. He kept telling me, “Well, I’m the baby’s daddy. I need to see him.” “So how do you expect to see the baby, if you don’t give me no money?” He told me, “Well that’s your problem,” ‘cause I don’t call him back, you know, when he calls me. Mhmh And he started getting mad cause I kept telling him that it was over, and it was over. So, finally he told me that he was gonna go over that night. And I said, “Come over and I’ll call the cops on you.” And he said, “You won’t have to, um, I’m gonna take the cops with me. I’m gonna see my son, and I’m gonna take him away from you.” And I told him, “They won’t let you take him.” He lives in a boarding home, where a bunch of crazy people are at. Mhmh And supposedly, he’s supposed to be working there also. Uh. . . Did he make any specific threats to hurt you?

In some jurisdictions this threat to take children is considered to be a form of family abuse, but in Anytown, it is not. So, it is likely that this is the reason why the paralegal does not co-construct this narrative. Often when this issue comes up in Anytown, both paralegals and divorce attorneys attempt to make the state’s position clear to women. They will explain that the state of AnyState sees both parents as viable caretakers for their children, regardless of evidence of abuse towards a spouse. Sometimes paralegals do not take the time to expound on this issue. The paralegal in Excerpt 7.1 does not ratify or even acknowledge this client’s fear of a kidnapping. The paralegal’s linguistic behavior acts as a surrogate for the explicit exposition of the rule of law in Anytown.

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The definitional divide is further evidenced in this particular narrative, when we learn that the client has indeed received threats of bodily injury, yet does not lead her story with them. The woman narrates bodily threats only when the paralegal asks for them. Excerpt 7.2 below is the client’s response to the paralegal’s question: “Did he make any specific threats to hurt you?”

Excerpt 7.2. Client’s response to: “Did he make any specific threats to hurt you?”

P: C: P: C: P:

Yes, he said that if I, he can’t have me then nobody else will. So, he’ll make the baby motherless. I guess, in other words, killing me. And he said that, he’s done that, he’s threatened about that before that he will kill me. If I, if he can’t have me. And to see what he would say, I asked him, “What about if I did have someone else?” Cause he kept telling me that I was, a bitch, calling me a bunch of ugly names. Um, saying just a bunch of ugly stuff and, and um, he told me if I did have somebody else, which he knew I did, according to him, he said he would kill that guy, and kill me too. And even if he had to go to jail, and leave, leave the baby, he would. Cause he said that without having me in his life, he’s nothing. ((pause for typing)) O.K., it says here that he wouldn’t mind leaving the baby motherless or fatherless? Right, motherless for killing me and fatherless for him going to jail. O.K. Which ( ) Mhmh. Uh, what happened after that?

It is not possible to determine what events, incidents or threats these women in general, and this one in particular, find(s) most frightening. Yet, it should not go without attention that even though this client has suffered death threats, her narration of the abuser’s threats to take her child precedes their mention. Crucial elements of this victim’s story, such as the name calling, the accusations of having a lover, and the threats to kill the lover are left undeveloped by the paralegal, who chooses first to focus on the death threats and then to move on immediately with the complicating action of the incident of which they are a part. The paralegal’s final question in the above excerpt, “Mhmh. Uh, what happened after that?”, attempts to entextualize a linear account of the violent threats. Interviewers are not really cooperating with their clients’ desires to tell a story, nevertheless their participation in the interview clearly contributes not

Disfigurement and discrepancy

only to the development of the report they seek, but also, albeit unwittingly, to the evolution of the client’s story. On the one hand, women have little choice but to respond to paralegals’ questions. At the very least, women must answer, but on the other hand, women do not need to stop with a simple answer. The way women exercise choice lies in how they respond to the recipient-driven entextualization process. The personal story differs from the institutional report in this setting, primarily because the text-making process of the story comes about through the interviewee’s blatant acts of agency in response to the interviewer’s questions. In other words, women take advantage of the narrative space to tell. The oral narrative space is that place where women can deconstruct events of the past and reconstruct them to make pragmatic sense for the moment of the their telling. The incident, according to the client, begins with the abuser’s demand to visit the child, and it escalates with the abuser’s threat to take the child away. It seems that the client, however, wants to have her feeling that the abuser would not make for a suitable primary custodian corroborated by the paralegal. But, instead of taking up the client’s emotional and rational reaction, the paralegal moves on to ask about physical violence or threats of physical violence. The client complies with the right answer, but she also pushes her own narrative agenda about the abuser being an unfit parent. The paralegal, while the author of the report, is in fact, not the reporter, or the first-person narrator. In the sense of Goffman, paralegals are animators, or perhaps, even better stated in this case, the articulators of victims’ account. It is not just life that paralegals give to the women’s accounts, but more specifically, they lend them a legal life or a legal voice. Even though the paralegal is author and animator/articulator, the victim assumes the position of principal or the person legally and ethically accountable for the narrative contained in the affidavit. Ironically the victim, as both reporter (first-person narrator) and principal, will have very little opportunity to engage with her primary interlocutors, the assistant district attorney and the judge regarding what is contained in the affidavit. But the differences between the story and report genres do not end with mode of communication (Hymes 1972), production formats (Goffman 1981) and participation frameworks (Polanyi 1985). The organization and component pieces of each of these genres are also very different. While the report genre can be categorized as formulaic, homogeneous, and cast in a modified or specialized Labovian narrative, the organization of the story genre is more variable, and apparently largely dependent on life experience. The domestic violence story tends to contain some combination of kernel, generic

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past/present and linear narrative types, and individual women can combine these discourse-level resources uniquely. There is, however, evidence to suggest that in certain ways women’s stories will vary systematically. Even though all batterers and all victims are not alike, typologies of battering show there to be two or three general types of abusers who use predictable abuse strategies to make their victims dependent on them (Holtzworht-Munroe & Stuart 1994; Jacobson & Gottman 1998). For this reason, one source of predictable variability in the organization of the story may be due to the nature of the battering relationship itself. In addition to the variability found among story structures when compared to the homogenized report structure, we find that women’s stories tend to represent domestic abuse as a relationship and not as just an incident of violence. Victims of domestic violence, like some lay litigants, who are what Conley and O’Barr refer to as relationship-oriented, are heavily focused on status and the intricacies of family or intimate connections when they interpret the rights of and allocate responsibilities to the actants in their narratives. Service providers try to construct rule-oriented accounts by focusing on behavior already considered to be criminal by the system. In so doing, the narratives they write are created of singular incidents of violence that can be interpreted as wrong or illegal, regardless of the fact that the parties are involved in an intimate relationship. This is to say that paralegals write the affidavits so that “the law as a system of precise rules for assessing responsibility. . .” (Conley & O’Barr 1990: 58–59) can be enacted. Conley and O’Barr’s proposal of a rules vs. relationship continuum to characterize different types of litigant accounts based on litigants’ orientation toward the law can be analogized to understand, not differences between speakers, but rather the differences between story and report genres. According to Conley and O’Barr (1990: 58–59, 173), litigants whose accounts are relational are “at variance with the agenda of the law” as they focus on social relationships and issues of entitlement due to positions of social status. Litigants whose accounts are rule-oriented, however, are found to be in sync with legal norms of narrating disputes as their accounts address specific legal rules and principles. What makes this conceptualization particularly interesting in the case of domestic abuse is that the dispute in question is one that is borne of an intimate social relationship, and not of a contract. Just as relational-litigants may, as Conley and O’Barr (1990: 58–59) propose, believe “that the law is empowered to assign rewards and punishments according to broad notions of social need and entitlement,” we could argue that the law, at least in the cases examined here, fails to take into consideration

Disfigurement and discrepancy

Figure 7.2. Inside stories and reports: Relation- vs. rule-orientations Mini-narratives Content

Stories: Relational-orientation of stories of domestic violence Focus on conflict, violence used to substantiate conflict

Reports: Rules-orientation of reports of domestic violence Focus on violence, conflict used to substantiate violence

Orientation clauses of Non-specific times and dates, Specific times and dates mini-narratives often preference to use children’s lives to orient violent events Naming Kinship terms, non-specified Proper names, identification of sex of ‘friends’ sex of friends Presentation of inci- Linear or episodic incidents Recent incidents, suggests dents given as evidence to justify leav- timeliness of violence, given ing the relationship as evidence to suggest urgent need for order; stresses victim’s credibility Resolution of mini- Women do not see miniincidents incidents as isolated events with beginnings, middles and ends. . .for them, they are incidents of violence for which the women themselves still have no resolution Overall resolution The fact that women are there is their way of stating, “I need legal help”

That the police were called, That the abuser was arrested, That injuries were sustained

Explicit plea for legal help

the fact that crime and conflict exist in intimate realms. Basically, these realms are not strictly contractual, and each individual involved is not free to accept or reject relationship terms. Nevertheless, the affidavit stands to represent the relationship formally. Figure 7.1 above, describing the overall structure of the affidavit, reflects the distinction between stories and reports through the rules and relationships continuum. In Figure 7.2, we move inside the report and story genres to see how their respective component parts follow Conley and O’Barr’s delineation. The descriptions above suggest that the report and story genres differ fundamentally in terms of their structures and in the ways they are produced. Also important to note however, is that stories and reports may serve different functions. Through the report genre, paralegals seek to achieve the main goal of obtaining a protective order for clients. The insistence of the interviewers in

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Figure 7.3. Ethnographic details about clients (C) from Pro Bono Law Clinic and final action taken in their cases Interview # 16 17 18

C age Number of years C in USA 24 5 31 9 38 16

Client years of school 11 6 12

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

38 31 28 20 19 32 22 32 47 44 34 26

12 6 12 0 6 12 12 12 0 12 2 9

16 13 8 5 2 7 6 15 15 8 16 7

Client employed as

Final action taken in case

Hotel cleaning Client did not appear for court House cleaning Hearing held, order granted House cleaning Stipulated order agreed to, no hearing needed House cleaning Client did not return to sign affidavit House cleaning Client requested that case be dropped Housewife Client requested that case be dropped Housewife Client did not appear for court Housewife Client requested that case be dropped Salesclerk No information on client found Clothes vendor Client did not appear for court Hairdresser Client did not appear for court Factory worker Client did not appear for court Apart. Manager Hearing held, order granted Factory work Hearing held, order granted Salesclerk Hearing held, order granted

eliciting the report genre reinforces this goal-oriented aspect of the communication. Yet, it is not clear that women’s goals for narrating match with those of the interviewers. Women’s stories and their behavior within the system suggest that women are likely to be pursuing a variety of goals. A purposive sample of fifteen clients, who I tape-recorded in the Pro Bono Law Clinic, reveals that many of the women who apply for these orders never actually follow through with the necessary steps to obtain them.1 Of these fifteen clients, represented in Figure 7.3 above, only five managed to walk away with injunctions in hand. The last column entitled, “Final Action Taken in the Case,” shows that two clients did not process the paperwork required of them the day they were interviewed. Three clients came back to the courthouse on their scheduled hearing dates, but they asked that their petition for court orders be dropped. And five clients did not return on their scheduled court date. There are several possible explanations for this phenomenon. It may be that not all women want a protective order in the first place. While I am convinced that every woman I tape-recorded was in search of a solution to the violence and abuse that made up part of her relationship, it was never clear

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that they thought that a protective order was the answer they were looking for. As we saw in Chapter 6, most women arrive at the application interview with a referral in hand. Having been referred by police and social welfare workers to the D.A.’s Office or the Pro Bono Law Clinic, women might be acting on authoritative recommendations. Many women appear at these informal legal settings somewhat unclear as to what a protective order really is or what it will do for them. After finding out more about the order, some women may decide against pursuing one. Learning that they will need to sign a statement indicating what the abuser has done, which he will be able to read, may dissuade women from continuing to be involved with the process. Once at home, some women may conclude that a protective order is too dangerous for the time being, as they come to realize that exposing the abuser and his actions publicly does not even really guarantee the issuance of the piece of paper that is meant to protect them. In other words, women may reason that the public exposure of an abuser in exchange for the right to call the police if he again begins to harass, threaten, sexually or physically abuse is a high price to pay to get exactly the same right that she had before taking the family’s private matter to court. Some women may conclude that having an order is no different than not having one. There may also be other purely practical or logistical considerations that keep women from returning to court. For example, the application process, including the wait-time, usually takes an entire morning or afternoon. Sometimes it takes as long as a whole day in the Pro Bono Law Clinic. Additionally, women who work or take care of small children may not be able to afford losing even a half-day more to return to court so that they can follow through with getting an order. If we accept that some women are merely doing the legwork necessary to explore their options within the sociolegal system, we must then ask: What communicative goals do the women have in mind when they narrate in the story-genre? That is, why are women telling stories of abuse in the protective order interview, instead of just reporting the facts? Or, if they are uncertain as to which facts are relevant, why don’t they just wait for the account to be elicited by the interviewer? The data suggest several reasons. First, battered women may be seeking advocacy, or a person in a position of authority who can listen to their account and validate their feelings and concerns. In this way, the protective order interview may serve as a face-enhancing space in which women can have their stories and their concerns ratified by an authoritative interlocutor who stands in for the law. The interview can serve to confirm women’s impressions about what they perceive to be problematic

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in their relationship. Women may also use the protective order interview as a type of therapeutic space, because at times, they seem to be sorting out the issues and problems in their home life with a disinterested listener. Some women are seeking direct action from the system. For instance, there are those who want to get their children back or to have their abuser kicked out of the home.2 Others may be interested in hearing what options are available to solve their domestic problems. Even for those women who really want a protective order, it is likely that they too would also want to accomplish one or more of the other communicative goals mentioned above. Though the report genre has limited communicative aims, the story genre, can achieve a wide-ranging realm of communicative goals. By telling their story, women can come to learn what the system considers abuse. Women may also realize what the law has to offer in the way of preventing and prosecuting abuse. Finally, the story genre can provide a communicative space of catharsis, as they may perceive the interview to be a safe place to air their family problems to an anonymous outsider. Interviewers are not, however, explicitly trained as counselors, so they may feel uncomfortable engaging with victims as therapeutic interlocutors. At the Clinic, one male interviewer complained to me about another male interviewer who regularly could be heard doing the type of interactive positive-face enhancing pragmatic work with victims that Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) define as exaggerating interest or sympathy for the hearer. The volunteer told me that without expert training in such matters (as defined by Cicourel 1989, 2001), this particular interviewer could potentially do more harm than good. Taking all of this into consideration, and adding to it the fact that these service providers have been put in place only for the purpose of getting women protective orders, it becomes understandable why they operate as if ‘obtaining the order’ is the best they can do for the victim. Much of the analysis that follows here focuses on how the discursive practices of the paralegal serve to reduce the complex identity forged by women in their stories, in order to create only one salient identity for them in the affidavit. Put differently, the exchange between the paralegal and her client serves as the moment in which the interactional institution totalizes the victim-ofa-crime-identity of the woman for the purposes of the report. Compounding these issues is the larger structural situation of the sociolegal system. Whereas paralegals interview multiple women daily, individual women may see multiple service providers over the course of one or several days. This system itself encourages the disparate entextualization goals of the story and report genres that are reinforced by several layers of intertextual interaction. For the par-

Disfigurement and discrepancy 

alegals, the intertextual nature of their work consists of the repetition of very similar interactions. In general, paralegals approach each interaction from the framework of a report genre, regardless of the fact that different victims come from a variety of neighborhoods, class backgrounds, ethnicities and abuse situations. The routinized nature of their linguistic work poses as spontaneous conversation in each individual interview (Philips 1992), but such repeated interaction (paralegals conduct an average of five interviews daily) both invokes and reinforces the report frame. From the perspective of the institution, the specialized function of discourse in a report genre serves to assist or fulfill the organizational or legal requirements of an interactive bureaucratic office. Irrespective of the commonalities among women themselves or the stories they tell, when they arrive at the District Attorney’s Office or the Pro Bono Clinic, they are required to say the same kinds of things in the same kinds of ways. Yet these interviews indicate that the interaction is not only one in which the legal institution tries to discursively make women into victims. It is also a space where women can be seen trying to present their identity as more complex than that of just a victim. The reasons behind women’s desire to present themselves as complex individuals whose experience encompasses more than just their victimization are likely to be quite varied. Women’s communicative objectives may include wanting to make a point in conversation (Polanyi 1985), wanting to solve some problem (Ochs, Smith, & Taylor 1996), wanting to have order imposed on the disorderliness of conflict (Haviland 1996), wanting to be seen as a survivor (see Schiffrin 1996) or wanting to establish community or solidarity (Norrick 1997). To accomplish any one of these objectives successfully, the interviews show that women seek to transform the interviewers who are eliciting their accounts into listeners who act as sounding boards. Once again, we see that while social structure serves to create identities of the participants up to a certain point (Foucault 1972), the analyst interested in locating agency cannot allow the rules of structure a priori to over-determine how participants will act. Regardless of the understood social conventions of an interview, agency, or the will, desire and ability to act, is quite present among victims. The protective order serves to respond to only one aspect of a battered woman’s needs.3 This specialized response invokes resistance that results in each of the interlocutor’s trying to disfigure the narrative trajectory of the other. Below, I explore how disfigurement of women’s representations leads to discrepancy.

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Partial omissions In the previous chapter we looked at how the structure of the interview was achieved by paralegals and how the very form of the speech event corresponds to the way entire incidents of violence as narrated by women are omitted by paralegals when drafting the affidavits. The remainder of this chapter examines partial omission of discrete incidents of violence. It also investigates the motivation behind these alterations, in order to explore how discrepancies that may raise issues of victim credibility can creep into an account. In trying to comply with time constraints and agency imposed space constraints for the information contained in the affidavits, paralegals must decide what information to include and which to exclude. We have already seen that paralegals have specific ideas as to what types of information are suitable for a report. Here, we will see that they also have very definitive ideas in mind regarding the quantity of information they want from victims. When telling of single incidents of violence, survivors normally err on the side of providing more information than the paralegals want to hear. The incidents they recount in story genres are longer, more intricate and more complex than those cast in report genres. In Excerpt 7.3 below, a woman is lightly chastised by the paralegal for providing too much speech about an incident. The battle over story/report entextualization – in this case, in terms of quantity of information – begins after the paralegal’s metalinguistic prompt indicating how the client should talk in the interview. The client starts narrating by recounting a series of events that presumably leads to an act of physical violence. The bold type in succeeding utterances in this excerpt will be explained below. This excerpt is exemplary in showing how information regarding a particular incident is omitted. Not only does it clearly illustrate the phenomenon of partial omission – and thus, partial representation – but it also incorporates several other characteristic divisions between stories and reports.

Excerpt 7.3. Narrative including too much information 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

P: What I want to start with is the incident that just happened. When did that happen? C: O.K., that happened on the ((date)). P: He’s in jail for what happened on the. . . C: Yes. P: O.K. ((.04 types))

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P: Tell me what happened. C: Ah, he had come home, and he walked in the door and said, he said, “O.K., I’m ready for a divorce now.” Well, before he even came to the door, he, he ran into the back of my car, with his truck. So at that moment, I knew he was P: [Did he cause damage? C: No. P: O.K. C: And I, at that moment, I knew that, um, he was upset, and I was gonna, I was on the phone with one of my girlfriends, and I told her, I had to go, and I took the phone into my cousin, and I told him, you know, “Frank’s been, Frank’s been drinking, here’s the phone, just in case.” And, and um, he came in, and that’s when he said, that he was ready for a divorce and, and I just said, “O.K., well, whatever you want.” You know, to try not to upset him. And um, and, he went off on his little tangent about how, how I don’t love him, and and um, I was having an affair with all these people in our neighborhood. Um, and, and then he, he calmed down some. And I was like, “O.K.” And I went and made him something to eat and I brought it back to him, and he, he ate and then, he got into another, he felt like arguing again, and and he went, he said he was going to bed. And usually when he says he’s going to bed, that means he wants me to go with him. So, I went ahead and followed, and when we were in bed, he started arguing again. And um, and you know, I, I finally had had, had had enough, and I told him, you know, “I’m just gonna get up and go, go and read the paper or something.” So I got, he, he gave me um, before we had gone to bed he gave me um, about three hundred dollars to pay bills with. P: Mhmh C: And then after I, I went to the computer and a, a few, few minutes later he came back and he asked me to give him the money so that he could leave. And I knew he was drunk and I didn’t want him out on the street. And I, knew he would go to my sister-in-law’s, and I didn’t want him going over there, because my sister-in-law had had my daughter for the evening, for the night. And I didn’t want him going over there with my daughter, while I knew he was drunk, or our, our daughter. P: Mhmh. C: And, So, um, and so, you know I was like, “Just wait until morning, I’ll give it to you in the morning, and then you can go.” So, that went backand-forth for a few times, and until, finally I agreed to give him the money, so I walked into the room, and the money was right there by the, the door, so he just grabbed it, he saw where it was and he grabbed it. P: Is that when the assault took place, or,

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((Victim must shake head “no,” begins to laugh)) P: if, if not, (( laughs)) it’s good to have background, C: [O.K. P: [but if not, if you could tell me what he C: [Well, it’s it’s coming, right now. P: O.K. C: O.K. ((laughing)). And, um, I’ve just gone over this story so many ((pause)) times. P: [(so many times ((I understand)). C: And um, we went back to the room, and he found the money, I was standing up, and I was like, “Well you got the money, so I’m gonna go, and I’m gonna leave.” And he pushed me onto the bed, and told me you know, I wasn’t gonna leave. P: Uhuh C: I stood back up, and he pushed me down again on the bed, and um, you know, I was like, “Well, you got your money, if you’re gonna go, go ahead and go.” And he pushed me down again, and I kept standing up, because I didn’t want him to think that I was afraid of him. And, and so finally, he just, he got tired of that, and oh, he pushed me down again, and ((sigh)) um, and he got on top of me, but my, my knees were to where, bent. So he couldn’t get on me. But, and he was on me and, just to try and keep him from doing anything, I just kind of looked up at the ceiling and I was like, “Oh look, there’s a hole in the ceiling.” And he goes, “No there’s not, you’re just trying to make me look.” And I was like, “No there is.” And, and he got up and looked up at the hole and I went for the door. And then before I could get the door fully open, he pushed the door closed. P: O.K., how, how did he um, he got up off of you to look at the hole in the

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

ceiling? C: Yes. P: O.K. C: Yes. P: ((.07)) So at that point, you, you got up? C: Mhmh. I got up and I went to open the door and he closed it on me. And um, you know, he was like, “Well,” he’s like, “you need to stay in here with me, and I was just like, “O.K, whatever I’ll stay in here.” And he went to the closet, no, he went, he left the room, and he asked my cousin, my uncle had gone hunting for the weekend, and he asked my cousin if my uncle had taken

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the pistol with him. P: Mhmh. C: And my cousin, I guess my cousin told him “yes.” And he came back in the room and he closed the door and I had heard, I heard him ask for the pistol, but I didn’t hear what my cousin said. And, he went to the closet and he got um, the (thirty ( ) six) out of the closet, and at that point, I got nervous. And I was like, so I asked him, I was like, “Oh, are you gonna go hunting?” And he, he didn’t answer. And I said, “Well, do you want me to call work for you in the morning to tell them that you’re sick? That you’re not coming in and. . .and?” And he said, “Well in the morning, you’re not going to be able to call anybody.” And, that just, made me more nervous. And, then I said, “Well, why not?” And, and he, he loaded the gun, and um, and he put it to my, my fore forehead. And um, just, just to, in, in my mind, I could just, you know, I could see all of these things happening, I could see, One: that either, he was gonna shoot me and I was gonna die, which I felt, I felt relief. (I felt that) P: [Did he, did he say anything though, when he, put the gun to your forehead? C: No. P: O.K. C: He didn’t say anything. P: O.K., um, did he finally put the gun down and, or what happened? C: Well he held it there, and um, I was afraid that if he shot, and only got, and missed just the right way where I would be um, mentally, um, incapable for the rest of my life, and I was like, “well no” so I put it down to my throat. So if he killed, if he shot me, I would, I would die, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. P: Mhmh C: Then he put it up to here, up back up to my forehead, and he told me, um and I closed my eyes and I just kind of, I kept my eyes covered and, he was like, “Well look at me.” And I was like, “No, I’m not gonna look at you. I’m not gonna watch you pull the trigger.” And he goes, “Well look where my hands are” And I was like, “No, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna watch.” And um, ( ) just kept yelling at me to look at him and I never would. And um, and he, he took the gun off of my head and I just kind of, my knees were weak, and I just fell to the ground, to the bed and then to the floor. And, he unloaded the gun, he goes, and he said, “Well here’s the shells, my hand was on the, on the scope the whole time. You were never in any danger.” P: O.K., he, he said there was what? Nothing in the gun, Or?

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150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

C: That his hands were, was on the scope and not on the trigger. P: Oh, but there bullet, there was C: Yeah, but, but the bullets were in it. P: O.K. C: And he, he took out the bullets and he threw them at me, saying, you know, “Here’s, here’s the bullets, they’re all there.” And then, then he, he said, “Oh look, here’s another one, where did that one come from?” And I was like “Ohho, great!” And um P: [O.K., let me um back up here, I have, “he threw the bullets and said that his hands were on the. . .”

The first sign that this victim gives too much information for the paralegal’s liking is found in line 68 of Excerpt 7.3 above. At this point, the interviewer stops the woman’s narration to prompt her to get to the assault. Using a yes/no question, the interviewer asks the client, “Is that when the assault took place, or. . . .” Her question is interrupted by the client’s laughter, a curious response, which I argue suggests that the client knows that she is narrating more than the paralegal wants to hear. Interestingly, the suspense the client tries to create in her narrative is cut by the tension introduced by the paralegal who, quite surprisingly, reacts to the nervous laugh introduced by the client with a mitigated metalinguistic order indicating what a report narrative of violence should sound like. In short, this paralegal says, without coming right out and saying so, that a report should highlight physical violence. The client’s use of laughter here can be interpreted as a pragmatic attempt to ease the interactional trouble with which she is confronted as having produced for herself. Following the client’s lead to ease the tension, the paralegal also laughs. The paralegal, then metalinguistically characterizes the client’s speech as ‘providing background’. The paralegal positively evaluates the client’s discourse by saying, ‘it’s good to have background’, however, this paralegal does not seem to want to deviate from her position as both legal and linguistic gatekeeper. This tightrope walk between coercing clients to narrate in a particular way and not insulting them when they fail to do so is part of the paralegals’ job. Often, as is the case here, evidence of these conflicting roles of advocate and gatekeeper is embedded within the same utterance. In a similar way, Greatbatch and Dingwall (1989) find that mediators in divorce court are not really neutral facilitators for the two disputing parties. Though paralegals are not really selectively facilitating one type of agreement over another as do the mediators in Greatbatch and Dingwall’s (1989) study, they do steer women toward the type

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of narratives preferred by the court, regardless of the way in which women want to narrate their experiences of abuse. At times it is difficult to determine exactly what advocacy is. On the one hand, if, as I suggested above, the paralegal believes that the best she can do for the client is help her obtain a protective order, then she may see the linguistic work that she does to cajole the client into narrating in the report format as advocacy. On the other hand, as I have shown elsewhere (Trinch 2001a), listening could also be considered an act of advocacy and an unwillingness to hear clients out combined with an insistence that they change their narrative genre – while not exactly a type of victim-blaming – may contribute to the negative feelings women have toward the reporting situation. Paralegals do seem to recognize the problems inherent in telling clients that their norms and ways of narrating are unacceptable. Here, the paralegal, perhaps remembering that the person she is talking to has just been assaulted with a gun, sees the need to validate or ratify the client’s linguistic action by evaluating her narrative behavior as “good”. She then, however, immediately negates its value in the interview with her use of contrastive ‘but’ to go on and say, “but if not, if you could tell me. . .” Both Schiffrin (1987) and Tannen (1993b) analyze the use of but, when employed by speakers or narrators. Tannen (1993b: 44), for example, states that narrators use but “to mark the denial of . . . [an] entire preceding set of statements.” But Schiffrin’s more detailed analysis shows how but functions in many different ways. Schiffrin (1987: 159) states: Since answering a question [means giving information and complying with a speech act that requests information] requires respondents to satisfy different expectations, it is not surprising to find that an answer may contain portions which are differently geared toward satisfying those expectations. . .individuals may differentiate the following portions of their responses by but. What but contrasts in such answers is the functional relation of material in the response to the different expectations created by the prior question.

The paralegal uses but to connect her request, “. . .if you could tell me. . .” with the face-enhancing statement she made before, “it’s good to have background.” She uses but to connect the utterance, “Is that where the assault took place, or,” with, “if you could tell me” to mean, ‘if that is not where the assault took place, then go to that part.’ Her employment of but is both functional and referential as she is reminding the client that the information she is providing is not the information that was elicited. In Schiffrin’s (1987: 159) terms: ‘but marks a referential contrast in addition to a functional contrast.’

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The client’s response to the paralegal’s request to narrate the assault, “Well, it’s, it’s coming, right now” seems to confirm that she does indeed know that what is expected of her in this situation is not a long, detailed, drawn out, step-by-by revelation of every move taken. In her analysis of discourse markers, Schiffrin (1987: 127) finds that speakers use the word well in precisely those conversational moments when they know that their responses do not fit with local coherence: . . .well is a response marker: well anchors its user in a conversational exchange when the options offered through a prior utterance for the coherence of an upcoming response are not precisely followed. More generally, well is possible wherever coherence options offered by one component of talk differ from those of another: well locates a speaker as a respondent to one level of discourse and allows a temporary release from attention to others.

This client does not disagree that the information she provides is ‘background,’ and in fact, she verbally agrees to take up the perlocutionary force of the paralegal’s request/demand. Yet, her linguistic action thereafter does not indicate uptake of the request. Instead, the client continues narrating the entire series of events leading up to the physical violence in great detail. It is also interesting to note that this interviewer calls all the information leading up to the event background. In so doing, she infers that the client has talked only about the circumstances surrounding the attack and not the assault itself. In other words, the paralegal, though willing to pay lip-service to the positive evaluation of the victim’s narrative discourse, contradicts herself by juxtaposing her positive assessment of the narration as “good” with her negative evaluation of it as background – or of information of relative unimportance, especially as compared to the physical aggression. According to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) definition of normal narrative, much of what the client says is cast in clauses that create temporal juncture. Therefore, the clauses the client includes are likely to be considered by her to have been events comprising the complicating action. Polanyi (1985), too, would analyze much of what the paralegal is somewhat dismissively calling background as non-stative event clauses on the narrative’s main timeline. Moreover, this is not a case where the interviewer is trying to establish if the victim indeed has some violence to narrate. Sometimes, when clients enter the system and begin talking as the interviewee above does, interviewers attempt to elicit a physical assault as a means of determining that the abuser’s acts are indeed going to be considered ‘violent’ by the court. Notice how the paralegal in Excerpt 7.4 does just this type of work with a client who, at least initially,

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seems to narrate what the court would consider to be harassment rather than necessarily violence.

Excerpt 7.4. Paralegal tries to determine if there is violence in relationship P: C: P:

C:

[Where was the child at this time? I’m assuming the child, she was with her aunt, María. O.K. ((types .05)) And um, other than the following, did he, do you recall whether he was making threats, when kind of jumped out of nowhere, was he kind of, making any threats to harm you? Um, he just told me that um “you’re not gonna see Annie anymore, and and you’re not gonna, I’m gonna take her from you,” and you know, “because you’re,” eh, um, “you’re screwing around, you’re sleeping around, eh, and I’m like “these are girlfriends,” and we had one, one male in the car, and, every time he sees me with a male, I mean, it could be a co-worker, friend, who he doesn’t know, never seen, he ( ). I’m like “o.k.” huh, “whatever”.

I include this example to mark the contrast between the linguistic work paralegals do to determine whether women actually have a violent, and not just a troubled, relationship with their current or former intimate partners. This type of definitional work that paralegals must do to establish the case is different from the interactive work the paralegal does in Excerpt 7.3 where the paralegal indicates that the problem is one of quantity and not of definition. In Excerpt 7.4, the interviewer is not trying to get the client to cut to the chase. She merely wants to see if the client is eligible for an order before proceeding with the interview. In Excerpt 7.3 the client arrives with an intra-institutional sanction of victimization, because her abuser was arrested. Her intake papers reveal a strong case of criminality with respect to her husband. From the intake forms and the police report, the interviewer already knows that the police have filed the charge, assault with a deadly weapon. This information tempers any suspicion that this interviewer is just trying to determine if the abuse narrated by the victim is in fact of the type the legal system will endorse. In the D.A.’s Office information that an abuser threatened his victim with a gun is given a high priority, irrespective of the recency of such a threat. In fact, an assault or a threat with deadly weapon is one of the few acts of violence that the District Attorney’s Office records in institutional memory through the collection of data for the office statistics. And every woman who applies for an order is supposed to be asked if the abuser has threatened her with a gun or

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a knife. Contextualized in these reasons, I conclude that the only problem the paralegal has with the client’s narrative in Excerpt 7.3 is her desire to provide great quantities of detailed information. From a pragmatic standpoint, the paralegal’s request that the client narrate the assault signals to the client that her entextualization of the event violates the Gricean maxim of quantity (Grice 1975). To paraphrase Grice, the victim’s contribution is more informative than is required (as cited in Sperber & Wilson 1986: 33). However, as was shown in the previous chapter on the omission of entire incidents, the problem here may also lie in the paralegal’s and the client’s differential assessment of what is relevant (Sperber & Wilson 1986). In the context of this interview, the paralegal seems to reason that the information provided by the victim is irrelevant, because most of it is unnecessary to obtain an order. As I discussed above, the paralegal is likely to see ‘obtaining an order’ as the client’s sole objective for narrating. But the client, even after having acknowledged that she understands the paralegal’s request, shows us that her other narrative goals, however, outweigh the interviewer’s preferred response. While this woman’s words in Excerpt 7.3, “Well, it’s coming, right now,” (in lines 75–76) show her awareness of her failure to comply with the communicative expectation of the reporting situation, her own strategy to continue storytelling is also one of merely paying lip service to the paralegal. Immediately after indicating that she is ‘getting right to it,’ the client also uses metalanguage also to comment on her narration up to this point. She offers a justification or rationale for breaking the interview rules anyway by stating in line 78, “O.K. ((laughing)). And, um, I’ve just gone over this story so many ((pause)) times.” Nevertheless, she then continues to narrate as she had been before. In other words, the semantic content of her statement says one thing, but the action her narrative takes does something altogether different. By telling the interviewer that she has gone over this story so many other times, she invokes her own linguistic analysis of intertextuality to explain why she is unable to comply with her interlocutor’s request. Her utterance here indicates that the narrative she has told many times has become fixed, and that regardless of the context in which she tells it, she cannot stray from the way she has told it elsewhere. This victim uses both metalanguage and contextualization cues to show that she wants a long narrative turn, or an extended floor space so that she can develop her story in the way that she has told it (“gone over it”) “so many times before.” So just as paralegals use both metalinguistic and more subtle contextualization cues to tell victims how to narrate, this victim also uses these pragmalinguistic devices to cue her interlocutor into how she wants to be heard. The use of just as in, “it’s just that. . .,” according to Tannen (1993b: 25), “frequently

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functions to underplay a statement, to block criticism on the basis that it is not more, therefore revealing the assumption that others might expect more.” Interestingly, the victim here does not use the word just to apologize that her narrative is not more. But, she does employ the word just to block the paralegal’s criticism of her narrative for not being quantitatively less. This strategy serves the client as she marks her narrative and her narration both analeptically and proleptically. Put more simply, she deploys a justification that is both defensive and offensive. It functions defensively as an apology meant to restore the damage caused by narrating in story form. At the same time, its proleptic function serves to stave off any further objection the paralegal may raise in response to the client’s preferred way of narrating. By laughing a nervous laugh and making a comment that links her narration in the micro-moment of its telling to the macro-structure of the sociolegal system (i.e., where she has had to tell the story before even arriving at the D.A.’s Office), the client both justifies her previous rule-breaking and suggests that she will not be able to break herself of it. It is as if she realizes that not only has she not yet narrated the physical assault, but also that she does not intend to do so right away because there is more information she still wants to include. If this observation is correct, then it may be that even when some women perceive the context to be one of a reporting-nature, they resist the report genre and opt for the story genre because it allows them to include the content and to do the interactional work with their narrative that they deem relevant. Of course it is highly unlikely that the client narrates the account in the same way in every context regardless of how many times she has told it. Even if prior to the interview the victim was unaware of the paralegal’s conversational desires, the fact that she ignores them once she becomes informed attests, not necessarily to her inability to narrate in the report genre, but rather to her determination to forge a different type of text. It is the interactive nature of these institutions that affords both participants the opportunity to make or re-make the ‘other’ through discourse.

Comparing the story and the report Let us now compare this interview transcript with the affidavit that the paralegal drafted afterwards. An excerpt from the affidavit that corresponds to the oral text shown in Excerpt 7.3 is given below in Example 7.5.

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Example 7.5. Affidavit resulting from oral narrative shown in Excerpt 7.3 On ((date)), ((Abuser’s name)) came home and said he was ready for a divorce now. He was intoxicated. I said okay. He then started accusing me of having an affair with a lot of men in the neighborhood. After he yelled for awhile I prepared dinner and we went to bed. ((Abuser’s name)) then started arguing with me again. I got out of bed and went towards the computer. ((Abuser’s name)) pushed me down on the bed and told me I was not going to leave. Each time I stood up he pushed me back down again. ((Abuser’s name)) got on top of me and refused to let me up until I distracted him. I got up to leave and ((Abuser’s name)) closed the door and prevented me from going. He went into our closet and grabbed a gun. ((Abuser’s name)) loaded the gun and put it to my forehead. I closed my eyes and ((Abuser’s name)) told me to look at him. I refused. . ..

In lines 119–120 of the interview text the victim begins to evaluate the climactic point of the incident when the gun is placed to her forehead. Her words alert the paralegal of her plans to extend her narrative turn yet again by suspending the action with a list of either/ors immediately before the resolution. The victim says: “And um, just, just to, in, in my mind, I could just, you know, I could see all these things happening, I could see, One: that either, he was gonna shoot me and I was gonna die, which I felt, I felt relief. (I felt that”)). . . .” The paralegal, not interested in how the victim felt, attempts to dissuade the woman from her story-telling, as is shown in line 122. The paralegal through a combination of an interruption and question puts a stop to the list before the client can even finish with her first point. The point was made earlier that some small claims litigants are considered by judges to offer irrelevant or superfluous information that includes personal background about actors, and evaluative comments about their motives (O’Barr & Conley 1996). O’Barr and Conley (1996) argue that these types of litigants speak in informal courts as if they were engaged in an everyday conversation. However, knowing that an affidavit or any other type of a written legal statement could be used in a future judicial proceeding to impeach a witness’ testimony, I would argue in this case of the woman in Excerpt 7.3 that it is not so easy to identify unnecessary information. Research has shown that the precarious distinction between important and irrelevant information holds especially true in rape cases. Conley and O’Barr (1998: 17) note that “[t]rivial inconsistencies in [a rape victim’s] testimony will be blown out of proportion to suggest faulty memory, if not mendacity.” These researchers point out that women who are victims of acquaintance rape find themselves caught in a gen-

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Figure 7.4. Inside discrete incidents of violence Inside discrete incidents of story genre Personal background about actants

Inside discrete incidents of report genre Nature and length of relationship

Evaluative comments about actants’ behav- Behaviors are not mentioned, save for final iors evaluation Evaluative comments about actants’ motives Motives for which violence is a response in response to violence Justification for victims’ behavior

Lack of justification, mere accounting of what occurred

Reported speech: direct quotation, indirect citation and a mixture of the two. A great deal of characterization of speech

Indirect citations, some characterization of speech

Predictions of future based on past behavior

Fewer predictions of future based on past behavior

Less emphasized importance on temporal Overt attempt sequencing sequencing Fewer legal terms

to

represent

temporal

More legal terms

dered double bind, because cultural stereotypes about women are exploited in the language of defense attorneys. For example, women who show themselves as emotional, when they evaluate events of the rape, are portrayed as being “flighty” and “irrational,” while those women who show little sentiment when recounting events are construed by defense attorneys as being cold, calculating and conniving. While many survivors of intimate partner violence are also victims of marital rape (Russell 1990; Bergen 1996), according to prosecutors in the District Attorney’s Office, women do not have to allege acquaintance rape for a defense attorneys or a jury to invoke gender stereotypes. The chief prosecutor of Domestic Violence at the D.A.’s Office, for example, told me that in her opinion the prosecution stands a better chance of convicting a spouse of intimate-partner violence when victims recant their accounts than they do when victims cooperate with the prosecution. Stereotypes regarding women’s inability to remember facts or their willingness to distort them for ulterior motives continue to affect the decisions made by juries in domestic violence cases as well. This victim, as do the litigants in O’Barr and Conley (1996), undoubtedly includes information regarding the motives of the actants in the narrative. But, in trying to go beyond merely identifying differences between lay and legal narrative expectations, I ask: What value do victims’ norms and ways of nar-

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rating have in their own right? What can the Civil and Criminal Justice System possibly learn from listening to lay voices?

The function of clients’ evaluative devices In this section, we examine evaluative devices, or those structural narrative elements that show the listener what the narrator believes to be important about the event(s) narrated. Victims use these devices for an array of reasons, and here, the analysis centers on how such devices serve women as the means to justify their actions. Among other things, evaluative devices reveal what narrators believe will be the opinions and expectations of their listeners in response to their activities and/or their decisions. We will therefore take a look at how clients try to meet the expectations of their interlocutor, as well as how they try to demonstrate good reason for veering away from them. According to Chafe (1980, 1977), in retelling experiences individuals must go through a series of mental processes that translate nonverbal internal representations of events into speech. For Chafe the three processes include identifying the event, finding a frame or a “sentence-level expression about particular individuals and their roles in the event” and “choosing a category to name objects or actions which play parts in the event” (as cited in Tannen 1993a: 10). Similar to the internal processes of verbalizing experiences proposed by Chafe are Goffman’s (1974) “primary social frameworks.” Primary social frameworks are internal patterns that permit or facilitate our understandings of new events as they give us the tools to recognize and organize incoming information. Goffman maintains that at any moment, several frames may be at work, and he notes “Taken all together, the primary frameworks of a particular social group constitute a central element of its culture, especially insofar as understandings emerge concerning principal classes of schemata, the relations of these classes to one another, and the sum total of forces and agents that these interpretive designs acknowledge to be loose in the world” (1974: 27). Tannen (1993a) likens Goffman’s notion of “frames” and Chafe’s concept of “prototype” and “internal representation” to a speaker’s idiosyncratic or cultural expectations. She states, “The prototype, like the frame, refers to an expectation about the world, based on prior experience, against which new experiences are measured and interpreted” (Tannen 1993a: 17). A frame then, is a culturally determined familiar activity, or “an organized mass” used by people to relate to new experiences through their old ones. “This prior experience or organized knowledge then

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takes the form of expectations about the world. . . saving the individual the trouble of figuring things out anew all the time” (Tannen 1993a: 21). Following Tannen’s analysis and applying it to the excerpt in example 7.3, the first frame used by the victim to indicate that she has taken the stance of a story-teller emerges as the client backtracks in her narration to include the fact that the abuser hit her car before he came in and told her he wanted a divorce. Tannen states that when narrators indicate that they have begun at a point before the starting point of the event, they show that they believe their interlocutors want them to recount everything that happened in chronological order. According to Tannen, narrators are motivated only by their beliefs regarding the expectations of listeners. Given the analysis that preceded this one, I suggest that as narrators, Latina women have their own agendas, which they try to achieve. This victim, for instance, wants to make sure that she has left nothing off the record. In several places, the victim in Excerpt 7.3 tells her interlocutor why she acted in certain ways. She takes great care to do this in lines 42, 48–49 as she includes evaluative clauses as justification for having gone along with the abuser on two separate occasions during the incident. In the first instance, the narrative clause reporting the action beginning in line 40: “And um, he came in, and that’s when he said, that he was ready for a divorce and I just said, “O.K., well, whatever you want,” is followed by the evaluative clause in line 42: “You know to try not to upset him.” If Tannen’s analysis of frames as evaluative devices that can reveal the narrators’ beliefs about interlocutor-expectations is correct, then this victim attempts to provide for her interlocutor a reasoned response to what she must believe would be the interviewer’s question. The victim uses the narrative evaluative device to explain why she did not answer the abuser in a more confrontational manner when he asked for a divorce. The second instance where an evaluative frame reveals the woman’s concern about the interviewer’s opinion of her trails the narrative clauses in lines 44–45. After the client states: “and he, he ate and then, he just got into another, like argument, again and, and he went, he said he was going to bed.” She then says, “And usually when he says he’s going to bed, that means he wants me to go with him.” Noticeably, the victim has told the paralegal that she was fighting with the abuser, or rather that he was fighting with her, even prior to his having entered the home. Yet, after an evening full of accusation, fighting words and confrontation, she says she followed the abuser into the bedroom. However, she does not merely state, “He said he was going to bed so I went too.” Instead, she elaborates with the explanatory utterance: “And usually when he says he’s going to bed, that means he wants me to go with him.”

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These two instances establish a linguistic pattern of self-evaluation, otherevaluation and especially a justification for actions taken. The evaluative clauses demonstrate the client’s ability to control the situation. In fact, this woman tells her narrator that she knows how to respond so as to alter the abuser’s emotions from a state of anger to one of tranquility. Right before she says that she went to fix the abuser something to eat, she states, “Um, and and then he, he calmed down some. And I was like “O.K.” ” This portion of the narrative stands in marked contrast to the point in the incident where she realizes she is no longer able to control her abuser’s actions. Dunn (2001) and other experts (Mills 1999) who work with or study battered women maintain that these women deal with their abusers on a daily basis, and because of this fact, they are themselves the authorities on their personal experiences of abuse. From this frame analysis, we can begin to see how this client in particular employs evaluation to claim her expertise and to establish her authority in the matter. Arguably, this type of evaluation is also used to bolster her credibility as she tries to prove that she acted in the correct manner. From the very beginning of the telling of this incident there is evidence that this victim intends to show herself to be not only a competent narrator, but a wise and prudent person as well. She does not indicate that she is at all unsure about what she is supposed to narrate in the reporting context. If anything, the victim indicates with her use of evaluation that she does not want to risk having her actions misinterpreted by the paralegal. These two evaluative clauses from this oral narrative however, do not make the paralegal’s final cut, and thus do not appear in the affidavit. The woman obviously thinks that these evaluative clauses are relevant, because she interjects them as if she were anticipating having her actions questioned. One can easily imagine a defense attorney, or anyone for that matter, asking this victim, “Well, if you were fighting with him, why did you get into bed with him?” Or, “Did he force you to go into the bedroom with him?” Such challenges make the evaluative clauses offered by this victim quite relevant. These clauses not only explain the woman’s actions, but they also function to ward off expected criticisms that are likely to occur in U.S. cultural settings. In other words, these evaluative devices indicate that the victim expects her seeming complicity to be called into question, perhaps because it has been questioned in the past. The evaluation could reveal to the listener the imbalance of power between the client and the abuser; at the same time it suggests how this victim has figured out how to be a survivor within the unequal relationship. Her evaluative techniques might also be reflecting her analysis of the situation and the resulting survival strategy that she employs to create equilibrium between herself and her abuser. Her lan-

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guage indicates that she is speaking from a victim-survivor frame (see Tannen 1993a; Martin & Powell 1995). Arguably information revealing the motives of victims and the abusers cannot be dismissed as merely evaluative or superfluous whether it occurs in everyday conversation or in informal legal settings. In the sociolegal system, people’s motives for doing (and not doing) things are continually questioned. By excluding such information from the official record at the moment of its inscription, as is done by this paralegal (as well as by others like her), the report genre frames the principal of the affidavit as if she were a third-party witness rather than the victim survivor herself. The practice of framing victims as disinterested witnesses who have no real stake in anything but recounting the facts begs the question as to whether victims can adequately evaluate or provide a justification for their survival strategies in legal contexts. In initial tellings like this one, the victim’s evaluative devices are in fact undesirable, because they show too much involvement. They do not present her as being objective or detached.4 In other words, in initial tellings victim evaluative devices are removed, because they do not conform to the report. In a subsequent telling, after their prior removal, such evaluative devices would most likely sound like excuses – as opposed to valid reasons for complicit behavior. A continued comparison between the texts shown in Excerpts 7.3 and 7.5 reveals several other bits of information about this incident that do not appear on the final affidavit. The fact that the abuser drove into the driveway and hit the victim’s car, for example, is not included. In Excerpt 7.6, another victim reports that the abuser arrived at the couple’s home and almost hit the side of the house with his car. Some pieces of this second car story, as well as other information, are not transferred from the oral narrative into the affidavit either. In this example, then, not only is there missing information regarding the way the abuser was driving the car, but also absent is a part of the complicating action that shows that the alleged abuser put the victim’s new clothes on the stove to burn them. The significant portions of this example are in bold type below.

Excerpt 7.6. Information victims include in complicating action P: C:

O.K. ¿Cómo a qué hora se empezó ese incidente? Empezó mentalmente como a las seis. (.03) Ah, este, entrando bien necio con el carro, que casi chocaba con la casa y yo salía rápido como que iba a chocar en la calle. Y entraba y golpeaba las puertas, prendía el radio mil veces y nosotros estamos muy (nerviosos). Como a las nueve creímos que se iba a dormir ya de un borracho, y que se podía ir a dormir. Cerró la puerta para que yo no entrara de la recámara. Dije, “me quedo en la sala.” Pero de rato,

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P: C:

P: C:

volvió a salir. Agarró mi ropa, prendió la estufa, y la puso a quemarse en la estufa. Y tenía yo cena, allí en mi estufa, y la agarró y la aventó por toda la cocina. [So que( ) [Y mi ropa que yo traigo ayer, inmediacita, la aventó en mi estufa y prendió mi estufa. Y yo caminé y puso( ). Y él empezó a ir a todas las puertas y las golpeaba contra la pared. Y se volvió a encerrar en el cuarto, y fue cuando llamé a la policía. (.06) ¿Hizo alguna amenaza de golpearla durante ese incidente? No. Porque no me acerco a él cuando anda así. (.04) Nomás, les estaba diciendo a los niños cosas feas de mi. (.04) Las amenazas, después, las hizo por teléfono. Cada vez me hablaba y me decía que me iba a arrepentir. Cuando el policía se lo llevó, me dijo en español porque el policía no hablaba en inglés ((she must mean Spanish here)), dijo, “esto lo vas a pagar muy caro,”. Y fue cuando le dije a mi niña, “dile al policía que me está amenazando.”

Translation of 7.6: Information victims include in complicating action 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

P: O.K. at about what time did this incident begin? C: Mentally it began at about six. (.03) Ah, so he drove in like a fool, he almost ran into the house and I ran out because I thought he was going to have an accident. And he came in and punched the doors, he turned on the radio a thousand times, and we were very (nervous). At about nine, we thought that he was going to pass out, and that we could go to bed. He closed the door so that I couldn’t go into the bedroom. I said, “I’ll stay in the living room.” But after awhile, he came out. He grabbed my clothes, he lit the stove and he burnt them on the stove. And my dinner was there on the stove, and he grabbed it and threw it all over the kitchen. P: [So ( ) C: [And right after that, the clothes that I just got yesterday, he threw them on the stove and he turned on my stove. And I started to walk, and he put ( ). So he started to go to all the doors and slammed them against the wall. And he went back into the room, and that’s when I called the police. (.06) P: Did he ever threaten to hit you during this incident? C: No, because I never get near him when he’s like that. (.04) Except, he was saying ugly things about me to the children. (.04) Um, later, he made the threats by phone. Each time he talked to me he told me I was going to regret this. When the police took him away, he told me in Spanish, because

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121 122 123

the police officer did not speak English ((she must mean Spanish here)). He said, “You’re going to pay for this.” And that was when I told my daughter, “Tell the police that he is threatening me.”

This interview’s corresponding affidavit is shown in Example 7.7 below.

Example 7.7. How information included by victim is excluded in affidavit On or about ((date)) at about ((time)) ((Abuser’s name)) came home drunk and was driving the car at a high speed. He then began knocking things over such as dishes, clothes and the food that I had prepared. ((Abuser’s name)) then began telling our children obscenities about me and he then grabbed my clothes and began burning them. ((Abuser’s name)) continued to act violently by closing doors and making a disturbance. The police were called and ((Abuser’s name)) was asked to leave the house. ((Abuser’s name)) called me several times after he left and made threats to harm me, because I reported him to the police. ((Abuser’s name)) said that I would be sorry and that he would harm me when he found me.

In the oral text, the woman mentions twice that the alleged abuser burned her clothes on the stove. In the final affidavit, while this fact is mentioned, it is not fully represented. Likewise, there is no mention that the Spanish-speaking abuser made threats to the woman in Spanish right in front of the officer who apparently spoke only English.5 In the telling of this same incident, the victim mentions twice that the abuser went back to the house after the police had ordered him to leave. Yet her repeated utterance about his return is not recorded in the final affidavit. Consequently the affidavit makes it appear as if the threats the abuser made toward this victim were only by phone, when, according to the victim’s story, the threats were made in front of the police and later when the alleged abuser defied a police order to return to the house. Such omissions from the official record distort the way in which women represent events, actors and ultimately the phenomenon of domestic violence. My findings concur with those of Briggs (1997) and Guha (1997) who suggest that by shifting the beginning of a narrative from a place where it might logically start for the narrator to a point in the middle of what the narrator may consider the complicating action, the events and actors about which they narrate become disfigured. In the last example, the interviewer disfigures the victim’s representation of the abuser by the way she decides to end the narrative. By not including the woman’s allegations that her husband is the kind of person who would make threats in front of a police officer or who would

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return after being ordered by police to leave the house, the affidavit presents the abuser as less frightening than the woman both perceives and has chosen to portray him to be. In this way the interviewer alters the victim’s portrayal of the abuser by leaving out significant parts of her more elaborate characterization of her spouse.

Anomalous cases Although most women appear to provide too much information for meeting the goals of the interviewers as is evidenced by the amount of information interviewers sift out of the oral versions, there are also instances in which some clients do not provide enough detail. Occasionally, service providers cannot find an impetus for the violence reported in the survivor’s narrative. Excerpt 7.8 shows how one women’s narrative begins in medias res (or in the middle of the complicating action) leaving unanswered important questions such as: Why did the fight start? or How did it start?

Excerpt 7.8. Insufficient complicating action to answer, “What Started the Fight?” 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437

P: O.K. ¿Qué pasó? ¿Qué más, antes de. . . C: O sea, llegué, esta vez fue que estábamos en el baile. En el baile, estábamos bien. P: Uhuh. C: Estaba, discutió ahí en el baile, y se vino a la casa. P: O.K. Y usted estaba C: [Se vino a la P: [Con ((abuser’s name))? C: Sí. (.07) P: O.K. C: Luego en el baile, (.02) me aventó, ¿Verdad? Entonces, pues, yo lo aventé. Otra vez, yo no (.03) quité para que no me aventara, ¿Verdad? P: Uhuh. C: Entonces, me agarró aquí del cuello ahí en el baile. Así me tenía ahí en el baile P: Uhuh. C: Hasta que los de la security de allí, todos lo quitaron. P: O.K. (.04) Y por nada, nomás no

Disfigurement and discrepancy

438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461

C: [Nomás porque, es que yo había ido al baño, y que, P: [Uhuh. C: cuando vine del baño saludé a alguien ya y se empezó a discutir por eso. P: O.K., (.03) ¿Y estaban bailando, o nomás tomando? C: [No, estábamos P: [O, o nomás parados? C: [Ahí parados, sí. P: Oh, O.K. (.55) P: O.K. So, él estaba diciendo a usted que el, tú, que estabas con el otr, C: Con alguien. P: ¿Con alguien? C: Que yo tenía a alguien sí, sí y empezó a discutir. Y yo, pues, “no”. Entonces me aventó, y yo yo nomás lo quité, ¿Verdad? P: Uhuh. C: Y luego me agarró de aquí, y de allí me tenía hasta que los demás gente, la, lo quitaron y se fue para la casa. P: Mhmh. C: Y luego yo después, me fui. Y cuando llegué, allí me estaba esperando. P: Mhmh C: Y pues otra vez a discutir. P: O.K. Well, was he choking you, I mean, did he just grab you? C: Sí.

Translation of Excerpt 7.8: Answer to “What started the fight?” P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

O.K. what happened, what else, before. . . Um, I got there, this time what happened was we were at the dance. At the dance, we were fine. Uhuh He was, he argued there at the dance, and came home. O.K. and you were [He came to [with ((abuser’s name))? Yes. (.07) O.K. Later at the dance, (.02) he pushed me, right? Then, I pushed him. Again, I didn’t (.03) get out of the way so he wouldn’t push me, right? Uhuh

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C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

Then he grabbed me here by the neck at the dance. That’s what he was doing to me at the dance. Uhuh Until the security people, everyone got him off me. O.K. (.04) And for no reason, except [Just because I had gone to the bathroom, and [Uhuh When I returned from the bathroom I said “hi” to someone and he started arguing because of that. O.K. (.03). And were you dancing, or just drinking? [No, we were [Or, or just standing there? [Just standing there, yes. Oh, O.K. (.55) O.K., So he was saying that he, you, were with the other, [With someone else [with someone else? that I had someone else, yes, yes, and he began to argue. And I said, “no.” So then he pushed me, and I just pushed him off me, right? Uhuh. And then, he grabbed me here, and he held on to me until the other people got him off me and he went home. Mhmh And then later, I went home. And when I arrived, he was waiting for me. Mhmh And then we argued again. O.K. Well, was he choking you, I mean, did he just grab you [Yes

Space constraints prevent the inclusion of the entire interview from which the above excerpt is taken, but it is important to note that in the interaction prior to the excerpt shown, the paralegal needed to explicitly ask the client what started the two fights about which she narrates. The woman responds in both cases with some variation of Nada, no empezó por nada, or ‘Nothing, it didn’t start for any reason.’ When the interviewer presses her for a reason in line 437 above, the woman offers an explanation that is perfectly interpretable as an initiating event for the complicating action – she said hello to another man and her boyfriend became jealous.

Disfigurement and discrepancy 

These data, like those shown in previous chapters, also speak to the tension paralegals face when they need to be both advocate and gatekeeper, especially when they confront not only insufficient or inadequate textual material, but also when they meet with tales of an offender’s violence in survivors’ narratives that seems to not have a motive. Violent incidents are rarely written without a plausible initiating event for the complicating action. Not to indicate what led to a fight in the affidavit would be conspicuous, as the legal system operates on the notion that most crimes are perpetrated for a purpose. Indeed, scholars such as Linde (1993) find that interlocutors in normal conversation also appreciate a full Labovian narrative, and Wodak (1985) corroborates this finding in legal arenas where she notes that judges are apt to consider anything less to be unsuccessful. Consequently service providers, concerned with their own ability to represent violence in a convincing way, must ask for the cause or reason for the violence in order to advocate for their clients by providing their accounts with a legally appropriate structure. However, in cases of domestic abuse it may be that in asking what provoked violence, service providers run the risk of reinforcing possible thoughts victims possess regarding how their own actions incite or instigate the aggression abusers enact toward them. This necessary search for an abuser’s motive may also explain reports in the literature that survivors of domestic violence and acquaintance rape victims encounter victim-blaming responses within institutional support systems (Bolis 1993; Matoesian 1993; Williams & Holmes 1981). Many women in this study revealed in conversation with sociolegal authorities that the alleged abusers try to make them feel as though they themselves actually did something to provoke the turbulence in the home. For example, women state that abusers tell them that they would not have gotten angry or have become violent if their intimate-partners had (or had not) done something. In attempting to locate motive in order to write a convincing report – arguably an act of advocacy in and of itself – these paralegals may have to reinforce these commonplace and stereotypical beliefs that women deserve to be beaten. What is interesting here though is that in two of the incidents written about in this client’s affidavit, the interviewer begins the complicating action of the linear Labovian mini-narratives with a narrative clause stating, “((Abuser’s name)) started yelling with me for no reason.” In so doing, the interviewer writes the affidavit in an anomalous way. Though she struggles some with the client in the verbal interaction to pry an initiating event out of her, in the affidavit she acquiesces to the client’s insistence that the abuser started to yell at her for no reason at all, and she writes exactly this into the official record. Perhaps this paralegal writes an exceptional affidavit, because she is new to the job

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and is not yet skilled in the art of standardizing women’s oral narratives. Yet, for the last incident narrated, shown above in Excerpt 7.8, the paralegal writes the affidavit with the motive of the alleged abuser’s anger at the beginning of the narrative, in a temporal order, as opposed to at the end of the narrative in the way the victim told the story. The relevant portion of that affidavit is shown below in Example 7.9.

Example 7.9. Interviewer repairs temporal sequencing On or about ((date)), ((Abuser’s name)) and I were at a dance. I came out of the lady’s room and said hello to someone. ((Abuser’s name)) saw and became upset. He went up to me and grabbed me by the neck. . ..

This example cannot be considered even a potential locus for discrepancy, even though the facts unravel in what Labov and Waletzky (1967) would call an embedded fashion in the oral narrative, as opposed to unfolding in temporal sequence. Still, it is noteworthy that this interviewer, as do almost all of the interviewers, attempts to cast the narrative in strict linear form. So, what Labov and Waletzky (1967) describe as being “normal” (in a linguistic sense) to narrative structure seems to be considered by the legal system as “normal” or “standard” in a social and cultural sense as well. Though the interviewer may invoke the report genre through verbal communicative strategies in the interview, she imposes it on the “totality of the telling” to write the affidavit in order to render the victim’s story “maximally interpretable” for its subsequent recipients (Briggs & Bauman 1992). Protective order interviewers, because of their social and institutional position, are sanctioned to consider victims’ oral stories to “lack self-sufficiency and autonomy of the formal-functional configuration of the discourse at hand” and thus, to conclude that “recourse must be made to other discursive formations to interpret its patterning and significance” (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 147). In the written format the adequate textual genre for the story is non-negotiable, since the story is constrained by the formulaic content and structure of the affidavit. These constraints to a certain extent ensure maximum interpretability, because the assistant district attorney and judge can understand easily and quickly how the elements and events of the institutionalized account fit with the rules of law. The imposition of the report genre on the oral story to produce the final affidavit “renders texts ordered, unified, and bounded, on the one hand, and fragmented, heterogeneous, and open-ended, on the other” (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 147).

Disfigurement and discrepancy 

Merry (2001) analyzes the issuance of protective orders as a way for the state to deal with criminality through the exclusion of dangerous elements from certain areas in order to create ‘safe spaces’ (i.e., by forcing culprits’ exclusion from the victims’ homes and workplaces). My data, however, suggest that the state also has a strategy of “including” elements or subjects that it considers “controllable” or effectively open to assistance, namely the women themselves. More specifically, the protective order interview can be conceptualized as an instrument used by the legal system to facilitate the issuance of orders, and, as such, it serves as an inclusive space within the justice system for women in search of a solution to the criminal acts they suffer in their homes. With paralegals and volunteers present to transform women’s stories of violence into what is currently considered to be legally relevant, judges do not have to preside over cases directly. The fact that stories are oral and that reports are written may be an obvious difference, but it is not an insignificant one. The affidavits, rarely consisting of more than one page, are quite short when compared with the lengthy conversation that often takes place prior to their drafting. It is likely that the pithiness of the report is necessary, because judges who do not want to ‘hear’ the whole story, presumably will not want to read about it either. Except in the rare event when a hearing occurs because an abuser will not agree to an order, judges hardly ever listen for themselves to direct victim testimony. Understood from this vantage point, the protective order interviews may actually serve to keep domestic abuse in the margins of the Criminal Justice System. If conceptualized as both a marginal and a marginalizing space, it may be that the protective order interview functions to give the appearance of inclusion of women and women’s issues, when in reality it serves to keep domestic violence victims out of the center of the sociolegal process. Both the women themselves and the problems they bring to court are relegated to a peripheral space where their somewhat unruly stories can be intercepted by paralegal or volunteer mediators. As a result, the representation of domestic abuse that survives the communicative interaction of the interview actually appears to be the type of violence – i.e., discrete incidents of violence – that the system is currently willing to handle. Institutions involved in providing services to battered women tend to emphasize those aspects of their identity that highlight victimization while they downplay those aspects of women’s identities that just might enable their survival. From a linguistic perspective, this is achieved through the imposition of a report genre on Latina women’s personal stories of abuse. In the next chapter, I develop this argument further by showing that the legal system not only

 Chapter 7

attempts to create victims, but also that it has a need to create a very specific type of victim.

Notes . This finding that women do not carry on with the procedure to obtain an order is corroborated by Lazarus-Black (2001) and Ford (1991). . In Someville, these requests are honored insofar as they are written into the petition. Volunteers and Clinic directors see both the abuser’s threats to take children and his carrying it out as abuse. In Anytown, as we have seen, things are quite different on this topic. . According to service providers in my field sites, my own observations and the literature on battering, some women enter and exit the system several times before seeking legal protection. . Notably, features of involvement/detachment integration/fragmentation are not inherent to the distinctions between speech and writing, as Tannen (1982) points out. Tannen (1982: 18), refining prior analyses of the presumed differences between spoken and written discourse, suggests: “From one point of view, the differences reflect register: people produce language of a form that seems appropriate to the genre and the audience.” . This case raises important issues about the types of services Spanish-speaking women receive when they call the police. Rivera (1996, 1997, 1998) and Bonilla-Santiago (1996) both write about the linguistic barriers Latina women face when trying to report domestic violence. Here, we learn that children are necessarily linked to the violence through the linguistic act of interpreting, because their non-English-speaking parents ask them to relay messages to law enforcement officers. While I was collecting data several monolingual Spanish-speaking women complained of the linguistic difficulties they encountered when trying to report to monolingual English-speaking officers (but see Valdés, Chávez, Angelini, Enright, González, García, & Wyman 2000 for an interesting treatment of children as interpreters). In a similar vein, I witnessed an occasion where in the halls of the courthouse, a respondent in a protective order case threatened his wife in Spanish right in front of a paralegal who spoke only English. This particular abuser told his wife that if she did not drop the protective order, he would take her children back to Mexico where she would never see them again.

Chapter 8

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax

Institutional memory functions at the micro-macro interface of the perception and the representation of violence. As an archive, not of what women report, but rather of what the institution is capable of effectively responding to, it is not surprising then to see that what the system is in fact able to adjudicate corresponds to what the institution considers to be violence. The aggregate of affidavits, forming institutional memory, is a discursive space in which the larger society defines what constitutes violence. From it, agency representatives draw profiles of victims and of perpetrators. The archive itself serves as one authority from which the rest can discern the frequency and severity of violent conflicts that occur in intimate relationships. All archives act as both place and process. As receptacles of representations of reality, legal documents remember events through the act of storage. But storing, too is dialogic in nature. The question to be answered is: which of the dialogical participants has the power to transform cultural conceptions and definitions of violence? The interview, as has been shown, becomes an encounter in which information, predetermined as important and relevant by the institution, is mapped onto women’s personal accounts. While omission of evaluative devices used by women in their personal stories of domestic abuse serves to make their accounts more brief, it is also ultimately an act of distortion. Likewise transformations of women’s experiences of domestic abuse into narrative syntax imparts the appearance of logic and truth, while at the same time it dismantles their personal representations of their lived reality for institutional memory.

Alterations in time Chapters 2 and 3 set the stage for our discussion of time, an element that I have argued is crucial in the listener’s interpretation of narrative as truth. Utilizing

 Chapter 8

an analysis of linguistic structure similar to Rumsey’s (1990), I suggested that narrative syntax, as it is described by researchers such as Labov and Waletzky (1967) and understood by listeners more generally to depict what happened in the past, underlies the interpretive ideology that narrative can somehow act as an accurate depiction of events. One of the fundamental changes found among the stories and the reports analyzed here entails the transformation of lived experience into this narrative syntax, and this type of transformation is carried out through the negotiation of the representation of time. In the interviews at the District Attorney’s Office, paralegals generally force a linear Labovian narrative on incidents that victims assert have happened before, and that they seem certain are going to happen again. A consistent change made to the morphosyntactic structures of victims’ narratives involves a shift from generic present time narratives to temporally sequenced linear narratives. Generic present time narratives, it should be remembered from Chapter 5, are organized temporally as “always at this exact moment in the proceedings, Event X takes place” (Polanyi 1985: 13). Verbal morphemes in victims’ stories used to create generic time narratives are consistently replaced with simple preterit forms in the affidavits. Upon hearing these generic-time narratives, interviewers attempt to redirect victims to focus on individual incidents for the mini-narratives in the affidavit. Although women normally comply with this request to focus on a single act of violence to varying degrees, it is unclear as to whether they are in agreement with this representation of the temporal nature of the violence they experience. Regardless of victims’ compliance or concordance, interviewers end up taking what victims represent as perpetual behavior and recasting it as a one-time occurrence. This alteration makes the incident seem isolated and unconnected to others like it. Perhaps interviewers are constrained from writing these incidents in the affidavit in generic-time narrative style for the same reason that Immigration and Naturalization Service officials tend to reject accounts that are couched in absolute terms with words like “always,” and “never” (see Chapter 5). Most likely, a literal interpretation of “always” and “never” also would leave victims’ narratives vulnerable to attack by an adversarial interlocutor, as such absolutes are rather easy to take apart in courtroom confrontation. Such terms can be analyzed by linguists as pragmatic, interactional intensifiers, but their referential semantic meaning would be impeachable. As we saw in Chapter 5, these generic present time narrative-types are common in the data, yet they are almost never recorded in the affidavits as such. Very seldom do we find a token of a generic narrative-type appearing in a linear

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

mini-narrative slot of an affidavit. Below Excerpts 8.1 and 8.2 illustrate how a generic present time narrative-type does make its way into an affidavit.

Excerpt 8.1. Generic present time narrative ((type .45)) P: C: P: P: C: P: C: P:

O.K., and before, before then, ah, it was in ((date)) when he, he had just, he just passed through your house ah, cursing you out? Yeah That’s what happened? (.03) So (there’s been), he’s been driving by your house and, and just parking. . . [Se parquea ahí y me, o sea, en, en la calle donde está el, el driveway, [Mhmh y se queda ahí y no se va. So he’s been stalking you?

In the oral narrative text above, the interviewer reads aloud the date of the incident from the paperwork the victim filled out prior to the interview. Once the victim confirms that indeed, that was the last time that the alleged abuser harassed her, the interviewer switches from the past tense and begins to talk about the event in the present perfect. The woman follows with the simple present tense, used in this case as the habitual present to reflect repeated behavior. Several narratives, some of which have already been given as examples in this study, reveal that interviewers recognize that victims are habitually harassed or abused because interviewers themselves will engage victims with generic present-time utterances. In Excerpt 8.2 below, quite exceptionally though, the interviewer fills a mini-narrative slot with the entire generic narrative-type almost identical to the way the victim gave it.

Excerpt 8.2. Exceptional affidavit On or about ((date)), ((Abuser’s name)) passed by my house and started cursing at me. He is constantly passing by my house. He will park in front of my house and sit there for five or ten minutes and leave.

Obviously, the first change this interviewer makes to transform the oral account to the written affidavit is accomplished through the translation of the victim’s Spanish-English code-switching variety to an English-only text. More

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important for our purposes however, is the unique way in which she represents the incident in the victim’s voice. So, though this interviewer begins by representing this event as a single episode of abuse, she continues by incorporating the iterative nature of this act by utilizing, at least to some extent, the representational resources brought to the interview by the client. For example, the client, responding to the interviewer’s question, “So (there’s been), he’s been driving by your house and, and just parking. . .,” follows in the same verbal line and utilizes the habitual present in Spanish to state, “Se parquea ahí y me, o sea, en, en la calle donde está, el, el driveway, y se queda ahí y no se va.” Performing a series of translations and transformations, the paralegal in this case represents what this victim has characterized as a frequent occurrence by incorporating the temporal operator “will” and the adverb “constantly” into her representation of the incident in the affidavit. As does the habitual present, the combination of these forms demonstrates the recurrent, rather than the future nature of the action. My ethnography in the D.A.’s Office offers some insight as to why and how this anomalous representation of violence became part of institutional memory, albeit a small one in comparison to the numerous counter examples. This interviewee did nothing special or different to convince her interlocutor to represent her abuser’s harassment as habitual. Rather, this interviewer, new on the job, had been working at the District Attorney’s Office only a short while at the time of this interview. Still very much in the process of becoming part of the institution for which she worked, she had not yet become skilled in institutionalizing women’s narratives or in totalizing certain aspects of their identities. With time and experience, paralegals learn how to make these transformations effortlessly and systematically.1 It may be that as they themselves become part of the institution, junior-level paralegals either become or are made more aware of the fact that from an institutional standpoint, the risk involved in stating the nature of events as frequentative is more intense than not representing violence as victims do. Therefore, the rule operating in these interviews is to recast generic-past/present time narratives as singular incidents in a linear Laboviannarrative-type. In the example shown in Excerpt 8.3 below, though a specific incident is elicited, the client, rather than discussing that incident in isolation, broadens the scope of her narration to encompass the notion that what she is recounting is a type of abusive behavior that happens all the time.

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

Excerpt 8.3. Generic present time narrative P:

C: P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C:

O.K. Great. What I’m gonna, what I’m gonna want you to do, or what we’re gonna need you to do is, start with the most recent incident, of him either threatening you, bothering you, or assaulting you, O.K.? And then we’ll go back in time. All right? So, when was the last time that he either went to your house or called you, or did anything like that? Um, called was this morning, ( ) [Did he make any threats this morning? Um, yeah. He keeps telling me that he’s gonna take the kids. That if, if he finds out that I’m doing anything, he just said, any little thing that I do, then he’s gonna go over and he’s gonna take the kids, he’s not gonna let me see them. He, he calls like, ten times a day. And he calls every day? Yeah. O.K. Um, what happened in ((month))? When he showed up, When you called the police? [um, it was the same thing, he was calling and, we were just arguing and arguing, and you know, I had people at my house and the kids were there. And, I finally stopped taking his calls, and he kept calling, he called for about an hour, constantly, he would not let the phone stop ringing.

By comparing the oral text with the written text on the affidavit, it becomes clear that the morphosyntax, in this case, verbal time, gets altered in the victim’s narrative when it is reproduced in the affidavit. The portion of the affidavit corresponding to this account is shown in Excerpt 8.4 below. Though the paralegal asks the victim if the abuser calls every day, and the victim answers affirmatively, the affidavit records the event as if it happened only once.

Excerpt 8.4. Transformation of generic present time narratives On or about ((date)) ((Abuser’s name)) called me at home and threatened to take the kids and not let me see them. He called over ten times that day.

We see then that within the story and the report genre, the way time and events are represented is quite different. In their stories, women often utilize verbal tenses to mark the repeated nature of violence and abuse, while interviewers re-present their experience as an individual event, more or less unrelated to other events like it.

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Another major difference concerning the way incidents and time are told and how these are portrayed in reports can also be examined from this client’s interview and affidavit. The report genre demands information in a left-toright, top-to-bottom fashion. Each point on the affidavit is begun, worked through and ended in the same way. In the story genre, narrative production unfolds quite differently. Often one event is elicited, somewhat developed and then abandoned for another issue. Later, however, the former event can be reintroduced for further negotiation. Unlike the affidavit, where the linearity of the Labovian narrative is reinforced by the succinct presentation of information at one time, the story genre allows for the same information to be presented and re-presented various times. In this manner, it is common for interviewers and victims to discuss an incident and then return to it, perhaps for fine-tuning or in order to add more substance and detail to it later. This type of revisiting of an incident previously discussed within the same speech event essentially is a redrafting – allowing for two tellings of the same event within the protective order interview. In the interview from which an example is given in Excerpt 8.1 above, the first time this woman, whose account deals with the abuser’s harassing visits, discusses the incident represented in the affidavit in Excerpt 8.2, she does not indicate the length of time the alleged abuser spends parked outside her house. In a subsequent draft of this same incident, the interviewer elicits information on the duration of the harassing visits. Just as was the case in Chapter 5 where we found that some victims’ orientation clauses lack numerical times and dates, so too do we find that time, in terms of the duration of an event, that is when an event began and when it ended, is also scarce in the women’s stories. As part of their communicative job of re-packaging women’s’ accounts, interviewers ask victims to add the detail of the duration of the events they describe. O’Barr and Conley (1996) report the analogous finding that more successful lay litigants in small claims court “include precise references to dates and quantities” (118, emphasis added). Here, the paralegals probe for information that is not automatically offered, apparently because they know the assistant district attorney and the judge will deem it necessary. What is interesting about this latter point, however, is that this type of factfinding goes beyond paralegals’ attempts to find out what happened. From the victim’s perspective whether the abuser sits outside her house for one or two hours, or one or two minutes is probably immaterial. The central question that the discovery of this different narrating norm raises concerns the pragmatic meaning of precise references to dates and quantities. Why is it that duration should be represented? Will judges and prosecutors perceive longer durations

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

as more threatening than shorter ones? Or, do they merely perceive accounts that report durations to be more reliable than those that do not incorporate such exidence of temporal precision?

Thematic alterations According to the theoretical work of Scarry (1985), Romero (1985), and Marcus (1994) domestic violence could be interpreted as torture or terrorism, because every act within a physically aggressive, intimate relationship comes to reinforce a context of fear that is supported by an ever-present threat of physical danger. Women’s stories resound of the fact that batterers exert control and enact power over them in a multitude of ways. The state of fear that enables the recurrent perpetuation of physical assault entails emotional, economic, psychological, and social humiliation and denigration. Yet, these themes rarely become part of the D.A.’s official depiction of the situation of domestic abuse. Excerpt 8.3 above provides some evidence for this claim. Notice how in this case, the woman does not only mention the abuser’s threat to take her children. She also explains how the abuser is able to use such a threat to control her behavior. She states that he told her that he will follow through, if he finds out that she is doing “anything, any little thing”. Advocacy agencies and support groups for battered women recognize and consider such menacing vigilance to be emotional abuse. Emotional abuse consists of a range of activities, but experts recognize that abusers typically use emotional abuse to control victims’ comings and goings. The research findings of Herman (1992) indicate that perpetrators do not have to resort to violence frequently in order to maintain control over victims. Instead, abusers can dominate their victims by keeping them in a constant state of fear induced by death threats, threats to take their children, destruction of the victim’s autonomy, isolation from other members of the social network, scrutiny of the victim’s body and even overwhelmingly remorseful apologies and promises to seek help after a violent outburst. These themes are prevalent in victims’ oral narratives, contrary to the findings of Torres (1991) with respect to the range of activities considered to be abusive by Latina women. The data examined here indicate that Latina women are very aware that emotional power and control is exerted on them by their abusers. In almost all interviews examined, clients mention that they have suffered or are currently suffering from at least one type of non-physical abusive behavior. For example, clients understand economic abuse in a variety of ways. They talk about the abuser’s not giving them any money for themselves and their

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children to be a grave form of mistreatment. Women complain that they have lost several jobs because they either have had to miss work due to embarrassing bruises, or because the abuser bothers and harasses them at work to the point where they are forced to leave their jobs. In addition to the various ways in which victims narrate themes of economic abuse, they also talk about mental abuse. A very common topic in the narratives of my Latina informants concerns how abuser’s jealousies serve to keep them immobile. The women talk of how they are often forbidden by their partners to leave the house or even to drive themselves to work. Also, victims reveal that abusers isolate them from family and friends by not allowing them to have visitors. These themes tend to take up a good deal of conversational space in the interviews, yet they are rarely, if ever, written about on the affidavits. Another salient theme in women’s oral narratives is their prior and usually unsatisfying involvement with law enforcement officials. Generally, it is the police about whom they speak most critically. Commonly women complain that officers are ineffective and unhelpful when they call on them for assistance. At times, women will make critical statements about the District Attorney’s Office as well. They will mention, for example, that on a prior trip to the D.A.’s Office they were turned away and told that they were ineligible for a protective order. Although such topics are important themes in women’s stories, they do not figure at all prominently in their reports. Obviously the state is not going to represent its own failure to act. First, the state is likely to consider actions or inactions of officers and offices to be contextually justifiable, and second, once accepted as a client, such complaints to the state about the state do not make for a good victim identity. Client expressions of resentment do not make for a good performance in a report genre, yet they are an essential part of the story genre. In fact, they often serve to explain how things have gotten to the precise point at which the victim finds herself. It may be quite reasonable to expect that clients’ accusations about the state’s shortcomings remain outside the official composition of violence. However, is it enough to merely point out the difference between stories and reports and explain away the discrepancy in terms of the state’s needs? Undeniably part of what victims have to say about domestic violence implicates the state itself, because at times they imply that state employees have allowed for the perpetuation of domestic violence. Victims are not alone in making this connection between the state and their abusers, as several feminist (volumes edited by Daniels 1995; Maschke 1997) and human rights (Beasely & Thomas 1994)

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analyses also implicate the state as being complicit with abusers, especially since so few remedies have been put forth to stop violence against women. At every stage of narrative development there is occasion for some type of alteration, some arguably more innocuous than others. We now turn to examples of phrasal and lexical changes that occur as the oral text is transformed into a written account. Excerpt 8.5 below contains the relevant utterances in the victim’s oral narrative, which will be compared to the phrase meant to reflect them in the following affidavit found in Excerpt 8.6. In the interview, the paralegal asks:

Excerpt 8.5. Victim’s utterances in oral narrative P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: I: C:

P: C:

O.K., tell me what happened on ((date))? ((repeats date)) Mhmh Um, we were trying to take turns as far as the kids, you know, [mhmh [he would have them one weekend, I would have them the next. Mhmh. That weekend was his. Mhmh And, I went out with one of my sisters. He was, he was supposed to have the kids, but he left them at his mom’s and went out, [Mhmh [got drunk. He still had access to the house, he had the keys, so by the time I got home, he was already there. And, he was drunk, he was there waiting for me, and when I walked in, you know, I felt, tense, and I, felt something was gonna happen. And he just started picking on me, telling me things, you know, what was I doing, who was I with? Mhmh. (.01) Um, started pushing me around. . .

When the oral text above, particularly those utterances shown in bold type is compared to the affidavit given in the example below, inconsistencies emerge that could easily undo the victim’s credibility. This interviewer, in transferring what the woman said in the interview to the affidavit, potentially has significantly changed the meaning of this woman’s utterances. The paralegal records the facts in Excerpt 8.6 in the following way:

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Excerpt 8.6. Example of how facts change On or about ((date)), at ((time)), ((Abuser’s name)) went to my house without my permission while I was out. He went into my house and waited for me. He was drunk. ((Abuser’s name)) questioned me and then pushed me against the bathroom wall. He grabbed my arms and I sustained bruises. He ran after me in the house. ((Abuser’s name)) knocked me to the floor in the kids’ room. He then got on top of me and told me that he was gonna have me whether I liked it or not. ((Abuser’s name)) slapped me and tried to rape me. I struggled with him. ((Abuser’s name)) removed my clothes, but I did everything I could to keep him from raping me. This went on for about three hours. ((Abuser’s name)) finally left. While he was gone, I called the police.

In this example, one can easily envision a defense attorney questioning this woman’s veracity in a future judicial proceeding. The victim never, in her oral narrative, says that the abuser went to her house without her permission. In actuality, her words seem to indicate that the abuser did not need permission. In the interview, she says, “he still had access to the house, he had the keys.” Nonetheless, she signs an affidavit with a statement that could be construed as counter-factual to what really happened. Arguably, the victim is not lying when she signs the affidavit, because the prepositional phrase, “without my permission” could be interpreted in various ways. For example, in everyday language, it could mean “without my knowledge,” or even “without having asked my permission.” However, this type of imprecision is dangerous in legal arenas, for it is the kind of seeming inconsistency between statements and facts that provides defense attorneys with ammunition to impeach victim credibility. Affidavits such as this one reveal to us how the law, generally designed to deal with stranger violence perpetrated in singular, random incidents, is grappling with understanding and adjudicating violence that occurs in intimate spheres where people have unlimited access to one another. Both Matoesian (2001) and Ehrlich (2001) discuss how, in acquaintance rape cases, cultural notions of what victims would or would not do are exploited by adversaries and even invoked by judges or other supposedly impartial decision-makers to make sense of sexual violence and aggression. Ehrlich (2001) explains how adversarial systems in the U.S. and Canada allow for the case to be made that victimization cannot occur if the presumed victim did not take every precaution to avoid it. This common ideology is another form of victim-blaming, as it holds victims responsible for criminal acts committed against them. This type of victim-blaming is commonly invoked to make sense of crimes, illness and

.

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

other misfortunes, because it allows the onlooker the position of thinking that such things could not happen to him/her. But such victim-blaming seems to be particularly prevalent in crimes of rape and domestic battering, where the victim’s whereabouts and reasons for staying with an abuser are questioned. In the case of the paralegal from the last example, it may be that her cultural knowledge of this victim-blaming mentality is what motivates her to change the story for the sake of the report. Western legal systems, like the ones in the United States and Canada, as Ehrlich (2001) points out, work on the notion that individuals are liberal subjects who act rationally and autonomously as they freely make choices. While most would recognize that this well-entrenched belief ignores the importance and influence of situational and social context on people’s decision-making practices, it is easy to understand that had the paralegal not changed the woman’s story for the report, she would have been leaving evidence in the record to suggest one of two possibly damaging scenarios for the client. By allowing her ex-partner to enter the house, the case could be made that either (a) the woman was not really afraid of him, or (b) she is irrational, and thus, cannot be trusted. It seems then, in order to get the short-term benefit provided by the protective order, the paralegal recasts this not-so-unusual access to mutual children, homes and cars commonly held jointly among intimates, into a statement that suggests that merely having gone to the home, the abuser did something wrong. The long-term ramifications of these types of transformations are two-fold. First they misreport the events. And second, by not admitting that abusers have access to their victims’ homes, these alterations perpetuate the popular, mythological and simplistic view that people are always freely making choices and acting in accordance with an unchanging and invariant rule of rationality and autonomy. At the lexical-level changes between the victims’ words and what is written in the affidavit are quite common. While any part of speech could be examined to study word-level changes, the verbs used to describe acts of physical violence stand out, because they are altered in ways that either aggravate or mitigate the force of acts mentioned by victims. Notice the second boldface sentence that reads, “((Abuser’s name)) knocked me to the floor in the kids’ room,” and compare it to the woman’s verbal rendition of the story as taken from the transcript of the interview where she says, “and finally, in the kids’ room, he pushed me down.” Lexical changes such as the substitution of the word knocked for pushed are common in the data. Other examples include the replacement of words such as: slashed (the tires) for punctured (the tires), told (me: me dijo) for threatened me, and grabbed (a crow bar) for got (a crow bar). When writing affidavits, paralegals commonly use verbs that the victims did not use in their

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oral version of the story. But when I asked native speakers about these lexical changes, I found considerable variance in their judgments as to whether they presupposed more or conversely less force. More interesting changes in lexicon from a linguistic perspective are found in the paralegals’ tendency to include words on the affidavit that either pertain to a generally higher register of speech or to the register of legalese. Some examples serve to illustrate. For instance, women’s common use of the word drunk often becomes intoxicated in the affidavit, and their lexical choice, bad words, usually becomes obscenities. In addition, the victims’ reporting of having gotten bruises is frequently recorded in the affidavit as their having sustained bruises or injuries. The claim is often made in textual analyses that the spoken language is less precise than the written version (see Jönsson & Linell 1991). But is this really the case? What, for example makes the meaning of intoxicated any more precise than the word drunk? Again, such changes seem to have much more to do with a text’s ability to perform or even achieve a specific identity for its principal/animator/author through the use of linguistic elements that really serve to index certain types of values. Other lexical changes are more clearly tied to a negotiation process within the interview. For instance, paralegals will first listen to victims recount an incident, and then they will repeat a portion of it back to clients, only in different words. The form of such utterances is similar to an echo question, and they function as confirmation checks. However, when interviewers employ these speech acts, they are doing more than merely making sure that they have understood. Paralegals use these techniques both to confirm their understanding of what clients have said and to be able to write their own version of the events in the affidavit. Excerpt 8.7 illustrates the first draft of an incident that is later re-introduced by the paralegal. Here the victim indicates that she had picked up a garden hoe to guard against being hit by the abuser with a crow bar.

Excerpt 8.7: First draft of incident given in victim’s words P: C:

P: C:

P:

Who started the fight, he did? He did. He did. And then, I came out, and that’s when he started swinging it at me. I had a, one of those, one of those hoes, you know an old fashioned, it’s real long, you can cut grass like this with it. Mhmh Well, I had that because he was, he was swinging it down at me like this, and I would just pick up that thing so he couldn’t hit me with it. And that’s when the [What were you picking up?

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C: P:

The uh, it’s called a hoe. Oh, the hoe. What . . .

In Excerpt 8.8, the interviewer employs one of these confirmation checks, which enables her to introduce meaning and language into the communicative interaction. This particular pragmalinguistic strategy makes it easier to move what the paralegal wants to say out of the oral text and into the affidavit. Though not necessarily a discrepant version of the victim’s story, it is another example of how victim voices are altered by paralegals.

Excerpt 8.8. Second draft of incident given in interviewer’s words P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

P:

(.16). ((To trainee)). Is that the way you spell “hoe”? It sounds (funny) to me. H-O-E. ( ) ((.05 typing)) So you got a garden hoe to protect yourself? Right. And what happened then? Um, he was [Did he hit you? No, he didn’t get to hit me ‘cause. . . [( ) he tried to hit you? Right ‘cause he would bring it down on me, and then my friend would try to come around, and try to grab him, and he would swing it down this way. And I had the hoe like this, I would hold it up, (and I would duck down) ‘cause he wanted to hit me with it. Mm‘kay, so who called the police?

With the first utterances (shown in bold), the interviewer restates what the victim has referred to earlier in the interview. But in her restatement the paralegal introduces the concept of self-defense by stating, “You got a garden hoe to protect yourself.” She does this both to be able to confirm, and then to change what the victim said in her first draft of the incident. The second set of boldface utterances in Excerpt 8.8 shows how paralegals lead victims to what they need them to say. Wanting the client to speak directly about physical violence, the paralegal asks, “Did he hit you?”, and when the client says no, the paralegal interrupts yet again in an attempt to figure out if the abuser at least tried to hit her. Offering the language that they will write in the final affidavit before women can even speak for themselves is another way in which paralegals tell women how they are to narrate. In the affidavit below, the interviewer is really quoting herself, rather than the victim:

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Excerpt 8.9. Interviewer quoting herself in the affidavit . . .I got a garden hoe to protect myself because ((Abuser’s name)) tried to hit me with a crow bar. . .

Often women will discuss the ways in which they fought back, but like the woman in the excerpt above, many do not explicitly couch their own acts of physical violence in terms of self-defense. In these cases interviewers have a way of downplaying women’s representation of their ability to fight back. Minimizing or ignoring the significance of women’s physical survival techniques is another discursive tactic that helps to totalize them, at least temporarily, as victims. One technique used by paralegals to achieve this identity construct for their clients is through confirmation checks like the one seen in the narrative above. Additionally paralegals squelch women’s descriptions of their capacity to defend themselves through physicality by converting their use of multiple verbs of physical actions of resistance into the word, struggle. Conflating many different verbs into one that makes meaning somewhat less clear can be seen in the narrative data presented in Excerpt 8.10 below.

Excerpt 8.10. Interviewer’s use of the word “struggle” P:

C: P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

(.13). O.K., um, did he do, did he do anything else, um, (.01) to you when he was there? You say, you wrote on here that he slapped you, is this when he slapped you? right. O.K. Um, and the whole time, I was, you know, crying and crying and I guess I was, I was dehydrated and he wouldn’t let me up. And he finally pulled back and let me sit down for a little while, but he wouldn’t let me get up, no, no, I couldn’t get any water, I couldn’t go to the restroom, I couldn’t move, I just had to sit there. Do you know about how long this took? Probably about three hours. Three hours? Mhmh. So was he successful? No. No? Mumum. ((meaning no)) So were the two of you struggling? Yeah. Yeah I did. You know, it’s like ( ) two or three times, I hit him, I bit him, anything to try and get him away from me.

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P: C:

Was he successful in removing your clothes? Mhmh.

Above, the client admits to a series of physical acts (hitting, biting, ‘anything to try and get him away from me’), and she makes no explicit statement of selfdefense. In so doing, this woman portrays herself as an agent, rather than as just a patient, or a person acted upon by a perpetrator. The interviewer however, fuses the physical acts admitted to by the victim into the verb “struggle” when writing the affidavit. The corresponding affidavit is given below in Excerpt 8.11.

Excerpt 8.11. How victim’s words are reduced to “struggle” On or about ((date)), at ((time)), ((Abuser’s name)) went to my house without my permission while I was out. He went into my house and waited for me. He was drunk. ((Abuser’s name)) questioned me and then pushed me against the bathroom wall. He grabbed my arms and I sustained bruises. He ran after me in the house. ((Abuser’s name)) knocked me to the floor in the kids’ room. He then got on top of me and told me that he was gonna have me whether I liked it or not. (Abuser’s name) slapped me and tried to rape me. I struggled with him. ((Abuser’s name)) removed my clothes, but I did everything I could to keep him from raping me. This went on for about three hours. ((Abuser’s name)) finally left. While he was gone, I called the police.

Nowhere in the affidavit does the paralegal represent the victim as having bitten or hit the abuser. Instead, her use of the more neutral word struggle, which has a broader, less specific connotation, is open to different, perhaps even more passive interpretations of the woman’s actions. Even the temporary totalizing of a woman’s identity as that of victim is not without costs, however. In a future judicial proceeding, if an abuser’s attorney questions whether the woman bit the abuser, her affidavit could quite easily be made to look as though she had intentionally left such specifics out. This portrayal of the woman also feeds the stereotypical images of the roles victims are believed to play in an attack. We see again and again in research on gender-related violence that while some level of resistance is required before a person can be considered a victim (see Ehrlich 2001 on what she calls the construction of ineffectual agency), too much resistance might make the person’s victim-status questionable. Notice also how the duration – “three hours” – is given in the affidavit with the sentences, “This went on for about three hours. ((Abuser’s name)) finally left. While he was gone, I called the police.” It is not clear by reading the affidavit what activity these ‘three hours’ are meant to frame. Also in the

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oral version the woman states that she fell asleep only to awake and find the abuser gone. Thus, the sentence that includes the duration of time of the incident could potentially raise more questions than it answers, especially since during some point in the evening, the victim fell asleep, and thus might not know exactly how long the incident lasted. A defense attorney, for example could ask, “What went on for three hours?” “Were you struggling with him for three hours while he tried to rape you?” or “Did the entire argument last for three hours?” Moreover, the fact that the victim fell asleep is not recorded in the affidavit, yet, the wording makes it look as if during her waking hours she struggled for three hours before the abuser finally left her alone. This is not at all how the victim represents the event in the oral narrative version. The interviewer elicits the duration of time from the interviewee because, as was noted above, women do not generally qualify events by how long they took to occur, and the law does. This example further reinforces the idea that references to time are used in these affidavits to lend credibility and authority to the official report genre through an illusion of precision. In this example, the inclusion of a temporal marking in reality, could render the incident even more susceptible to questions.

Alterations in the global organization of narrative Another type of alteration that occurs in texts that contain changes to the organization of narrative. More specifically, the events and the order of incidents as narrated by victims are often transposed by paralegals in their depiction of these same events in the affidavit. The examples shown below in Excerpts 8.12 and 8.13 illustrate what I mean by this:

Excerpt 8.12. Sequences narrated by victims P: C:

P: C: P: C: P:

O.K., ¿me puede decir qué sucedió durante ese incidente? Estamos hablando de que sucedió el ((date)). Bueno, porque él, él, el chamaco se está quedando conmi(go) es mi hijo. Y él me tiene muchos celos a mijo. ¿Por qué? Yo no sé.(.02) ¿Verdad? Y como mi primer esposo fue americano, [Mhmh el papá de mis chamacos, y él dice que quiere familia y yo ya no puedo tener familia. O.K. Y yo le digo, “¿Tú pa’ qué quieres familia si ya tienes sesenta-y-un años?” [Mhmh

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C:

P: C:

Pero, después sale él de bronca, y con su permiso, dice que soy puta, que estoy wonga, que estoy todo y luego quiere sexo por, por donde no se debe. Y yo no soy una persona que a mí, me más no ( ). ¿So intentó violarla señora? Sí, por el, por el otro la(d)o. (.03) Y, eso fue el pleito, porque no me dejé.

Translation of above example (.06) P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C:

O.K. can you tell me what happened during this incident? We’re talking about what happened on ((date)). Well, because he, he, the boy who is staying with me is my son. And he is very jealous of my son. Why? I don’t know. (.02) You know? And since my first husband was American, [Mhmh the father of my children, and he says that he wants a family. And I can’t have anymore children . O.K. And I say to him, “Why do you want children if you are already sixty-one years old?” [Mhmh But, he got angry, and with your permission, he says that I’m a whore, that I’m loose among other things, and then he wants to have sex where you’re not supposed to have sex. And I’m not a person that, no, to me ( ). So, did he try to rape you ma’am? Yes, through, through the other end. (.03) And that’s what started the argument, because I wouldn’t let him. (.07)

In the affidavit, this incident is written about in the following way:

Excerpt 8.13. Alterations of sequences On or about ((date)) at about ((time)), ((Abuser’s name)) began arguing with me and attempted to force me to have anal sex with him. ((Abuser’s name)) and I struggled and ((Abuser’s name)) hit me on the face and arms with a closed fist. I then hit ((Abuser’s name)) on the face. ((Abuser’s name)) stated he wanted children and I told him it was impossible because I am fifty-two years old. ((Abuser’s name)) was intoxicated and he later fell asleep. I sustained bruises to my face and shoulders as a result of this incident. No police report [was] made.

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If it can be inferred from this woman’s oral account that the fight started with the alleged abuser’s request to have a family, since that is what the victim narrates first, and in great detail, then the order of the events in this incident is changed in the affidavit to represent a different chronological version of this story. It is not always clear from the way victims narrate that what they say first actually happened first. Schiffrin (1987) attributes this phenomenon to the ambiguity embodied by discourse markers such as “and,” “then” and “and then.” When these markers are used, says Schiffrin, it is difficult to determine at times, whether the narrator is using them to connect a string of temporally sequenced events or merely to sew together a string of successive ideas. In protective order interviews when there is confusion, interviewers attempt to pin-point the course of events by trying to elicit narrations according to what happened first, second, third, et cetera. Still the affidavits are written in their tight linear sequence, even though the paralegals are not always successful in untangling how things happened. Interviewers use words like “then,” and “later” in the affidavits not only to show that a sequence of events has occurred, but essentially as another means of imposing a sequence even when victims are unclear about chronology. In addition to changing or altering the sequence of events in the complicating action of mini-narratives of a discrete incident, earlier I showed that interviewers also attempt to order the incidents about which women speak by requesting the last one first. Time and again, this request proves to be problematic for many women. For the sake of quantification, I return to the twelve interviews examined in Chapter 6. In each of those twelve interviews, interviewers incorporate such an elicitation device. Six of these twelve interviews reveal the types of difficulty that some women have in complying with this request. In the examples that follow, I list the segments of those interviews that cause interactional trouble, because women fail to comply with the request. In Excerpts 8.14 and 8.15 below, clients interpret the word incident differently from the way interviewers do. In Excerpt 8.14 for example, the victim actually says, “No exactamente pasó incidente, porque no me maltrató”, indicating that for her, an incident entails physical violence. The client’s narrative in Excerpt 8.15 offers additional insight into what the victim in Excerpt 8.14 might consider to be a bona fide incident of domestic abuse. The narrative shown in Excerpt 8.15 indicates that when asked about the most recent incident, the victim reports what happened the last time there was physical violence, not the last time there was an argument or some type of verbal abuse. Rather than beginning with the verbal threats of the most recent incident that led her to leave her

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home and go to the Women’s Shelter, the client’s narrative indicates that she also considers an incident to be an event in which there was physical violence.

Excerpt 8.14. Example of divergent meanings of the word incident P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

Gracias señora. Um, ¿El último incidente que pasó fue ayer? No, exactamente [Disculpe No exactamente, no exactamente pasó incidente, porque no me maltrató. ¿No le hizo nada? ¿No la amenazó? [Pero (.01) Pero fue. . .Sí. Es lo que hace todo el tiempo. [O.K., dígame lo que pasó ayer.

Translations of above example P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

Thank you ma’am. Um, the last incident took place yesterday? It wasn’t exactly [Excuse me It wasn’t exactly, it wasn’t exactly an incident, because he didn’t abuse me. He didn’t do anything? He didn’t threaten you? [But (.01) it was. . ..Yes. That’s what he does all the time. [O.K., tell me what happened yesterday.

Excerpt 8.15. Additional evidence for claim of divergent meanings P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C:

((typing .04)) O.K., the most recent incident that occurred ahh. . . Was just, ah two weeks ago when I got my head cut, and then on the ((date)), the day before we left, we had a huge argument. And the next morning he left at six, but before he left, he woke me up and told me he wanted me out of the house already. So the incident where he hit you on the head was the most recent incident? Yes. And this was two weeks ago, so this was sometime in ((month))? Yes. Late ((month))? Yes.

Knowledge of differential discourse strategies commonly afforded to defense and prosecuting attorneys in direct and cross-examination in criminal trials in the U.S. might lead one to point out that in these interviews paralegals employ what is known as “leading questions.” Leading questions are those that include the semantic material of the answers. About leading questions in trials, Berk-

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Seligson (1990a: 24) says: “they allow lawyers to predetermine the substance of an impending answer, thereby to tightly control what a witness is going to say.” Here, I would argue that there are two possible interpretations of leading questions. On the one hand, we could analyze them as a linguistic tactic on the part of paralegals to give the “right answers away” to clients. In other words, by asking, as the paralegal does in Excerpt 8.14, if the abuser threatened the victim, with utterances like, “¿No la amenazó?”, or Didn’t he threaten you?, the paralegals provide victims with the information that counts for a protective order. While this interpretation is valid, in light of the current thesis, on the other hand, leading questions can also function as a means of imposing the report genre. However, given that there might be divergent meanings for the word incident among paralegals and victims, it may also be that these very experienced interviewers understand that Latina women have a variable understanding of the word. In this setting they may function more as a definitional device for clients.2 Indeed, the interviewers seem to expect this variable interpretation and therefore, some of them, like the one in the excerpt below, are highly explicit in defining what the “most recent incident” means for their clients.

Excerpt 8.16. Explicit definition of phrase, “most recent incident” P:

C:

O.K. Great. What I’m gonna, what I’m gonna want you to do, or what we’re gonna need you to do is, start with the most recent incident, of him either threatening you, bothering you, or assaulting you, O.K.? And then we’ll go back in time. All right? So, when was the last time that he either went to your house or called you, or did anything like that? Um, called was this morning, ( )

The paralegal in the oral interview text shown above in Excerpt 8.16 provides an entire laundry list to define what she considers to be an incident. The victim picks “called” from among them and begins the narration once prompted to do so. Rather than “giving the answers away,” paralegals might be trying to negotiate the meaning of violence and abuse with victims. The utilization of these leading questions might be the paralegals’ way of attempting to show victims what the system counts as abuse. In other words, after having worked with victims, and particularly Latina victims of abuse, it may be that paralegals have come to expect that their clients’ definition of incident will be different than the legal system’s. Some women seem to interpret the word incident to refer to a time when the abuser did something and the police were called. Interestingly a police report made to a patrol officer in Anytown is called an incident report.

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax

At this point, we see that there is a paradox between institutional and lay definitions of abuse. That is, there is a seeming contradiction between what the two consider to be abusive as some women may perceive phone calls to be threatening, but they may be reluctant to come forward and narrate them as incidents. And while paralegals define acts such as phone calls as incidents, it is unlikely that they will endorse women as victims or clients if all they have to report at the time of the interview are harassing phone calls. We saw in Chapter 5 that one elicitation device that interviewers use to request a telling of the most recent incident is to refer to what the client has written in the slot designated for a brief written account of the most recent incident on the intake forms. In the following two interviews, shown as Excerpts 8.17 and 8.18 below, the paralegals elicit the last incident by referring to the dates marked on the intake forms by the clients. However, in neither of these interviews is it the last incident that these women narrate. Instead, these clients begin their narrations with the penultimate incident.

Excerpt 8.17. How clients resist narrating last incident first (.25) P: C:

O.K., um, go ahead, start by telling me what happened on Saturday. On Saturday, um, I was just, we were just there, I had found out that he had bought a ticket from one of the parents. And uh, he told the parents that he was just wanting to help out the, the boosters, so he bought, he bought the ticket, and he wasn’t going to show up there. So, I danced with, with one of my friends.

Excerpt 8.18. Additional evidence – clients do not write last incident first P: C:

O.K., this last incident, um, (.03) he just passed through your house, is that, I mean, what happened? Tell me what happened this last, on, on the ((date))? Andaba dando vueltas por, por la casa y diciendo bad words, así.

The two interviews above in Excerpts 8.17 and 8.18 suggest that when left to their own devices to tell the story, in this case, to write about it, some victims prefer to begin with what happened first and then proceed to what happened after that. In other words, the survivors themselves seem to want to begin with the first incident (or the penultimate) and then go forward sequentially in time to discuss the second (or the most recent) incident. In this way, these women show a preference for linearity and temporal juncture. On the intake forms, many women begin with the first of the last two incidents – as if it were more



 Chapter 8

natural to begin with what happened first – and then they continue on with what has happened more recently. This finding is analogous to people’s tendency to write their given name in the first slot on a form that often will request the surname first. Thus, rather than following the instructions that are written on the form, these victims slip into writing a sequentially organized narrative-type detailing what it was that has brought them into the District Attorney’s Office. The interviewers, acting on behalf of the institution and as the co-author of the report genre elicit the most recent incident, as if the most recent incident were the most important. Ehrlich (2001), writing about Canadian rape laws, provides insight into why it might be that the reports are written with reference to the most recent incident first. Ehrlich relates that in Canada until 1983, when there was a major reform in rape law statutes, there existed the recent complaint rule. “This rule” Ehrlich (2001: 23) writes, “obligated the complainant to make a prompt complaint in order that her testimony be deemed reliable.” Though the data in this study come from the U.S. context, this Canadian rule seems to echo the ideological importance given to immediate reporting of male violence against women. A the data reveal that recent complaints are given more weight than those that get made in time. We have seen that the importance of recency of reports of domestic violence is institutionalized discursively in the protective order interview in several ways. First, the D.A.’s paralegals and the Clinic volunteers seek narratives of violence which have occurred within the past month. And second, though they strive for a strict adherence to temporal ordering within individual episodes of violence, they almost always report the most recent incident first in the affidavits. Arguably, in criminal proceedings, the recency standard may play a crucial role in protecting the rights of the accused. However, the emphasis of recency in civil court proceedings, where the protective order is petitioned, speaks to the ideological work of lending credibility to women, which is attributed culturally to immediate reporting. For many battered women, however, it seems that their decision to come into the system is not based on what happened the last time the abuser did something. Instead, their stories reveal that their decision is based on a tangled series of events that have, in most cases, taken them on a roller coaster ride of hope and despair. Listening to the way they narrate, it often sounds like the last incident is only perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back. The following interview, represented in Excerpt 8.19, corroborates this explanation. The victim seems to want to organize her narrative as a two-part incident with the last incident trailing the event that occurred first. The excerpt shows that when the interviewer elicits the last incident, and the interviewee gives its date,

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

she immediately brings up the fact that the abuser had been at her home the day before to puncture the tires of her car.

Excerpt 8.19. Example of narration in linear, temporally sequenced order of incidents P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

(.04) And the last time that he gave you a problem was when? ((day)). The uh, the ((day)) that just past, the ((date))? Mhmh. And he had just gotten out of jail too, ‘cause he went Sunday, so. What was he in jail for? Criminal mischief? Mm’kay, you, put him there, or? Right. ‘Cause he came and he slashed my sister’s car’s tires. O.K. And um, he came, he got out and he came back over to your house? Right, that night about, he was waiting for me there at home. I had gone to Shop-N-Save to go get the groceries, when I drove up. . .

The following text in Excerpt 8.20 shows another women’s reluctance to narrate the most recent incident first. However, given this particular victim’s uniform avoidance of the taboo topic of sexual assault, she may, more consciously than the other victims, be attempting to steer clear of the last incident.3

Excerpt 8.20. Reluctance to narrate last incident first P:

C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

O.K. ((types .15)) O.K., el incidente más reciente que sucedió, O.K., ¿Cuándo fue que, el más reciente, señora, dice usted que la golpeó cuando fue a esa cantina. ¿Cuándo sucedió eso [Sí ese el, [¿Eso es el más reciente o hay algúno otro más reciente que eso? Fue antes de ((date)). ¿El ((date))? El ((date)) me dejó toda moreteada, me rompió la ropa. ¿De de, desde ((date)) hasta ahorita? [ehh, es ((more recent date)). ¿No ha habido ningún otro incidente? [eh, ((more recent date)) salimos de golpes y no estábamos tomando. Él tio no toma.

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Translation of above example P:

C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

O.K. ((types .15)) O.K., the most recent incident, O.K., when was, the most recent incident, ma’ am, you say that he hit you when he went to that bar. When did that happen? [Yes that the, Is that the most recent or is there a more recent one than that? It was before ((date)). The ((date)) The ((date)). He bruised me all over, he tore up my clothes. From, since ((date)) ‘til now um, [Uh, it’s ((more recent date)) there has been no other incident? [Uh, ((more recent date)) we started hitting each other and we weren’t drinking. The guy doesn’t drink.

These data imply a certain irony with respect to temporal, sequential and teleological ordering. On the one hand, the report genre places a great deal of importance on the step-by-step recounting of events with temporal juncture when representing individual episodes. As we have seen, however, women seem to have difficulty separating out events that they perceive to happen all the time in order to talk about them as a one-time-occurrence. The paralegals’ overt attempts to make the mini-incidents come across with temporal juncture, I argue, are made to give accounts veracity as linear ordering insinuates truth in narrative. But, on the other hand, because women recount crimes, and particularly, gender-related crimes, there is an attempt on the part of paralegals to make this point stridently by subscribing to the ‘recent complaint’ phenomenon whereby, women are also taken to be more reliable and more truthful if they report events in a timely manner. Hence, it seems then that having the most recent event come first is more compelling in terms of credibility than is even linearity.

Negotiating and managing the gap What is interesting is that there seems to be a sense among legal practitioners that oral narratives can be reproduced transparently in the affidavit. My finding that the report genre is imposed on the story to write an affidavit leads me to concur with Briggs and Bauman (1992: 147) that this imposition orders, unifies and binds texts on the one hand, as paralegals work to create a legally relevant

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

version of the account. But on the other hand, this imposition of one genre on the other causes fragmentation in women’s stories that leaves them open-ended and even vulnerable to discrepancy. In addition, the analysis presented here confirms Briggs and Bauman’s (1992) prediction that as texts are reproduced in different genres, an intertextual gap between them will emerge. When the texts are viewed diachronically, as if the oral narrative came before its written counterpart, gaps in meaning and gaps in representation occur between them at various levels. Several strategies are employed by paralegals as they carry out their institutional duties both to minimize and maximize the gap between the oral stories and the written reports. These minimization and maximization strategies serve to transform a story into a report while giving the appearance that the victim alone produced the report. These strategies of foregrounding (or maximizing) and suppressing (or minimizing) the process of textual production of the source text (i.e., the interview) and the affidavit predictably provokes unintentional changes in meaning. The Domestic Violence Questionnaire Form, for example, analyzed in Chapter 5, is employed to begin minimizing the gap between the way the women talk about abuse and the way the legal system requires that they present it. This goal is furthered by the interview, itself a gap-minimizing event. The interview serves to bring women into a discursive situation with the legal system by which their accounts of physical violence can be channeled, defined, re-defined and ordered by the interviewer. Here, I have shown that paralegals do engage in this process by both explicitly stating how the interview should unfold through their metalanguage and metacommentary and through contextualization cues that demonstrate it. The interviewers, in this way, try to elicit from victims only that which they will include in the final affidavit. However, as Briggs and Bauman (1992: 156) point out, “all genres are not created equally – or, more accurately, equally empowered – in terms of structuring discourse.” Thus, within the production of the oral narrative text, the contextualization cues of the report genre are not strong enough to structure the interaction or the victims’ oral story narrative. Women, in spite of paralegals’ directing, channeling and signaling to them to do something else, often continue with their preferred narrative genre of storytelling. Yet women’s power to represent themselves changes rather dramatically in the report genre. In the written affidavit, the report is imposed on the totality of the telling – as we have seen, temporarily totalizing the identity of women as victims of discrete incidents of physical violence and threats of physical harm that are perpetrated by someone who just happens to be an intimate partner. As a

 Chapter 8

result of this totalizing process of re-presenting an account of domestic violence, discrepant versions are created in spite of the gap-minimizing techniques introduced by interviewers to structure the interaction. In addition by performing certain speech acts such as confirmation checks through altered and somewhat delayed echo questions, the interviewer herself, as co-producer of the oral narrative text, serves to minimize the gap between the language of the interview and the language of the affidavit. That is, the paralegal is able to introduce into the oral narrative text, language that was not employed by the victim. Once she gets it confirmed, the paralegal can then move her own words out of the oral narrative text and into the affidavit. By way of her own introduction of linguistic form and meaning, the paralegal accomplishes a minimization of the gap between what is said and what is written. Likewise, legal terms such as “to sustain injuries,” or even “to make a police report,” “or to file a charge,” are not phrases that are typically used by victims who generally say, “I got a bruise,” or “I called the cops.” Yet, paralegals introduce this type of legal language as a gap-minimizing technique that enables them to easily move it out of the oral discourse and into the affidavit. These data should remind us of Eggins and Martin’s (1997) work on genre and register as they provide a good example of what it means to have texts that perform different values, actions and identities in culture. From a Critical Discourse Analytic perspective though, these alterations are not only about difference. Rather, they also speak to relations of dominance as the structure of the system, the interview and the report genre serve to reproduce the hierarchal structural relationships of stories and reports, as well as of the producers for whom these narrative genres stand in. Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 273) put it in the following way: We can only make sense of the salience of discourse in contemporary social processes and power relations by recognizing that discourse constitutes society and culture, as well as being constituted by them. Their relationship, that is, is a dialectical one. This entails that every instance of language use makes its own small contribution to reproducing and/or transforming society and culture, including power relations. That is the power of discourse: that is why it is worth struggling over.

Along these lines, the analysis shows that discourse is used to reproduce power relations through gap-maximization strategies as well. Gap-maximizing devices are those that make the relationship between the texts more opaque as the separation between them is widened. Gap-maximizing techniques used by these interviewers consist mostly of the act of deletion. Crucial language used

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

in the construction of one text is omitted from the other. This time, however, the discourse omissions of importance do not belong to the women, but rather they pertain to the interviewers. The affidavit, originally presented in Chapter 5, is reproduced here in Figure 8.1 for ease of reference. From it, we see that the paralegal’s questions are nowhere present. The content of the affidavit downplays the paralegals’ role as “interviewer” or “interlocutor” for victims’ stories. These paralegals who so intensely play the role of “interviewer” in the verbal exchange become only “notary publics” or witnesses to the fact that the statement in the affidavit was made. Paradoxically, as animators (and/or articulators) and authors of the affidavits, paralegals utilize a gap-minimizing technique of writing the affidavit in the first-person, as if the survivor were writing it herself.4 It is not always the case that language is removed from a text to obscure the manner and means of its production. Arguably, in each different context, the veracity of an official record is carried through distinct types of discourse. For example, Walker (1990) in examining the verbatim record of court proceedings and Slembrouck (1992), who compared audio recordings of Parliament with Hansard versions of the same parliamentary proceedings, find that linguistic elements are refined and/or subtracted from the official record in differential ways: depending for example on whose speech, and what the relationship that person has to the proceedings is, is being represented. Coulthard (1996) about the production of remembered records of police interrogations of suspects in England, where the verbal involvement of the officer in extracting confessions needs to be recorded, finds that officers add linguistic elements to the record. Such additions are made in an effort to enhance the verisimilitude and authenticity of the official record. Authenticity enhancers in such records include the insertion of discourse markers to represent orality, the inclusion of interruptions and the inscription of non-verbal language such as, “MORLEY smiled and made no reply” (Coulthard 1996: 175–176). The point to take away here is not whether gap-maximization/minimization occurs with the addition or subtraction of discourse. Rather, the particularity of the text and the goals of that text to achieve some cultural performance determines what is ‘truthful’ and what is ‘authentic.’ Also, approximately one-third, or roughly 30 of the 90 interviews that I recorded in the D.A.’s Office were conducted in Spanish, while in only one of the affidavits written for a Spanish-speaking client is this fact reflected. In this unique affidavit there is a sentence at the end stating, “This affidavit has been read back to me in Spanish by ((paralegal’s name)) of the district attorney’s

 Chapter 8

Figure 8.1. Example of sample affidavit State of AnyState County of AnyCounty Before me, the undersigned authority, on this day personally appeared Vania Díaz, who being by me duly sworn on oath stated:

“I am the Applicant in the above and foregoing Application for a Protective Order and the facts and circumstances contained therein are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.” There is a clear and present danger of continuing family violence and of other immediate and irreparable harm if a Temporary Ex Parte Protective Order is not granted, as shown by the following: Overall Orientation Clauses: Victor Díaz is my ex-boyfriend. We lived together for eight months. We have known each other for three years. We separated in January 2001 although we did date on and off. I have one minor child in my home. Linear mini account: On October 5, 2001, Victor was sick and had stayed at my house so that I could take care of him. I got home and asked him if I had any mail and he said he didn’t know. I went outside to check the mail and he grabbed me by the hair and banged my head against the window. I got scared and I ran to the store and called the police. When the police arrived, Victor was arrested for Assault-Bodily Injury. I sustained some redness to my right eye as a result of this assault. He is still at the AnyCounty Jail. Linear mini account: In June 2001, Victor grabbed me by the head and banged my head against the wall. The sheet rock to the wall was damaged and I sustained a large bump to my head. I called the police and a report was made. Linear mini account: In January 2001, Victor told me to go upstairs because he had my birthday present. As I got upstairs he pointed a gun at me and told me that he was going to kill me. I pushed the gun away several times but he continued to tell me that he was going to kill me. At one point the gun fell and I walked downstairs. Some people that had come to my party began leaving. When all the people were gone, Victor pulled out a knife and threatened to cut my throat. His cousin was also there and managed to talk him out of hurting me. I did not call the police and did not file charges. Overall Evaluation: Victor is very irrational and I fear for what he may be capable of doing to me in the future. I am afraid that he may carry out his threats to kill me. It is for this reason that I am seeking legal protection. Participant Signatures: Sworn and subscribed to before me on this ((date)) of April, A.D., ((year)). ________________________(signature line for client) Vania Díaz ___________________________(signature line for paralegal) Notary Public, State of AnyState

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

office.” By not making mention of the language of the interview, the paralegals employ yet another gap-minimizing technique, which makes it seem like what the victim said is indeed transparently reproduced on the affidavit. Arguably, there may be more discrepancies from the oral to the written text as the transference of the Spanish-speaking victims’ words must be transformed from the story genre to the report genre, from spoken to written language and translated from Spanish to English. Yet, the gap-minimizing technique of omitting this information serves to obscure the fact that the victim was aided in the construction of the narrative, and that whoever helped her, also translated what she said from Spanish to English. These gap-minimizing and gap-maximizing techniques as well as the examples of the types of alterations found in the texts have been given to illustrate how the oral narrative text is transformed to become a written one, but more importantly, how the story genre is transformed to become a report. The changes made, as we have seen in the studies of Walker (1990), Slembrouck (1992) and Coulthard (1996), are not value-free. They are purposeful in the creation of different types of performative texts. As these women enter the institution to tell their stories, what they say in person and the linguistic resources they employ to define and represent their reality (van Leeuwen 1996), their own story, are significantly changed. These changes too, are value-laden, and they serve to reproduce women’s positions in society and the place of women’s issues in the legal system. Paralegals, as the communicative liaisons between victims and higher judicial authorities, essentially must transform the women’s modes of representation of domestic violence into narrative syntax that will be understood quickly and easily. Alterations like the ones described, while temporarily totalizing certain aspects of women’s identities, also provide women access to this societal institution. However, this type of inclusion – one that occurs only through a re-production of the system on the women’s accounts, does not necessarily produce equity between men and women, victims and non-victims or between victims and their abusers. The notion of inclusion brings us back to our original question regarding the value of these accounts prior to their having been subjected to multiple transformations. Kress (1996: 18), through his eloquent discussion of equity, suggests that there is value in knowing (perceiving) and storing (representing) the ‘representational resources’ used by Latina women in the creation of their narratives of domestic abuse: In this view the issue of equity, for instance takes on a quite specific character: whereas until now it has generally been seen as a matter of making concessions

 Chapter 8

to marginal groups, allowing them access to goods which the dominant or mainstream group(s) enjoy, of being ‘nice’ to those less fortunate than oneself, it will, rather, have to be treated as a matter which works reciprocally, in all directions. A truly equitable society is one in which the mainstream groups see it as essential to have access to the linguistic and cultural resources of minority groups and demand such access as a matter of equity. Equity cannot be left as a matter of making concessions; it has to be seen as a matter of equality of cultural trade, where each social group is seen as having contributions of equal value to make to all other social groups in the larger social unit.

Characterizations of stories and reports that mark the former as emotional, contextual and performed and the latter as factual, objective and decontextualized would ignore the significance of the ideological work that genres do. The oral narrator – switching between Spanish and English and between the conversational historical present and the past, employing reported speech either directly or indirectly or evaluating the events or actors about which s/he speaks – is not the only textual producer who performs. So too does the narrator who, whether writing or speaking, avoids reported speech, intonation, overt evaluation, switches between languages and tenses in favor of using (apparently) specific times, dates, quantities and linear complicating actions that seem to provide a coherent explanation of what happened. And this is what is meant by the claim that the texts that narrators create in different spheres of communication aid them in distinct types of cultural performances. Stories, complete with reported speech, prosody, repetition, intonation, hand gestures, and thematic content that focuses on the personal, the emotional and the somewhat elusive or intangible, in legal settings, become ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966; cf. Merry 1990). Conversely, reports in a legal setting perform the cultural values of rationality, logic and precision. As icons that index different cultural and contextual values, genres not only frame messages in certain spheres of communication, they also serve to construct them. A narrative that is framed as a report constructs a particular interpretive message in the legal system. It says, or can be read as saying, “I am sincere,” “I have the necessary authority to be able to say this,” and “You should deem me to be a credible narrator, because I know how to narrate this information”. The oral stories that women bring into the system, perhaps especially if having “broken into performance” (Hymes 1975), take on the characteristics of entertainment, interest, subjectivity and even gossip. While not necessarily or inherently negative, these attributes, as “matter out of place” become coarse, profane, vulgar and even taboo.

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

The preference for a report genre in legal contexts structures the system along principles of hierarchy and even exclusion. Insisting on preferred narrative forms is a way to control access, to draw boundaries that are meant to keep certain representations and their narrators out. This boundary makes those on the inside part of the system, while anything outside gets marked as taboo. Though the concept of institutional memory challenges the notion of law as a closed and impervious system,5 privileged narrative types act on many levels as a major structuring mechanism. Institutional memory – an archive based on the inter-relation between perception and representation – can be made compatible with Douglas’ (1966) notion of structure, by conceptualizing boundaries as decidedly extant, but porous. Borders, after all, can only be as rigid as their patrollers. In this study, we have seen that there are rigid and more flexible border patrollers of the legal/linguistic kind who are charged with the task of controlling representations of violence. Paralegals, who are new to the job, as we saw in Chapter 7, prove to be the holes through which non-standard narrative syntax makes its way into the legal, historical repository of violence against women. When these more junior paralegals unwittingly allow such representations to seep into the record, domestic violence gets represented in novel ways. On the other hand, paralegals who are savvier about their transformational tasks intercept the dispreferred narrative forms before they can be perceived as viable representative vehicles of violence. The protective order interview, as an intermediate space between the law and those outside it, is in a sense a filter for both genre and gender. It is the mechanism employed by the system to protect women from abusive spouses as well as the mechanism that protects the system from profane narrators. Although women are given a voice to speak about abuse to higher judicial authorities through the affidavit, their own norms and ways of narrating abuse, for the most part, are erased from the experience of representation. In reality, the protective order interview is a pragmatic site of both exclusion and inclusion (cf. Lazarus-Black 2001). As the affidavit gives voice in one sense, it controls it or suppresses it in another. The women’s ways of narrating and their norms of representing the various aspects of the abuse situation undergo a cleansing process. Through this filtering that which has typically been relegated to a space outside the system’s boundaries (i.e., women in general, family disputes, emotional and relational problems) can be transformed into crimes, motivated by reason and defined in discrete incidents of linearity in order to be safely brought inside. The protective order interview then is a pragmatic tool that makes it possible for the system to include battered women in the adjudi-

 Chapter 8

cation process. Yet, at the same time, it also serves to convert what women have to say about violence into the system’s terms. As we saw in Chapter 3, Hirsch (1998) notes gendered and cultural entailments of different ways of narrating in Kadhis courts among Swahili Muslim men and women. Her finding that women who tell tales of domestic disputes (i.e. stories) are the “prototypical devalued speaker” in Swahili culture, is consonant with the data examined here. However, Hirsch’s conclusions, though similar, are not identical to the conclusions I draw. While I agree that the linking of non-prestige forms (in this case, stories) with non-prestige people (here, battered, Latina, victims of domestic violence) serves in bolstering the cultural devaluation each of the other, there is a sense in the U.S. legal system that through linguistic purification, the negatively valued parts of the women’s speech can be transformed into forms that carry more authority. However, such transformations ultimately serve in the reproduction of the negative valuation that they temporarily seek to ameliorate. Arguably, both what women have to say about domestic violence and the way that they express it, or wish to represent it challenges the existing system. For this reason neither the genres themselves nor the alterations made to them can be seen as innocuous and simply different. But perhaps it is because of the potential of women’s narratives to challenge the system that we see here, what Hirsch (1998: 67) describes in Swahili culture as, an “[e]mphasis on the trivial and potentially fictional qualities of women’s speech merg[ing] with emphasis on its dangerous and disruptive qualities to create the impression that women’s speech is suspect, not to be counted on, and to be suppressed when it gets too close to home, literally.”

Notes . This novice paralegal acts in the same way as the other novice interviewer that incorporated a non-event as the initiating event in the previous chapter. That said, however, it is worth noting that this type of transformation seems to be less systematic in the Pro Bono Law Clinic. Volunteer interviewers are either much more flexible about both negotiating and representing time or, since they work in the Clinic so infrequently, it might be that they remain like novice-interviewers forever. In either case, mini-narratives do not as consistently observe a strict narrative syntax in the affidavits written by Clinic volunteers. . This third possibility leads us back to the question of how to determine just what counts as advocacy, as these linguistic devices can be interpreted to function on many levels. . See Chapter 9 for this analysis in more detail. It is included here because it is counted as one of the six interviews that demonstrate that some women exhibit difficulty in narrating what happened most recently as opposed to beginning with what appears to be more natu-

Transforming domestic violence into narrative syntax 

ral, that is, to start with the first of a series of recent incidents that have all led to the action the woman is taking by coming to the District Attorney’s Office. . Berk-Seligson (1998 personal communication) points out that interpreters are trained to interpret a third-party’s speech in the first-person in much the same way, namely to make the interpreter’s rendition of the third-party’s speech sound like it belongs solely to the person for whom the interpretation is being done. While an analysis of the role played by interpreters is beyond the scope of this analysis, my own data suggest that they too contribute to the construction of the victim-witness’s identity. . Douglas’(1966) concept of culture may ultimately depend on a closed system.

Chapter 9

Beyond the storytelling taboo Latinas’ narratives and sexual violence

The sociolegal system, as a type of speech community, both proscribes and prescribes communicative practices. In so doing, it gives prestige to certain forms of narrative. Privileging one form over others inevitably makes others seem not only dispreferred (in the sense of conversation analysis), but also downgraded, as they appear to be “out of place”. Thus, the transformation process then, motivated by the interpretive ideologies that some speech genres are more official, more rational, and/or more ‘credible,’ ironically becomes one main source of discrepancy in women’s versions of violence. Latina clients also constitute or come from a particular speech community, and such an acknowledgement leads us to question other possible sources of discrepancy that arise between stories and reports. In this chapter, the analysis that follows centers on the way Latina women disclose and discuss sexual assault. Though we begin with a review of what women say when they first disclose a sexual assault, we will see in the ensuing analysis that the responsibility of reporting does not rest solely on the communicative practices of victim-survivors. Latina women’s disclosure of sexual violence has been conceptualized by other researchers as being somewhat peculiar to this sociocultural group. What follows though, is not a comparison of the communicative practices employed by Latina women and women from other ethnic groups (e.g., White women, African-American women or Asian women). Instead, the analysis seeks to understand in an empirical and ethnographic way, the claims made in the rape, battering and sexuality literature regarding Latina women’s willingness to talk about sexual violence. My focus here is on the way sexual aggression gets discussed in order to ascertain how such discussion figures into the process of linguistic transformation, alteration and eventual discrepancy between stories and reports. Other researchers (Bergen 1996; Low & Organista 2000; Russell 1990; Yllö 1999) find that intimate-partner sexual assault is underreported in institutions and even underrepresented both in academic studies and in treatment pro-

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grams. Such under-representation is seen as a product of the intense social and cultural stigma attached to victims who do come forward with incidents of sexual aggression (see Berman 1998; Heise, Pitanguy, & Germain 1994a; Heise, Raikes, Watts, & Zwi 1994b). Studies about Latinas indicate that women from this ethnic minority group are even more reluctant than their non-Latino counterparts to make reports of sexual violence (Larrain & Rodriguez 1993; Lefley et al. 1993; Michael et. al. 1994; Williams & Holmes 1981). In fact, some writing about Latina women makes the argument that they flatly avoid talk (directly or otherwise) about issues related to even sex in general (de la Vega 1990; Diaz-Duque 1989; Irvine 1994; Medrano 1994). Each of these arguments indicates that among Latina women there is a cultural interdiction against speaking about sexuality and sexual aggression. Here, we will try to determine the extent to which this presumed taboo in Latino culture has an impact on Latina women’s reporting incidents of sexual violence. Linguistic and anthropological studies of socio-cultural taboos (Grimes 1978, 1971; Kany 1960; Ullmann 1966) lead us to expect that descriptions of rapes and other intimate-partner sexual assault will be marked in the discourse of both interviewers and victims as linguistic taboo. Azevedo (1992) defines linguistic taboo as topics, words or expressions that are either prohibited or somehow restricted in the discourse of a speech community. In legal settings such descriptions may entail necessary references to body parts, bodily functions, sex and sexuality. Yet, the existence of a socio-cultural taboo does not mean that there will be no speech about the topic; it only means that often discussions about it will be disguised in euphemism. Kany (1960: v) defines euphemism as: the means by which a disagreeable, offensive, or fear-instilling matter is designated with an indirect or softer term. Euphemisms satisfy a linguistic need. For his own sake as well as that of his listeners, a speaker constantly resorts to euphemism in order to disguise an unpleasant truth, veil an offense, or palliate indecency.

Within the reporting context, a crucial question that arises is whether euphemistic mechanisms result in any misunderstandings between interviewers and interviewees. Linguistic strategies used to avoid taboo terms include lexical substitutes, to make love, multiple-meaning verbs, to sleep with, and empty verbs, such as to do, to have. So in this chapter, I ask: can linguistic taboos lead to the misreporting of incidents to which they are meant to refer? In other words, does the taboo status of sexuality and of sexual violence in Latino cul-

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

ture contribute to the creation of inconsistent versions of violence? And finally, what might such discrepancies mean for institutional memory?

Background to the topics of rape and sexual assault Definitions of rape in the U.S. legal system originate in British common law. Up through the 1980s, U.S. statutes maintained the British tradition of finding wife rape to be a legal impossibility (Yllö 1999). In the vast majority of the fifty states, the spousal exclusion has been removed from rape laws. And, in most U.S. states today, the legal definition of rape is ‘nonconsensual sexual penetration of an adolescent or adult obtained by physical force, by threat of bodily harm, or at such time when the victim is incapable of giving consent by virtue of mental illness, mental retardation, or intoxication’ (Koss, Goodman, Brown, Fitzgerald, Keita, & Russo 1994 as cited in Ramos Lira, Koss, & Felipe Russo 1999: 236). The law now focuses on the criminal nature of the act, and thus no longer excludes certain types of rapists (i.e., husbands) from the adjudication process. Protective order interviews may include the disclosure of sexual violence in the broadest sense of the term and not of only rape per se. In order to incorporate all of the sexually violent events about which Latina women speak, sexual violence is defined here as any unwanted sexual advance ranging from an intimate-partner’s unwanted attempt to kiss or touch a survivor to an attempted or completed act of rape.

Ways of disclosing From a corpus of 173 protective order interviews gathered during my fieldwork, I have generated a sample of 22 interviews in which clients discuss sexual assault.1 Elsewhere I have examined the lexical items employed by clients to introduce and/or categorize sexual aggression (Trinch 2001b).2 A review of the findings from this prior study provides the first step in understanding how sexual assault is represented in U.S. legal archives. Table 9.1 represents the range of different types of utterances that the Latina women in the study use to refer to sexual assault. The data here make it immediately clear that Latina women cannot be essentialized as a group, because there is great variation found among them with respect to their reluctance and/or willingness to openly and directly speak about sexual violence. While 17 of these 22 interviewees prefer euphemistic speech to refer to sexual

Group B Direct (not legal, euphemistic, yet unambiguous)

#13 Because one of my girls got molested at school.

#12 And see, I had a stepfather, right? And when I was seven years old, or six, he uh, he sexually, um, molested me, you know? Right?

#4 Y, y, él trató de, de abusarme sexualmente en el carro. ‘And, and, he tried to, to sexually abuse me in the car’. #5 If I don’t um, if I don’t go sleep #6 He was pulling my clothes off. He #3 No words were spoken about with him, uh, he, he, twists my arm. was tearing them off. the sexual assault in the interview. Victim did write about it on the #9 luego quiere sexo por, por #11 It happened Saturday, the intake sheet, though. dónde no se debe, y yo no soy una night before that he forced himself persona que a mí me ( ) on me. #16 Sexual violence narrative ‘And then he wants sex where sex is was elicited by interviewer. Near not supposed to be had, and I am not #14 ‘forced himself.’ This utter- the end of the interview the topic is the kind of person that ( )’ ance comes from an intertextual link re-introduced by the interpreter. to the victim’s discourse prior to #20 Yo tengo, yo le tengo miedo the tape-recording. Here, it is the #19 Sexual violence narrative de él, eh, este, entonces, entonces, interviewer, presumably restating was elicited by the interviewer. trató tres veces de intentarlo, de, de the victims’ words in the following tener relaciones conmigo. reported speech, who says, “You said #22 Sexual violence narrative ‘I am afraid, I am afraid of him, um, that he forced himself on you.” was elicited by interviewer. then, then, he tried three times to try it, to, to have relations with me’. #15 Y me quiso morder. ‘And he tried to bite me.’

Group C Group D Group E Group F Less direct (legal, eu- Less indirect (not legal, euphemistic Indirect (not legal, euphemistic and Inexplicit, nearly non-existent (posphemistic and unspeci- and ambiguous) vague) sibly would not have been reported if fied) interviewer had not asked)

understand how and whether their utterances become part of institutional memory.

* This table is published in Trinch (2001b). It is reproduced in this chapter, because what Latina women report about sexual violance is the first step of the analysis undertaken here to

#8 Try to, try #17 No. Me, ah, to rape me again. me hizo que tuviera relaciones con él. #21 Y trató ‘No, he, uh, he made de, de violarme me have relations with tres veces. him.’ ‘And he tried to, to rape me three #18 Y, entonces, times.’ este, y me forzó a tener relaciones con él. ‘And, then, um, and he forced me to have relations with him.’

#10 Hace, la última vez que tuvo relaciones #2 He raped sexuales conmigo, fue a me. fuerzas. ‘It was, the last time that #7 So he tried to he had sexual relations rape me. with me, it was by force.’

#1 He raped me.

Group A Direct and explicit (legal, not euphemistic, and unambiguous)

Table 9.1. Spectrum of directness for terms survivors use to refer to sexual assault*

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assault, five Latinas use the direct referent rape at some point in their discourse. As is indicated by the subheadings of each group, use of the direct referent rape is considered to be non-euphemistic, legalistic, direct and explicit language. The term rape is, of course, suitable for the protective order context, as it is a legal term that is also well understood by the larger public. Moving from left to right on the spectrum, we find, in Group B, Latina women who discuss marital rape as ‘forced sex.’ Three women, all of whom are Spanish monolinguals, choose to talk about rape in terms that are definitional as opposed to categorizational. These women do not use the word rape, and thus show a preference for avoiding the legal, classificatory term.3 ‘Forced sex’ is euphemistic, yet, there is no threat to meaning. These women make themselves understood, so their terminology is also considered to be direct and unambiguous. Their choice of language to discuss rape as a crime demonstrates an unequivocal understanding that forced sex, even by a spouse or an intimate-partner, is wrong. In addition, by initiating the discussion of the sex crime themselves, these women illustrate their knowledge that marital rape is also illegal. So, while the term, forced sex is not considered to be a legal term, it is a definition of a criminal act, and therefore, although euphemistic, it is still quite suitable for the report. In the middle of Table 9.1, under Column C, there are a group of references to acts of sexual violence, which although legalistic, are quite non-specific. Here, the women use words such as sexually abused or sexually molested, words that do not indicate precisely what happened. Yet, belonging to the semantic domain of legalese (see Allan & Burridge 1991), these words do have the power to categorize acts as being criminal. For this reason, they are classified as euphemistic and legalistic at the same time. In Groups A, B, and C, the terms used are appropriate for the reporting context. Even when sexually violent or sexually aggressive acts are not fully specified, the terminology used by the women in these three groups marks the acts that they describe as [+sexual] [+violent]. The second half of the chart is quite different though. The last three columns include euphemistic usages whose meanings are not immediately clear. In Group D, Latina women’s lexical choices are less direct, more euphemistic, and in this context, ambiguous. This combination of features makes these terms less compatible with the report genre. The vocabulary the women in this group use to introduce the topic of sexual violence could be interpreted as referring to problems found to be normal in marital or intimate-partner relationships. The women in this group say things that might not be immediately recognizable as serious sexual violence or sexual aggression. Because these women endeavor to speak in delicate, inoffensive terminology, what they

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say can most certainly be composed of the semantic feature [+sexual], but the case cannot easily be made that what is said is also [+violent]. It is likely that interviewers in these cases would need to negotiate the violent aspect of these utterances, because the semantic feature of violence is not present. Brown and Levinson (1987) and Lakoff (1974) argue that by manipulating ambiguity, speakers can provide their interlocutors, as well as guard for themselves, a way out of a potentially disagreeable interpretation of an utterance. So while phrases and terms such as “forced me to have sex” or “sexually abused me” can be considered euphemistic substitutes for the more direct referents “raped me” or “tried to rape me”, they are not ambiguous inasmuch as they do not allow for two discernible and distinct meanings. If the lexical items in Group D are semantically composed with the feature [+sexual], but not necessarily imbued with features that would be interpretable as [+violent], then those in Group E can be conceptualized as being just the opposite: [+violent], but not categorically [+sexual]. The women in this group employ indirect, non-legal terms that allude to acts of physical violence. This group of linguistic items certainly indicates physical aggression, but the sexual component is not entirely present in their semantic constitution. As a rule, the events narrated in these protective order interviews include utterances of pushing, shoving, pulling, grabbing, throwing, dragging and the like. In this context, the utterance “He was pulling my clothes off. He was tearing them off,” may be interpreted by the interviewer as the result (in the sense of the prototypical Labovian resolution to the action) of having been dragged, pulled, grabbed and thrown, rather than as the complicating action constituting or leading up to sexual aggression. Problems of interpretation could occur as a result of the combination of the context of narrative production with the types of lexical items found in Groups D and E. Allan and Burridge (1991: 4) define context as both ‘world spoken of ’ and ‘world spoken in.’ Rather than helping to make the meaning of euphemism clearer (cf. Bloomfield 1933; Grimes 1978; Kany 1960; Ullmann 1966), sometimes context – both the one about which women speak (i.e., intimate-partner relationships) as well as the one within which they speak (the protective order interview whose content focuses primarily on physical violence) – can actually convolute meaning. At the rightmost end of the spectrum we find interviews where sexual assaults were reported only after service providers explicitly elicited narratives on this topic. Listening to these interviews, one gets the sense that the survivors would not have introduced sexual violence as a discourse topic had interviewers not blatantly asked about it. Furthermore, after interviewers initiate

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

the topic and victims admit to having suffered sexual abuse, the victims themselves rarely reintroduce the subject or return to the topic to elaborate on it. In Group E, had the interviewers or the interpreters not steered victims back to a discussion of sexual assault, it is plausible that the victims would not have developed narratives about it.4 These 22 interviews suggest that some Latina women possess the necessary sociolinguistic competence to use legalistic and euphemistic terms without offense (cf. Philips 1992). Some of their terms are germane to the reporting context, because they incorporate legalese or definitions of criminal acts. Other women though, may be less adept at making themselves clear in this context while maintaining the presumed cultural decorum and delicacy needed to talk about taboo subjects. In this latter case, euphemistic terminology may put meaning at risk. But, as we have seen, meaning and narrative itself are constructed in interaction, and thus, no meaning or utterance can be construed as the sole products of the narrator. What follows then, is an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of the construction of meaning of sexual assault. The first part includes an examination of the way in which service providers record the victims’ disclosures of sexual violence in the report genre of the affidavit. The second part consists of a comparison between what the victims initially said and what was eventually recorded. In the third part of the analysis, we return to the transcribed interview data where interactional sociolinguistic theory predicts that the meaning of sexual assault will have emerged.

Ways of recording sexual assault Just as Table 9.1 shows the variation and creativity among Latina women when disclosing sexual assault, Table 9.2, “Official inscription of sexual assault in institutional memory”, reveals the multiple ways in which service providers represent this type of intimate-partner aggression in the affidavits. For ease of comparison between what victims originally said about sexual violence and how service providers altered their words, the service providers’ recordings are positioned in the columns along the “Spectrum of directness. . .”, in the places where the victims’ original utterances fell. Even a cursory comparison of Tables 9.1 and 9.2 demonstrates that the way victims disclose (and/or categorize) sexual violence differs from the way the institutional representatives report their ‘stories’. In a few cases, service providers replace the survivors’ direct referents rape with euphemistic terms. This oc-

#21 I was still sleeping in the living room when the defendant raped me.

#8 ((Abuser’s name)) then tore my bra and attempted to take my clothes off.

#7 ((Abuser’s name)) slapped me and tried to rape me.

#18 He has also forced me to have sex with him on several occasions since the separation.

Me llevó a la recámara y abusó de mi sexualmente dos veces en un período, pone, en un período de una hora.

Interpreter reads affidavit to victim:

#13 ((Abuser’s name)) also molested one of our daughters several years ago.

#12 No affidavit was found for this client.

#17 He took me to the bedroom and sexually assaulted me twice in the period of about one hour.

#2 In the past ((Abuser’s name)) has sexually abused me . . .

#4 ((Abuser’s name)) tried to sexually abuse me.

#10 ((Abuser’s name)) forced me to have sex with him.

(legal, and

#1 He then sexually assaulted me and also tried to sexually assault me from behind.

Group C Less direct euphemistic unspecified)

Group B Direct (not legal, euphemistic, yet unambiguous)

Group A Direct and explicit (legal, not euphemistic and unambiguous

#20 When he awoke, he assaulted me again by holding and pulling my hair and holding my wrists and wanted to have sex with me against my will.

#9 On or about ((date)) at about ((time)), ((Abuser’s name)) began arguing with me and attempted to force me to have anal sex with him.

#5 No affidavit was written for this client as it was determined that there had been no recent incident of physical violence.

Group D Less indirect (not legal, euphemistic and ambiguous)

Table 9.2. Official inscription of sexual assault in institutional memory

#15 He forced himself on me and tried to give me a hickey on my neck. . .

#14 . . .he forced himself on me, kissing and grabbing me, while I asked him to stop and tried to push him off of me. When he grabbed me and tried to kiss me, he hit my head and left ear. . .

#11 No affidavit was found here.

#6 No protective order was found for this client.

Group E Indirect (not legal, euphemistic and vague)

#22 Not included on affidavit.

#19 He also forced me to have sex with him many times.

#16 He forced himself on me and raped me several times while high.

#3 ((Abuser’s name)) has also physically and sexually abused me numerous times in the past.

Group F Inexplicit, nearly non-existent (possibly would not have been reported if interviewer had not asked)

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curs in interviews #1 and #2 where both victims’ “He raped me” become (#1) “He then sexually assaulted me and also tried to sexually assault me from behind,” and (#2) “In the past ((Abuser’s name)) has sexually abused me”, respectively. In other instances, interviewers manage to rewrite the incident with less euphemistic and more direct terminology (see affidavit renditions #9, #16, #19, #15 located in Table 9.2). The most flagrant of such cases is interview #16 where the victim’s disclosure was characterized as not only euphemistic, but also nearly non-existent. Yet from this interview, the service provider rendered the sexual violence in the affidavit as, “He forced himself on me and raped me several times while high.” In interview #16, the negotiation of what is meant by ‘rape’ or ‘forced sex’ is actually carried out by the interpreter rather than the interviewer. As is usually the case with these ‘barely there narratives,’ here too, we see in the excerpt below that initially, it is not the victim who introduces the rape topic.

Excerpt 9.1. Interviewer first introduces the sexual assault P: Has he ever, um, forced himself on her, when um, he wanted sex? When um CF: ¿Se ha forzado él contigo cuando él cuando él quiere el sexo y tú no quieres? (Has he forced himself with you when he, when he wanted sex and you didn’t want it?) C: Sí. (Yes) CF: Yes. C: Es que viene drogado, y a mí no me (gusta) tener relaciones. (It is that he comes to me drugged, and I don’t (like) to have relations). CF: Yeah, cause she doesn’t want to have relationships with him when he’s like that. P: Yeah.

From the context of this excerpt, it seems that the volunteer-interviewer is in the process of drawing up a list of the types of abuse suffered by the victim to which she will refer when she writes the affidavit later on. Ironically though, as the interviewer drafts the affidavit, she seems to forget all about the sexual assault as she never mentions it while she is filling in the details of other mininarratives of current incidents. After the victim has narrated several abusive incidents, the volunteer asks, “O.K., what else do we want to say?” At this point, it is the interpreter, in this case, the victim’s cousin, who, without even waiting for the victim’s response to the question she translated, reminds the interviewer that the victim has been forced by her husband to have sex with him. The text below shown in Excerpt 9.2 represents this interaction.

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Excerpt 9.2. Interpreter’s help in constructing a rape narrative P: CF: P: CF: P: CF: P: CF: C: P: CF: C: P: CF: P: CF: P: CF:

C: CF: C: CF: P: CF: C: CF: P: CF: C:

O.K., what else do we want to say? ¿Qué más quieres que pongan? (What else do you want them to put?) And you’ve been telling her what um Yes. O.K., um, has he um, He has forced her to want to have um, relationships. O.K. Uh ¿Sí te ha forzado a tener relaciones con él cuando anda así? (He has forced you to have relations with him when he is out of it?) () Has he tried to actually rape her? ¿Ha tratado de, de, es, de abusar de tí? (Has he tried to, to uh, to rape ((+euphemism)) you?) ¿Cómo? Después, ¿Tener relaciones cuando anda con la droga? (What? After? To have relations when he is on drugs?) Yeah? Uh, well, she says, was that, no. What’s the difference between. . . Well, if she was not ready for it, and he forced himself on her. That’s actually rape? It’s called spousal rape. Dice como si él está, él está preparado de tener relaciones contigo y tú no. (She says that it is when he is prep, he is prepared to have relations with you and you are not ready.) Mmmh, toma (Um, he takes) [Y él (le) toma de forza. (And he takes it by force). Sí. (Yes.) Yes. It has happened like that.(.23) ¿Y no se forza (And doesn’t he force [That was not only just once, that was many times, huh? Hace más, varías veces que ha pasado eso? Que él se aforza contigo? (Has it been many tims that this has happened?) No, unas tres veces, no más. (No, just three times, no more.) It’s been like three occasions. O.K. Porque tú no ( ) pues preparada para hacer relaciones (Because you aren’t ( ) prepared for having relations.) Sí, pero, no (Yes, but, well)

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

CF: Y otra cosa es que se forza, ella es más bien como, abusar de tí. (And the other thing is that he forces it, and for her, it’s more like taking advantage of you.) (.15) P: So when did she call the police? You, just this weekend?

I will return to a discussion of this type of interaction and its importance for the co-construction of meaning below. Here I simply wish to point out the extreme disparity between the way this victim discloses the sexual violence in her marriage and the way her interviewer represents it. Essentially, this victim does little more than answer questions, and frankly, she has a difficult time even doing that. For whatever reason, this client is reluctant to speak about, let alone narrate, an act of sexual violence. In fact, she is determined to minimize or mitigate the violent or forceful nature of this type of abuse, while both the interpreter and the interviewer seem determined to aggravate it. As we will see below, this type of interpreter/interviewer behavior falls outside the norm. Nonetheless, this interview demonstrates that it is clearly possible to have interpreters and interviewers defining things in ways that victims do not and perhaps more importantly, would (or might now) not do in the future. Given that the story genre is subjected to various transformations as it undergoes the entextualization process of becoming a report, such alterations with respect to sexual assault are predictable. It is not always the case that victim-initial utterances that embody ambiguity, vagaries, hesitation or reluctance always lead to either misreporting or underreporting. The use of euphemism among some Latina women or even their seeming reluctance to speak about sexual violence openly and directly does not automatically translate into the absence of an official report of it. In Table 9.3 below, this point can be seen more clearly, because interviewers’ transformations are re-arranged along the “Spectrum of directness. . .” according to the semantic features that they themselves possess (cf. Table 9.2 where they are arranged according to the semantic features possessed by the initial utterances made by victims). By examining the interviewers’ renditions of the women’s sexual assault stories, several observations can be made. First, none of the records containing a sexual assault represents it in terms that could be characterized as belonging to Columns D or E. Though some Latina women selected lexical items that were indirect, not legal, euphemistic, ambiguous and/or vague, the affidavit data indicate that service providers avoid such vocabulary when writing about sexual aggression. Yet quite interestingly, service providers do not always use terms that represent the strongest case for criminal categorization of a sexually violent act.

#16F: He forced himself on me and raped me several times while high.

#14E . . .he forced himself on me, kissing and grabbing me, while I asked him to stop and tried to push him off of me. . . .

#19F He also forced me to have sex with him many times.

#15E He forced himself on me and tried to give me a hickey on my neck. . .

#20D . . .and wanted to have sex with me against my will.

#9D . . .((Abuser)) began arguing with me and attempted to force me to have anal sex with him.

#18B He has also forced me to have sex with him on several occasions since the separation.

#10B ((Abuser)) forced me to have sex with him.

#8A ((Abuser)) then tore my bra and attempted to take my clothes off.

#7A ((Abuser’s name)) slapped me and tried to rape me.

#21A I was still sleeping in the living room when the defendant raped me.

Group B Direct (not legal, euphemistic, yet unambiguous)

Group A Direct and explicit (legal, not euphemistic and unambiguous

#3F ((Abuser’s name)) has also physically and sexually abused me numerous times in the past.

#13C ((Abuser’s name)) also molested one of our daughters several years ago.

#17B He took me to the bedroom and sexually assaulted me twice in the period of about one hour.

#22F Affidavit was written, but it contained no mention of sexual assault.

#11E No affidavit was found here. It is likely that the interviewer did not file a petition for a protective order with the court.

#6E No affidavit was found here. It is likely that the interviewer did not file a petition for a protective order with the court.

#5D No affidavit was written for this client. The interviewer determined that she could not file on the client’s behalf because there had been no recent incident of physical violence.

GroupF Inexplicit, nearly non-existent (possibly would not have been reported if interviewer had not asked)

#2A In the past ((Abuser’s name)) has sexually abused me, struck me with a fist and also kicked me.

Group E Indirect (not legal, euphemistic and vague)

#12C No affidavit was found here. It is likely that the interviewer did not file a petition for a protective order with the court.

Group D Less indirect (not legal, euphemistic and ambiguous)

#1A *He then sexually assaulted me and also tried to sexually assault me from behind. When he was through he let me get up.

Group C Less direct (legal, euphemistic and unspecified)

Table 9.3. Spectrum of directness for recording sexual assaults in institutional memory

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One of two things happen to victims’ disclosures. Either service providers use terms and phrases that are legal (i.e., rape, sexual assault) and/or definitional (i.e., ‘forced to have sex’) to record sexual violence, or the sexual violence narrated by the clients is not represented, and thus, goes unreported. In the majority of the cases, service providers’ semantic representations of sexual assault coincide with the reporting context. Not surprisingly then, they appear on the Spectrum of directness from the middle-left (Columns B and C) to the far left (Column A). Only a few of the interviewers, when drafting the affidavits, use lexical options that include the direct referent rape itself (n = 3). While most employ a definition of the sexual aggression (n = 9), as in ‘forced to have sex’, many of them (n = 6) select a euphemistic, legal term such as sexual assault. While these three lexical groupings reflect different strategies of communicating sexual assault, they all are appropriate for the legal context. Given that only three of the 22 interviews resulted in a record containing the word rape, while 19 others ended in the employment of either euphemistic substitutes for it (n = 13) or no record of it at all (n = 5), these data suggest more than just variation in recording. Arguably, there is a linguistic taboo at work, not only proscribing women’s direct reports of rape, but one also operating on service providers’ direct representations of rape. Lexical items such as sexual assault, sexually abused or sexually molested in a report, as in women’s stories, can run the meaning gamut, and this finding drives home an important point about the way genres mediate the authority of their messages. That a term is appropriate for the context does not mean that it is necessarily more precise. Allan and Burridge (1991) maintain that though legal jargon and euphemism are not the same thing, legalese can be used euphemistically because of its special quality of being both clear and ambiguous at the same time. With terms such as sexual abuse, service providers and victims alike can give the appearance of speaking with clarity about what happened. That is, by naming the act as [+sexual] [+violent], one can indeed state that what happened is an example of a particular thing (see Conley & O’Barr 1998 on naming crimes). Yet, such a tactic nonetheless, obfuscates the details of the event as it leaves the act(s) to which the speaker refers unspecified. Neither interviewer nor interviewee need describe or listen to the details of these unseemly events. Note for example what happens to the victim-initial disclosures of sexual violence in interview #9 (“luego quiere sexo por, por dónde no se debe, y yo no soy una persona que a mí me ( )” or in English, And then he wants sex where sex is not supposed to be had, and I am not the kind of person that ( ), and in interview #20, “Yo tengo, yo le tengo miedo de él, eh, este, entonces, entonces, trató tres veces de intentarlo, de, de tener relaciones conmigo,” translated as, I am afraid,

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I am afraid of him, um, then, then, he tried three times to try it, to, to have relations with me. Both of these utterances were initially analyzed as belonging to Column D, “Less indirect, not legal, euphemistic and ambigous,” because they are composed of the semantic feature [+sexual], but not necessarily [+violent]. But, service providers’ transformations of these utterances make it so that they include both [+sexual] [+violent]: #9 “. . .((Abuser)) began arguing with me and attempted to force me to have anal sex with him,” and #20 “. . .and wanted to have sex with me against my will.” In these two examples, the interviewers represent the sexual assaults disclosed by these two women more directly, but they continue to employ euphemism. The words the interviewers choose are not as explicit as the most direct referent rape, and the terminology is not solely legal. Rather the terminology is descriptive and definitional. The service providers in these two cases make clear that what the victims have reported is some type of sexual violence or aggression. They achieve this clarity through words such as the verb force and the prepositional phrase, against my will. However, what actually happened – whether the acts of sexual violence were only attempted and not completed – remains unstated. Here, their use of the verbs “tried” and “wanted to”, though clearly expressing the abusers’ desire to have sex and the victims’ resistance to it, still maintain an element of semantic ambiguity with respect to the final outcome. In other words, it is clear that there is a reference to sexual assault, but unclear whether the sexual assault consisted of only attempts of rapes or of attempts that resulted in actual rapes. These interviews in particular speak to the important links between micro and macro social discourse processes, as we see that meaning is not only negotiated locally, but also made and unmade within the context of political spheres of representation. There are several levels of meaning-making, negotiating and representing, and thus, service providers can alter words, change or resolve some misinterpretations, and in some cases, even introduce others. What was ambiguous in these victims’ speech is no longer so, but the new representations do not really transparently record their experiences either, as some questions remain unanswered. This lexico-semantic evidence provides further support that the report genre is not as precise as it appears to be. Instead, certain terms give more of an impression of exactitude (i.e., “sexually abuse” or “wanted to have sex with me against my will”) than do others (i.e., “If I don’t go sleep with him, uh, he, he twists my arm”). Much more surprising in these data is that despite the fact that women disclosed sexual assault, five of the victims’ initial disclosures of sexual violence (#5, #6, #11, #12, #22) receive no representation in institutional memory at

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

all. On the “Spectrum of directness for recording sexual assault in institutional memory,” these five interviews are located in group F. In three of these cases (#6, #11, #12), no affidavit was found for the interviews in question. This does not necessarily mean that service providers refused to write them. In fact, in all three of these cases, after listening to the clients, service providers stated that they would recommend them for orders. However, in each of these instances, the service provider asked the client to return to sign the affidavit at a later date. It may be that these clients did not return to the office, so the interviewers did not bother to draft their affidavits. I should point out, had I not recorded, transcribed and analyzed these interviews, there would be no record whatsoever of the sexual assaults these women reported. Nevertheless, clientfollow-through is not the only reason why sexual violence goes un-represented in institutional memory. In the case of interview #22, though an affidavit was drafted for the client, the reported sexual assault is not included in it. An analysis of the way rape was initially disclosed in interview #22 placed it in Column F as one of the nearly non-existent narratives of sexual assault. The excerpt shown in 9.3 below illustrates the barely-thereness of this client’s narrative of sexual violence.

Excerpt 9.3. Interviewer elicits sexual assault narrative in the middle of interview P: I: C: I: C: I: C: I: P: I: C: I: P: I: C:

Ummm, when’s his birthday? Cuándo nació? (When was he born?) ¿Él? (Him?) Sí. (Yes.) El diez de, de julio. (The tenth of, of July.) July tenth. Uh, y tiene 23 años. (Uh, and he is 23 years old.) And he’s twenty-three. He’s twenty-three so . . . 79. So, you formally lived together and you were dating before. ( ). . . y estaban saliendo (() . . .and you were dating.) ¿Cómo? (What?) ( ) pone aquí que vivieron juntos, que estaban saliendo. (( ) you put here that you lived together, that you were dating.) Um, has he ever sexually assaulted you? ¿Le ha agredido sexualmente? (Has he ever sexually assaulted you?) ¿Cómo? (What?)

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I: P: C: P: I: C: P: I: P: I: P: I:

¿Que si le ha agredido sexualmente? (If he has ever sexually assaulted you?) (.02) Has he ever uh, force[¡Ah, sí! (Ah, yes!) forced himself on you? Que si la ha, la forzó alguna vez a tener relaciones? (Whether he has, forced you ever to have relations.) Ah-hah, sí. (Uh-huh, yes.) Did he force himself? Yes O.K. You have no children together. Check with these. . . [Si puede firmar allí (If you could sign there) Sign there. [firmar allí. (sign there.)

Not all barely-there narratives are exactly alike. In contrast to the client in interview #16 (shown in Excerpts 9.1 and 9.2 above) who seems to need to be convinced by the interpreter and the interviewer that what her husband did to her was rape, the response given by the client in interview #22 is resoundingly affirmative. However, just as it is difficult to characterize the speech of the client in interview #16 as a narrative of sexual violence, so too is it difficult to analyze this client’s response to the interviewer’s query about sexual violence as a full-fledged narrative. I showed in Chapter 5 that kernel-type narratives are a common strategy used by victims to probe for conversational interest on the part of their interviewers. In Excerpt 9.3, a kernel narrative of sexual assault is created by the question asked by the interviewer. Although the client here readily admits that her ex-boyfriend has indeed ‘forced her to have relations with him,’ the kernel, or the most important element of a longer narrative, lies fallow in the discourse. None of the participants in this interview ever returns to this central piece of information or bothers to develop it into a mini-narrative for the affidavit. Though interpreters are technically not supposed to add or subtract language or meaning from the discourse of the primary participants,5 as we saw in Chapter 6 and as we just witnessed in Excerpt 9.2 above, in these interviews, they often perform the conversational roles of interlocutor and interviewer as well as that of interpreter. The final affidavit produced by this interviewer on behalf of the client is shown in Excerpt 9.4 below.

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Excerpt 9.4. Affidavit excludes interviewer-elicited sexual assault Declaration of Margarita Palacios I, Margarita Palacios, do declare and say: Defendant, Carlos Fernández, is my former boyfriend. We lived together for about six months, but I have recently moved out. Defendant is an extremely violent person who has subjected me to physical, verbal and emotional abuse over the time we had been together. When I moved out about 3 weeks ago, defendant came to my work, forced me into his car and threatened to run me over if he ever saw me with another man. On January, 17, 2001, defendant saw me with a male friend of mine. He struck me across the face and then forced me into his car, continuing to hit me on the head. I suffer from headaches because of all of the times he has hit me on the head. I seek this restraining order because I fear the defendant and I am afraid that he may attempt to make good on his threats to harm me. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct and that this document was executed January 22, 2001 at Someville, Somestate. __________________________ signature line for client

Interview #22 is a sexual assault disclosure that remains at the same level of representation from initial disclosure to final speech genre. The original disclosure was analyzed as belonging to Column F, because the victim produces only minimal language, amounting to little more than the affirmative “yes”. In both interviews #16 and #22, the speech behavior of the victims with respect to sexual violence indicates that they are reluctant to talk about it. First, the victims themselves do not introduce the topic. Second, when asked if they have been sexually assaulted or raped, they show hesitance before answering. Both women politely ask for clarification and repetition after hearing the question. Third, neither of these victims re-introduces the topic herself. Fourth and finally, both seem to prefer to talk about sexual violence in terms other than rape or sexual assault. The interviewers pick up on this preference as well, as is evidenced by their linguistic mitigation of and explanation of the semantically loaded and negatively charged term rape. In this respect, we see some linguistic accommodation on the part of interviewers with regard to the disclosure of sexual assault. Euphemism might be more than simply a sociolinguistic practice employed to avoid offense. In some cases, it may be that euphemism serves narra-

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tors in the process of creating more palatable or functional identity constructs. Research in victimology (see Bergen 1996; Gavey 1999; Lamb 1999a, 1999b; Wood & Rennie 1994) suggests that the variant lexicon used by women to refer to sexual assault stems from actual semantic distinctions that they make between different types of sexual aggression. For example, Bergen (1996) finds that for Anglo women, rape in partner relationships refers only to extremely violent sexual acts that make their partners’ behavior unrecognizable (i.e., when they look like stereotypical stranger rapists). For this same group of women, Bergen notes that forced sex consists of sexual aggression by abusers who, according to their victim-survivors, act in predictable and recognizable ways and with far less force. The finding that some Latina women also define forced sex as something different than rape is particularly important for the prosecution of domestic battering. The affidavits drafted by interviewers #16 and #22 could become sources of discrepancy between victims’ affidavits and their subsequent accounts if these women were ever to take the witness stand. Interviewer #16, for example, included the word rape in the victim’s affidavit by writing, ‘He forced himself on me and raped me several times’. Yet, the data from the interview transcript reveal that this victim is less than comfortable with this term, especially since the sexual violence was elicited by the interviewer and re-introduced by the interpreter. On the witness stand, if asked whether her husband actually raped her, client #16 could very well say ‘no’, which in turn could create a crucial inconsistency between the various versions of the events. The interaction between the interviewer and the client in #22 presents a different challenge to presenting and re-presenting reports of rape. Remember in this case, the interviewer brought up sexual violence, negotiated its meaning with the client and then never bothered to include it in the affidavit. By bringing up sexual violence in the interview, the volunteer has defined forced sex as a type of domestic abuse. Had the victim not considered sexual abuse to be domestic violence when she entered the Law Clinic, it is reasonable to think that she might leave having acquired a new definition of family violence that entails sexual assault. This interviewer may have paved the way for the victim to include the sexual violence in future tellings. If this victim were to take the witness stand and disclose sexual violence in her narrative, a defense attorney with access to her original affidavit, merely by asking why such information was absent from it, could make it appear as though the victim is polishing, exaggerating or embellishing her testimony. Interviews #16 and #22 present some interesting, if not paradoxical, problems that may be associated with the stigma and taboo attached to sexual vio-

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lence. On the one hand, if victims are not comfortable with reporting rape or if they make distinctions between what academics and therapists would consider synonymous lexical items that refer to rape, the service provider’s utilization of the strongest legal category rape may actually, albeit inadvertently, undermine the victim’s credibility in a future telling. Including the term rape in the record, when victims do not use this particular word and/or do not define sexual acts as rape can render their accounts unstable. Some victims may very well deny on the stand that they have been raped, but be willing to admit that they have been forced to have sex. On the other hand, the service provider’s accessing of taboo topics like sexual assault, but not taking the time to develop them could send mixed messages to clients about what is suitable for a denunciation of domestic abuse. Therefore, linguistic taboo may play a major factor in the creation of official records that eventually become either incomplete or unstable institutional memory with ramifications for the clients’ futures. The data indicate a third problem, notably under-representation of sexual abuse. It is also the case that in interview #5 the client’s highly euphemistic utterance, “If I don’t go sleep with him, uh, he, he twists my arm”, gains her no representation in institutional memory. Unlike interview #22 above, where the sexual violence goes unrecorded, but other aspects of domestic violence get inscribed, no affidavit at all was drafted for the client from interview #5. In this example, the paralegal determines that there is not enough recent physical violence to recommend the client for a protective order. The final seconds of the interview in which the paralegal arrives at and shares her conclusion with the client is located in Excerpt 9.5 below.

Excerpt 9.5. Sexual assault not worthy of protective order P: C: P:

So he hasn’t been physically abusive towards you lately? Mummum ((meaning no)). O.K. (pause) What I can do at this point, is send Teodoro a letter to the house, saying that you’ve made a complaint, that he is threatening you. O.K.? And assaulting your son, and if he continues to do that, charges may be filed against him. For right now, we’re just asking that he leave you alone. O.K. It’s not actually a letter to throw him out of the house. O.K.? Um, the only way that you can have him removed from the house is, I mean you can’t have him evicted because, you’re married to him. And your, both your names are on the house.

Though this client had admitted to sexual violence and the interview transcript makes clear that the service provider indeed, after the negotiation of its mean-

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ing, understood the client to be talking about sexual coercion, the interviewer is looking for only ‘physical’ violence that happened recently. In her conclusions, this service provider implies that sexual violence is not physical violence. Interestingly, the client seems to accept this distinction as well. For this reason, the paralegal offers to send a warning letter to the abuser. The client’s initial disclosure of sexual violence consists of a combination of the idiomatic expression, “twists my arm” and the euphemistic term “to sleep with.” “Twists my arm” has a metaphorical and often ironic meaning in English. When used in conversation, it is often interpreted as the speaker’s willingness to acquiesce to a proposal without having had to suffer much hardcore persuasion. In this case, the metaphor “twists my arm” plus the euphemism “go sleep with him” for to have sex with him could carry a literal meaning. Stating the events in this way, the client is unclear as to whether she refers to unwanted sexual activity that comes about as a result of coercion (i.e., rape) or to a type of coaxing among intimates that results in consensual sexual activity. On the surface, the statement could look like normal marital negotiation of sexual activity. It is only within the context of a protective order interview that this otherwise seemingly innocuous utterance could appear serious. By not saying that she is forced to have sex, this client keeps her language taboo-free by creating ambiguity as to what she might mean. The social and linguistic context of the discourse, however, should make it difficult for the paralegal to ignore the possibility that this victim’s utterance indicates sexual coercion. Below in Excerpt 9.6, the client and the paralegal negotiate the meaning of “. . .And um, and then also, like if I don’t um, if I don’t go sleep with him, uh, he, he twists my arm.”

Excerpt 9.6. Negotiating the meaning of metaphorical expressions P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C: P:

((interrupting)) [Was he abusive to you then? He’s always been verbally abusive, you know. What he does is he threatens me a lot in front of people. Mhmh And he abuses me, and ah, like, I mean, if I don’t [Threatens you, like what? What does he say? Well, um, he, he’s just always talking about, saying that, like I said that if he sees me, that I’m with somebody else [Mhmh [then he’s gonna do that to me. And um, and then also, like if I don’t um, if I don’t go sleep with him, Mhmh

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

C:

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C:

uh, he, he twists my arm. And he knows that I have a lot of stomach problems and I always have a pain on my left side, so what he does, he’s, he always stabs me there with his hand. And When was the last time that that happened? That you can remember. About two weeks ago, maybe. About two weeks ago? Yeah, most of the time, you know, I just take it, ‘cause I don’t want to scare my kids. (.) O.K., so when you say [Sometimes he just takes a sleeping pill or two, sometimes he’ll take three at one time. Mhmh And he drinks like ah, a fish all year. At eight or nine, he’ll finish like a half bottle in two days. And I mean, everybody tells him at work, and at home, all our relatives tell him that that’s too much and too strong to be mixing, but he says he can’t sleep so. (.) I don’t know, he gets abusive and he gets all these delusions, I don’t know if it’s his medication or what? ((pause for typing)) So then, what’d you say that two weeks ago, um, did he actually force you to have sex with him. He did. Yes? Did he make any threats to you then? Just the same one all the time that if, I mean, he has just gotten so jealous recently, or when, I guess the past year or two, he’s been saying that I have somebody else and he ah, wants to see like my time card, he wants to know if I got out of work fifteen minutes ago, I should have already been home, he uh, he says he goes to see if I’m there or not, but I’ve never seen him. You know, going around my job Mhmh or anything like that. O.K. Have you made several police reports? No. No.? O.K. We went to a counselor once or twice, maybe a year or two years ago, but um, he never went back to him. O.K., counselor for, because he was hitting you? No, like a family counselor that ( ) he was a family therapist. And then we went on our own to a family counselor and paid, we just went to that session, he never went back. Who was sending you to counseling? ()

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P: C: P: C: P: C:

Who recommended that you go? Well, one, he just went to a (masonic lodge) he talked to somebody there. And then, I just [sh]ose somebody out of the book and I told him for us to go. O.K., let me just ask you some questions, O.K.? It’s required in the ( ). Um, during your relationship, has ((Abuser’s name)) ever slapped you before. Well, just those two times that he hit me, he hit me at least those two times. O.K., so he slapped you. Or was it, a slap or was it? I mean, like I said, he grabbed me by my neck and my hair and. . .

Before examining the way sexual aggression is negotiated in the above example, let us first examine the way this client narrates. Interviewee #5 offers a clear example of a victim who resists the report genre. First, the client does not wait for the paralegal to elicit her narrative. Undoubtedly, her discourse responds to and is influenced by the interviewer, but this interviewee’s narrative is exceedingly teller-driven as Toolan’s (1988) distinction between the relationships that tellers have with their tales and their audiences suggests. The interviewee introduces several kernel narratives as a list of successive ideas, adds unsolicited information and provides substantial context for the abuse she describes. In utterance after utterance, the client talks about her social networks and evaluates her own feelings about her abuser’s actions. The paralegal tries to gain control of the conversation several times in this short excerpt. Her initial attempt is a request, made during an interruption, for an orientation to the most recent incident of sexual aggresion. Yet, before the paralegal can gain a discursive footing where she is able to manage the client’s narrative through elicitation, the client interrupts her to take the floor again. Rather than utilizing the interruption to discuss sexual violence though, this client begins talking about her partner’s substance use. The paralegal’s second attempt to direct the interaction is located in her exercising the option to avoid co-constructing the topic of drug and alcohol use introduced by the client. Instead, the paralegal returns to the sexual assault kernel injected earlier by the client and attempts to deal with the ambiguity it possessed by asking her, “So then, what’d you say that two weeks ago, um, did he actually force you to have sex with him.” While we have explored the dual meanings of the lexical items, from the point of view of its syntax, the utterance makes for uncertainty about what happened as well. This utterance does not syntactically reveal whether the coercion, itself a form of sexual violence, indeed results in the completion of acts of sexual violence attempted. To that end, the service provider asks her question as is evidenced by her employment of the emphatic, but unnecessary ‘do’-insertion in this past tense

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construction as well as the incorporation of the adverbial qualifier “actually”. Tannen (1993b: 48) states that adverbs are used by narrators “to describe the way in which something was done, and such description reflects a distinctly evaluative process.” Here, the narrator’s interlocutor uses the adverb “actually” to distinguish whether something was, in fact, done or not. The client states unequivocally that her husband forced her to have sex, but rather than focusing on the sexual violence of two weeks ago, she decides to talk about how the abuser’s jealousy is manifest in threats and his need to control her. Again, the paralegal utilizes the communicative strategy of ignoring the client’s kernels on jealousy and control by not collaborating with her to construct them. The paralegal only superficially acknowledges that the client has just said something through her use of the back-channeling device “Mhmh”. Instead of supporting the client’s narrative path, the paralegal attempts once more to gain a semblance of linearity within a discrete incident of violence. Having already secured an incident of domestic abuse (i.e., sexual assault) and the orientation to it (i.e., two weeks ago), she opts to try to impose linear orderliness by asking for a preferred resolution (i.e., that the police were called). This question may in fact serve the dual role of creating a sense of logically connected narrative sentences and of lending the client’s seemingly erratic denunciation of apparently unconnected episodes some institutional credibility through narrative coherence and syntax. The interactional trouble, caused by the paralegal’s desire to hear a report and the client’s expectation to be able to tell her story, seems to make the paralegal work harder, while the client appears to remain unfazed by the fact that there is a competing genre. The paralegal’s question, with its insinuation of the institutional expectation that the client should have made police reports, does not stop this client from narrating in her own way. She answers “no” and charges on with her own tale. Finally the paralegal, as if losing patience with the client, stakes out a steadier stance toward her discursive role as interviewer. The paralegal moves out of the interlocutor-frame that the client has been creating for her with every one of her own narrative utterances. The paralegal does this through her use of the word, “O.K.” in an attempt to punctuate her desire to recover the role as interviewer. She also incorporates in this changeof-frame utterance the word “required”, which invokes an entity outside of the interview to provide herself with the authority to take on and to perform this institutional role. This tactic seems, at least temporarily, to suggest to the client that in the context of the D.A.’s Office, her role as narrator should be enacted through responses to the interviewer’s elicitation rather than through initiation of her own narrative trajectory.

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This interview brings together issues of the storytelling taboo with those taboo issues that go beyond it. In so doing it raises several important questions and a number of provocative possible answers. The client in the interview above provides a good example of the relational-oriented litigants discussed by Conley and O’Barr (1990, 1998). To those who have the authority to determine what is central to domestic abuse and what is not, this client’s narrative sounds unfocused, tangential to main points and overly concerned with social networks over which the law has no jurisdiction. Analyzing institutional authority’s disdain for such narratives brings us back to the idea that these story narratives are in fact taboo, or a proscribed form, designated and observed as such by legal actants in the service of protecting institutional boundaries. Of course, it is not that women, who narrate this way, are automatically excluded from the protective order petitioning process. In fact, it is the paralegals’ and volunteers’ job to intercept these taboo narratives and transform them before they can contaminate legal order. Therefore, a question such as, “Do women who narrate in the story genre have less success in convincing interviewers to draft affidavits than those who narrate in the report genre?” is too simplistic. The conversion from ‘story’ to ‘report’ is precisely the task with which interviewers are charged. In their role as both legal and linguistic gatekeepers, interviewers primarily and normally function to find a way to include these women, while excluding their profane norms and ways of narration and representation. So while it is not usually the case that the way women narrate impairs their chances of getting the paralegals or the volunteers to help them petition the court for an order, interview #5 may present just such an instance. This interview is an example of the challenges facing what Lazarus-Black (2001) aptly refers to as the “pragmatics of inclusion.” Lazarus-Black (2001: 389) defines the pragmatics of inclusion as a “complex set of practices” that involve both the acts of those “charged with implementing the state’s efforts to discipline and govern family life” and the acts that amount to “subordinated people’s struggles to gain access to and recognition from dominant institutions that often contribute to their everyday oppression”. Taking the protective order as the institutional space in Trinidad within which ‘subordinated people first struggle to gain access to hegemonic institutions and then challenge those institutions to maintain their inclusion,” Lazarus-Black (2001: 387) finds that only a certain set of women are regularly included within the state’s purview of protection. She says,

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. . .in practice, domestic violence law does not provide relief for [just] any one who suffers familial abuse; it protects only certain categories of women and far fewer of them than most citizens imagine. . .the few women in Pelau who were granted restraining orders in 1997 were protected according to certain rules and under certain circumstances that do not challenge radically the fundamental structures of economic and gender domination in their society. In fact, by claiming to protect a wide array of persons in need of protection the state buttresses its own legitimacy – and that of the political elite – and contributes to the hegemony of law. (Lazarus-Black 2001: 401)

While my ethnography regarding who gets orders and who does not concurs with the concerns and findings of Lazarus-Black, my data suggest that the protective order itself can also be seen as a legal space of convenience that serves to exclude women from parts of the judicial system. Domestic violence, as women represent it, is very different from domestic violence as the law defines it. Rather than being a space in which subordinated peoples can “un-mak[e]. . .structures of domination through acts of individual and collective resistance” (LazarusBlack 2001: 389), the protective order interview serves as a space where the interactive institution can re-make incorrigible narratives and narrators into controlled and simplistic representations of violence and victims. Interview #5 presents a case in which a client refuses to submit to this re-making. Her narrative suggests that she is determined to resist the linear structure of the Labovian narrative in order to represent domestic violence as something that happens outside of emotion, commitment and extended family. She refuses to narrate it in terms of beginnings, middles and ends. As a result, the cost of this radical resistance and refusal to come under the control of the “dominant institutions that contribute to [her] every day oppression” (Lazarus-Black 2001), is to be turned away from the institution. For her, resistance means not having the chance to leave any reference to her experience behind. Perhaps the way this victim discloses sexual violence acts in concert with the storytelling taboo to lead this paralegal-interviewer to turn her away and ultimately keep her out of institutional memory. Would the paralegal, for example, have been able to have been so dismissive had interviewee #5 said, “And if I do not want to sleep with him, he rapes me,” as opposed to her more delicate and ambiguous, “If I don’t um, if I don’t go sleep with him, uh, he, he, twists my arm.” Undoubtedly, the language of the victims sometimes will make a difference in the paralegals’ determination of their eligibility, at least when in combination with other factors. It is probably no accident that each of the five

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women who directly use the word “rape” to disclose sexual violence were recommended for orders, and they managed to have sexual aggression show up as institutional memory in their affidavits. These sexual assault narratives suggest that the interdiction against women’s reporting rape is accompanied and perhaps even compounded by the taboo that service providers’ themselves feel when they need to represent sexual violence. Although some Latina women’s communicative practices indicate that they do not know how to talk about sexual abuse in the reporting context, the interviewer can employ language to create a linguistic context for disclosure. A sexual assault report is not simply what women say or what interviewers expect to hear from them. Rather, the report’s meaning is the product of the verbal interaction that ensues in the discursive space between victim-initial disclosures of sexual violence and the service providers’ ultimate rendering of it in affidavits. It is to this negotiation of meaning that I now turn.

Alteration and negotiation of sexual assault story and euphemism In between those women who are forthcoming with disclosures of sexual assault and those who allow their interviewers and interpreters the license to create the sexual assault narrative for them, we find a third group. In contrast to the norms and ways of narrating of the five Latina women who used the word rape to disclose sexual aggression is the Latina woman shown in Excerpt 9.7 below. In this excerpt from interview #9, the Spanish-speaking victim is much less willing than her five counterparts to mention the word “violar” or rape. Yet, unlike the women who say virtually nothing, this woman clearly wants to say something about it. The interviewer, therefore, needs to engage the victim in a negotiation process by which the notion of forced sex can be brought to the surface.

Excerpt 9.7. Negotiating the meaning of forced sex 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182

(.06) P: OK, ¿me puede decir qué sucedió durante ese incidente? Estamos hablando de que sucedió el ((date)) C: Bueno, porque él, él, el chamaco se está quedando conmi(go) es mi hijo. Y él me tiene muchos celos a mijo. ¿Por qué? Yo no sé. (.02) ¿Verdad? Y como mi primer esposo fue americano, P: [Mhmh C: el papá de mis chamacos, y él dice que quiere familia y yo ya no puedo

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183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192

tener familia. P: O.K. C: Y yo le digo, “¿Tú pa’ qué quieres familia si ya tienes sesenta-y-un años?” P: [Mhmh C: Pero, después sale él de bronca, y con su permiso, dice que soy puta, que estoy wonga, que estoy todo y luego quiere sexo por, por donde no se debe. Y yo no soy una persona que a mí, me más no ( ). P: ¿So intentó violarla señora? C: Sí, por el, por el otro la(d)o. (.03) Y, eso fue el pleito, porque no me dejé. (.07)

Translation of above example of negotiation of meaning of forced sex 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194

(.06) P: O.K. can you tell me what happened during this incident? We’re talking about what happened on ((date)). C: Well, because he, he, the boy who is staying with me is my son. And he is very jealous of my son. Why? I don’t know. (.02) You know? And since my first husband was American, P: [Mhmh C: the father of my children, and he says that he wants a family. And I can’t have anymore children. P: O.K. C: And I say to him, “Why do you want children if you are already sixty-one years old?” P: [Mhmh C: But, he got angry, and with your permission, he says that I’m a whore, that I’m loose among other things, and then he wants to have sex whereyou’re you’re not supposed to have sex. And I’m not a person that, no, to me ( ). P: So, did he try to rape you ma’am? C: Yes, through, through the other end. (.03) And that’s what started the argument, because I wouldn’t let him. (.07)

In the affidavit, this incident is written about in the following way in Excerpt 9.8:

Excerpt 9.8. Interviewer’s representation of attempted rape in affidavit On or about ((date)) at about ((time)), ((Abuser’s name)) began arguing with me and attempted to force me to have anal sex with him. ((Abuser’s name)) and I

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struggled and ((Abuser’s name)) hit me on the face and arms with a closed fist. I then hit ((Abuser’s name)) on the face. ((Abuser’s name)) stated he wanted children and I told him it was impossible because I am fifty-two years old. ((Abuser’s name)) was intoxicated and he later fell asleep. I sustained bruises to my face and shoulders as a result of this incident. No police report ((was)) made.

Client #9’s oral narrative shows her preference for highly euphemistic speech. This is evident in both her request to repeat the profanities prefaced by, “y con su permiso” or, with your permission, and by her description of the alleged abuser’s wanting to have sex with her, where sex is not supposed to be had. The interviewer needs to negotiate what the client means by this utterance because, as we have seen to be the case before, her choice of lexicon and her use of syntax may, but do not necessarily, imply force. The client narrates the majority of this past event in the conversational historical present. Presumably she does this to make events in the past seem more vivid for the listener. In this narrative however, as querer is cast in the present tense in the phrase, “y luego quiere sexo por, por donde no se debe”, or and then he wants sex, where sex is not supposed to be had, there is no presupposition of force. If the victim had cast this portion of the narrative in the past as ‘y luego quiso sexo. . .’ then force would have been implied, as the preterite of querer in Spanish means tried, but was unsuccessful. The interviewer negotiates the meaning of the utterance with the vicitm by introducing the term “violar” or rape. In the affidavit, the interviewer changes what the victim said to reflect that the act described was one of sexual aggression. An analysis of this client’s entire oral narrative reveals that she establishes a pattern of avoiding a discussion about the attempted sexual assault throughout the interview. First, although the attempted sexual assault is the most recent abusive incident, the victim refers only to the penultimate incident and to her husband’s habitual abusive behavior. The second point at which she exhibits resistance to speaking about sexual assault occurs in the middle part of the interview where the paralegal invites her to narrate the most recent abuse. Rather than beginning with the most recent incident, the client starts to narrate the penultimate incident, seemingly circumventing the need to talk about the attempted sexual assault.6 The uniformity of the victim’s hesitance is enhanced by her use of euphemistic speech, as was analyzed above.7 Euphemistic phrases that do not require negotiation of meaning are also common to the narratives of Latina women talking about sexual assualt, because their interlocutors understand what is meant by their gentler, less offen-

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sive phrases. Excerpts of these uses of euphemistic speech are given in Excerpts 9.9 and 9.10 (taken from the same interview) below.

Excerpt 9.9. Example of victim’s euphemistic speech 28 29 30 31 32

C: Hace, la última vez que tuvo relaciones sexuales conmigo, hace como un mes y medio. Fue a fuerzas. Regresé al trabajo toda la semana, no podía ni trabajar. (.02) Pero eso no le quiero decir a los niños. (.03) P: ¿Además del alcohol, él usa alguna otra droga?

Translation of above example of victim’s euphemistic speech C:

P:

It was, the last time he had sexual relations with me, about a month and a half ago. He forced me. I returned to work all that week, I couldn’t even work (.02). But I don’t want to tell the children that. (.03) Besides alcohol, does he use any other drug?

Excerpt 9.10. Euphemistic speech maintained by paralegal 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234

(.17) P: O.K., durante un incidente, dice usted que había sexualmente, la, la C: [Sí P: Se aprovechó de usted. Y eso ¿cuándo sucedió señora, más o menos?. C: Habrá, como un mes y medio también. P: So más o menos también en ((month)). C: Mhmh, y yo pensé de que lo vuelva a intentar, y ahora sí lo reporto porque pos no, eso no debe ser a fuerzas y fui al trabajo con todas las manos a adoloridas y todo. (.04) P: So la agarró fuerte sus ah, C: [Sí eso que se ((showing her wrists and forearms)) me haya hinchado, me dolía. P: Y hizo alguna amenaza si acaso usted no. . . C: [Mhmh P: [lo hacía, ¿Qué le dijo? ((First hesitates, then uses “hacer,” for taboo word “to have sex”)).8 C: Que iba a hacer escándalo pa’ que los niños miraran todo. (.02) Y todo tiempo me decía que por qué no quería tener relaciones con él, me decía pues, me decía que, porque si yo tenía a alguien y yo le decía que no, “es la

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235 236 237 238 239 240

situación en que estamos viviendo. ¿Cómo quieres?” (.07). P: ¿Hizo un reporte de policía en este que eso, en esta ocasión? C: No. P: Y y durante el incidente que sucedió, cuándo, este, no la golpeó pero cuando que quiso este. . .9 C: Nomás le dije así para que no intentara otra vez.

Translation of above example of euphemistic speech maintained by paralegal (.17) P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C: P: C:

P: C: P: C:

O.K., during an incident you said that there was sexually, the, the [Yes He took advantage of you. And that, when did that happen ma’am, approximately. That would be about a month and a half ago also. So more or less also ((month)) Mhmh, and so I thought that in case he tried to do it again, and now I am reporting it because well, that should not be forced. And I went to work with sore hands and everything. (.04) So he grabbed on hard to your ah, [Yes that ((showing her wrists and forearms)) was swollen, it was painful. And did he happen to threaten you if you didn’t. . . [Mhmh [[do it. What did he say to you? ((First hesitates and then uses “hacer” for taboo word “to have sex.”)) That he was going to make a scandal so that the children watch. (.02) And all the while he asked me why I didn’t want to have relations with him, he said, um, he asked if I had someone else and I told him no, “It’s the situation that we live in, what do you want?” (.07) So did you fill out a police report on this, for that, on this occasion. No. And, and during the incident that happened, when, um, but whenever he tried um. . . I just told him that so he wouldn’t try it again.

In the data above, the boldface utterances in Excerpts 9.9 and 9.10 show how this victim also prefers euphemistic speech to talk about a sexual assault. Here, however, unlike the victims shown in Excerpts 9.6 and 9.7, the client implies

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forced sex without having to say the word rape. Apparently this produces no difficulty in comprehension on the part of the interviewer who later on returns to the topic, calling it an incident of “sexual abuse”. Moreover, in the second draft of this same incident shown in Excerpt 9.7, above, the interviewer’s language choices are also euphemistic. Her use of softer terminology here contrasts with her selection of lexicon with the client in Excerpt 9.7, where she employed the most direct referent in her question, “¿So, intentó violarla señora?” With this victim in Excerpt 9.10, the preference for euphemism is clear, but there will be no confusion with respect to the meaning of her utterance. The victim and the service provider share the same denotation for the utterance, “Hace, la última vez que tuvo relaciones sexuales conmigo, hace como un mes y medio. Fue a fuerzas,” or About, the last time he had sex with me was about a month and a half ago. It was by force. Evidence of this is found in the service provider’s lexical choices later on in her utterances, “O.K., durante un incidente, dice usted que había sexualmente, la, la (C: Sí) Se aprovechó de usted. Y eso ¿cuándo sucedió señora, más o menos?” O.K., during an incident, you said that he had sexually, you, you, that he took advantage of you? And when did that happen, more or less ma’am? It appears to be the case in most instances as well, that it is the victim who sets the tone for how sexual assaults will be discussed within the interview. Often it seems that the service providers recognize victim-preferences for euphemistic speech to discuss sexual violence. They may also share this preference to maintain decorum and delicacy in talking about this issue. In fact, often they incorporate euphemism both when talking to clients and writing affidavits. This is true for the victim and service provider shown in Excerpt 9.11 below.

Excerpt 9.11. Victim’s euphemistic speech for sexual assault 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240

C: Entonces, se salió. Fue a comprar unos cigarros, regresó y me dijo que quería hablar conmigo, pero ya que tengamos, “subamos al carro, y fuéramos a hablar.” Entonces, ( ) y se fue a, a, a un callejón, ¿Verdad? Y me dijo, “demuéstrame que me quieres.” Le digo, “((Abuser’s name)), no te quiero. Yo no te lo voy a demostrar porque no te quiero.” Y, y, él trató de, de abusarme sexualmente (.02) en el carro. P: [Mhmh C: Pero, o sea, no, no, no hizo nada. No dejé que hiciera nada, nada o sea, uh, se salió del callejón, y empezó a manejar bien rápido, y parecía que nos quería matar o algo. Pero, me dijo, me dijo que le dijera que le quería, y que

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241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248

le dijera que (lo) quería aquí. Entonces, mientras tengo miedo de que me matara, pues le tengo que decir que lo quería y que no lo iba a dejar, así. Y a lo, fuimos otra vez a la casa de la cuñada. Y ah, fuimos por la bebé. Y le dije que le iba a dar otra oportunidad para nomás para que nos fuéramos para ((City)), nomás porque yo no tenía a nadie en ((State)). No conocía, ni siquiera conocí ((State)), o sea, este pueblito en ((State)) está bien solo. No hay nadie. P: [[Mhmh

Translation of above example of victim’s euphemistic speech for sexual assault C:

P: C:

P:

So, he went out. He went to buy some cigarettes, he returned and told me he wanted to talk to me, “so while we’re here, let’s get into the car” and that we were going to talk. Then, ( ) and he went to, to, to, an alleyway, you know? And he said, “Show me that you love me.” I tell him, “((Abuser’s name)), I don’t love you. I’m not going to show you because I don’t love you.” And, and, he tried to, to abuse me sexually (.02) in the car. [Mhmh But, um, he, he, didn’t do anything. I didn’t let him do anything, anything. I mean, uh, he left the alley, and started to drive real fast, as if he wanted to kill us or something. But, he told me, he told me to tell him that I loved him, and to tell him that I loved him right there. So, while I was afraid that he would kill me, I had to tell him that I loved him, and that I wouldn’t leave him like that. And then, another time we went to the sister-in-law’s house. And uh, we went to pick up the baby. And I told him that I was going to give him another opportunity, just so that, so that we would to ((city)). Just because I didn’t have anyone in ((state)). I didn’t know, I didn’t even know ((state)), I mean, this town in ((state)) is in the middle of nowhere. There is nobody. [Mhmh

The corresponding affidavit states that the alleged abuser tried to sexually abuse the victim, and thusly, the act is described in the affidavit in a manner that is consistent with the way the victim uses it in her oral narrative. While these 22 cases demonstrate that some Latina women are very reluctant to disclose sexual assault, they also show that others seem to have no problem expressing that a rape or an attempted rape took place. Moreover, while some women are at either end of the direct/indirect spectrum, others are somewhere in the middle, showing a preference for euphemistic speech, but a willingness to disambiguate it so that meaning is not obscured. The first example shown in Excerpt 9.7 above illustrates that when the victim’s euphemistic

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speech is too vague or too divergent from institutional norms of talking about sexual violence, a negotiation of meaning must ensue, so that the complete story can be told. Le Vine and Franco (1981) report that gender is the most important factor in predicting disclosure among Hispanics. Their study suggests that both male and female Hispanics prefer to self-disclose to women, rather than to men. If these findings do indeed reflect a pattern, then it may be that just as the narrative is affected by the interviewer’s decisions to omit entire incidents, so too is it transformed by choices that narrators make to delete entire incidents of sexual assault based on the gender of their interlocutors. This last point brings us to one final important issue that has been implied throughout the analysis here: Latina women’s willingness to disclose and ways of disclosing violence, and perhaps especially stigmatized violence like sexual assault, is likely to depend on the situation in which they find themselves. That is, because Latina women are not essential subjects, what they are willing to say about sexual assault varies contextually. Interviews #20 and #21 (from Table 9.1) provide us with an example of how the use of euphemism, spurred on by the sociolinguistic need to couch sexual violence in the most delicate of terms, affects the outcome of a report. In these two cases, the same Spanish-dominant survivor was interviewed twice in the Pro-Bono Law Clinic by different sets of interviewers within the span of a couple of days.10 These sessions resulted in two stikingly different affidavits. The first interview, conducted by an Anglo female interviewer who was aided by a Mexican-American male interpreter, resulted in the affidavit shown below in Excerpt 9.12.

Excerpt 9.12. Affidavit resulting from first interview ((Abuser’s name)) was drunk and on drugs. He calmed down for awhile and fell asleep. When he awoke, he assaulted me again by holding and pulling my hair and holding my wrists and wanted to have sex with me against my will.

The corresponding portion of this same woman’s affidavit, produced days later by the victim, a Filipina female interviewer and an Anglo female interpreter, is shown in Excerpt 9.13 below.

Excerpt 9.13. Affidavit resulting from second interview On ((date)) at about ((time)), defendant was still in my house. I was sleeping in the living room when defendant raped me. After he began to fight with me, again he grabbed me and pulled me by my hair and called me dirty names. I phoned the police and filed a report as soon as defendant left my house.

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The two affidavits represent very different events. In the first affidavit, the client is shown to have been the victim of an attempted rape,11 while in the second affidavit, she is depicted as having been raped. The interview transcripts show that this same client uses euphemistic speech in both interviews. In the first interview, the victim mentions the sexual assault two times in her narration to the Anglo female interviewer and the Mexican-American male interpreter. The two relevant portions of this interview are shown in Excerpts 9.14 and 9.15.

Excerpt 9.14. Victim’s first interview, first draft of sexual assault (When intepreters are present, I = interpreter, P = Paralegal and C = Client) 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480

C: Yo tengo, yo le tengo miedo de él, eh, este, entonces, entonces, trató tres veces de intentarlo, de, de, de tener relaciones conmigo. I: He tried to ah, he tried to have sex with me three times. C: Entonces, él se enojó ya bastante. I: He got very mad. C: Y empezó a insultarme. I: And he started to insult me. C: Siempre con todo me insulta, y insultos (se ) I: (He’s always) insulting me, ( ) C: Y me dijo que yo era, muchas malas palabras I: and he called me a lot of bad words. C: Y me dijo, “nos vemos en corte” I: And he said, “I’ll see you in court” C: [“Te voy a pelear a la niña” I: I’m going to fight you for custody of our daughter. C: Eh, ah, palabras, palabras, palabras. I: And he said a lot of – obscenidades? C: Sí. I: Obscenities. C: Y agarró la puerta y la aventó y otra vez, palabras y palabras. I: He slammed the door and continued yelling obscenities at me. (.02) P: Did he threaten to hit her again? I: [¿Él le hizo alguna amenaza de agredirla o hacerla daño otra vez? C: [Este, no, sólo de quitarme la niña.

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

Translation of above example of victim’s first interview, first draft of sexual assault 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481

C: I am, I am afraid of him, uh, um, so, so, he tried three times to attempt it, to, to, to, have sexual relations with me. I: He tried to uh, he tried to have sex with me three times. C: Then, he got very mad. I: He got very mad. C: And he started to insult me. I: And he started to insult me. C: He always insults me about everything, and insults ( ) I: (He’s always) insulting me ( ) C: And he called me a lot of bad words. I: And he called me a of of bad words. C: And he told me, um, “We’ll see each other in court.” I: And he said, “I’ll see you in court.” C: [“I’m going to fight for our little girl.” I: “I’m going to fight you for custody of our daughter.” C: Um, ah, words, words, words. I: And he said a lot of – obscendidades ((to client for clarification – means obscenities)). C: Yes. I: Obscenities. C: And he grabbed the door and he slammed it, and again, words and words. I: He slammed the door and continued yelling obscenities at me. (.02) P: Did he threaten to hit her again? I: Did he threaten to hit you or hurt you again? C: [Um, no, only that he was going to take our daughter.

In this first draft of the sexual assault, the surrounding context indicates that the victim was most likely not interested in having sex with her estranged husband, because she had been narrating about the fight that preceded the event in this incident where she says he tried to have sex with her. In addition, she juxtaposes her utterance about the sexual assault alongside an utterance in which she states that she is afraid of him. Yet, the victim does not indicate whether she was in fact raped. Later on, the interviewer attempts to re-draft the sexual assault account, apparently to make sure that she has the correct information

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for the affidavit. The way the topic is re-accessed, along with the way the client responds, is shown in the data below.

Excerpt 9.15. Victim’s first interview, second draft of sexual assault 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501

P: And she said that she was sleeping on the couch, he assaulted her while she was asleep? I: (Usted dijo) que estaba en el sofá, él y él, ah, qué es lo que le hizo? C: Este, después que trató de hacerme el amor, él me tocaba todo el cuerpo, I: He tried, and after he tried to have sex with me touched me all over C: Quería besarme y todo eso, y yo siempre le rechacé pero él me tenía agarrada de la, de las manos. I: ( ) And he held me by the hands. C: Y siempre no, no me dejé. Me resistí. I: I resisted him ((.11 type)) P: Um, I need to know if, um if before this, if there were other times that he threatened her or assaulted her. I: Necesita saber si antes había más problemas con él.

Translation of above example of victim’s first interview, second draft of sexual assault P: I: C: I: C: I: C: I: P: I:

And she said that she was sleeping on the couch, he assaulted her while she was asleep? (You said) that you were on the sofa, he and he, ah, what did he do? Um, after trying to make love with me, he touched my whole body, He tried, and after he tried to have sex with me, touched me all over. He wanted to kiss me and everything. And I always rejected him, but he held me by the, by the hands. ( ) and he held me by the hands. And I wouldn’t let him. I resisted. I resisted him. ((.11 typing)) Um, I need to know if, um, if, before this, if there were other times that he threatened her or assaulted her. She needs to know if there were other problems with him before that.

In neither the first nor the second draft of the sexual assault does the victim indicate that she was indeed raped. And neither the interviewer nor the interpreter presses the point to ask if the abuser did in fact rape her. Rather than be-

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coming clearer as the three negotiate the meaning of sexual assault, this client’s speech becomes increasingly more euphemistic as she describes her abuser’s actions. First she says, “él, eh, este, entonces, entonces trató tres veces de intentarlo, de, de tener relaciones conmigo,” or He, uh, um, then, then, he tried three times to try it, to, to have relations with me. Then in the second draft within the same interview, she says, “Este, después que trató de hacerme el amor, él me tocaba todo el cuerpo,” meaning, Then, after he tried to make love to me, he touched me all over my body. Still, within this first interview, but in the second draft of this incident, the victim emphasizes her own innocence by including the following two statements. First she states, “Quería besarme y todo eso, y yo siempre, le rechacé pero él me tenía agarrada de la, de las manos,” or in English, He was trying to kiss me and all this, and I always rejected him. She then goes on to say, “Y siempre no, no me dejé. Me resistí”, translated as, And always, I didn’t, I didn’t let him. I resisted. These utterances of resistance seem to play one of the two major roles that instigate the discrepant versions of this account. First, the victim’s euphemistic speech about sexual assault is ambiguous in the context of a marital dispute – especially when she incorporates words such as “tried to make love to me.” But second, and perhaps more oblique still are this victim’s utterances of resistence toward the alleged abuser’s advances. It may be that her insistence that she opposed the abuser are misinterpreted by the interviewer and the interpreter as the narrative resolution, or the result of the events narrated. The utterances of resistence are most likely not the resolution, but instead are merely parts of the narrative’s complicating action. In this case, it appears that the victim is using the word “siempre”, or always, not as a marker of habitual action, but as an intensifier of her own capacity to resist at all times during the event. These utterances of resistance may even be culturally appropriate evaluative devices that some women use to diplay themselves in the best possible light. Even though rape always entails some opposition to or force against the attacker’s motion, the interviewer and the interpreter seem to consider these utterances to reflect how the incident ended. With the second interview as a comparison, it becomes clearer that although her utterances state “I resisted him,” they do not mean “therefore he did not rape me.” In reality, these statements are perfectly consistent with the definition of rape, as all rape victims resist in some way – though they may not be able to act in a capacity that will stop a rape from happening. In the second interview, this same victim discusses the sexual assault with a Filipina female interviewer and an Anglo female interpreter in a dramatically less euphemistic way. This is shown in Excerpt 9.16 below.

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Excerpt 9.16. Victim’s euphemistic speech in the second interview 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187

C: Me agarraba de aqui, me aventaba así I: [Grabbing me from here, and throwing me like this. C: y trató de, de violarme tres veces. I: ¿Violarla? C: Mhmh I: And then he tried to rape me three times. P: Did he rape you? I: ¿Sí llegó C: [Yes. I: [a a violarla? P: And that’s when you called the police? I: Esto es cuando usted llamó a la policía para C: [Y él se fue, y y yo llamé a la policía. I: And after he left, and that’s when I called the police. C: Y cuando él se fue afuera de la casa gritó que yo era, muchas palabras, bad words, en español y. . . I: Again when he left the house, he started screaming bad things at me. C: Y me amenazó que me iba a quitar a la niña

Translation of above excerpt of victim’s euphemistic speech in her second interview C: I: C: I: C: I: P: I: C: I: P: I: C: I: C:

He grabbed me here, he pushed me like this. [Grabbing me from here and throwing me like this. And tried to, to rape me three times. Rape you? Mhmh. And then he tried to rape me three times. Did he rape you? Did he actually [Yes [rape you? And that’s when you called the police? And that’s when you called the police to [And he left, and and I called the police And after he left, and that’s when I called the police. And when he went outside the house he shouted bad words at me in Spanish and. . .

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I: C:

Again when he left the house, he started screaming bad things at me. And he threatened that he would take my daughter away from me.

In this interview, the speech of this client is still at least syntactically marked for euphemism because with her “y trató de, de violarme tres veces”, she does not begin by directly asserting that her estranged husband did actually rape her. This same client, when talking with the two female interlocutors, however, does mention the word “violar” or rape, and in so doing, she lowers the level of propriety in their interaction. Also, in this case, the interviewer and the interpreter are disposed to further question the victim about the rape. The interpreter employs an echo-question as a confirmation check with her question, “¿Violarla?”, Raped you? in which she utilizes the exact words of the victim. The interviewer, upon hearing the translation pointedly asks, “Did he rape you?” And before even waiting for the translation, the victim answers the interviewer affirmatively.12 There is only one draft of the sexual assault incident in this interview, and from it, the affidavit is written depicting the client as a rape victim, rather than the victim of an attempted rape. Arguably, several contextual factors are working simultaneously on the production of these two different narrative accounts of the same story. While one explanation may be that the victim is uncomfortable discussing sexual assault in the presence of men, and therefore chooses to use highly euphemistic speech, another explanation may be that the Filipina interviewer was given the whole story because she point-blank asked the victim if the abuser had in fact raped her. However, qualitative discourse and narrative analyses of these 22 sexual assault narratives reveal patterns of speech that indicate that the explanation of these discrepancies is more subtle and complex than either of these more simplistic answers. In most of the sexual assault narratives there is a tendency on the part of the interviewer (and the interpreters in these last two cases) to employ the same type of speech used by the victim in both the interview context and on the final affidavit. With the exception of the paralegal who needs to use the word violar in interview #9 to disambiguate the victim’s language, in the majority of the other interviews the victims’ interlocutors maintain the same level of reserve as do their clients. The reason for this phenomenon seems to be that when it is clear that forced sex is the subject of a narrative-turn, interviewers follow the victim’s lead and refer to it in the same manner as victims do. In the two interviews in this corpus where a survivor says “And he tried to rape me,” the interviewer also employs the word rape when doing her part in coconstructing the verbal narrative. Both interviewers also use the term rape in

 Chapter 9

the accounts they draft in the final affidavit as well, and they ask the victims if the rape was successful. In the two interviews where women were described as using euphemistic terms that indicated force for the sexual assault, through utterances such as “Hace, la última vez que tuvo relaciones sexuales conmigo, hace como un mes y medio. Fue a fuerzas”, or, It was, the last time that he had sexual relations with me, it was by force, the interviewers respond in turn with equally euphemistic utterances like: “O.K., durante un incidente, dice usted que la había sexualmente, la, la (C: Sí) se aprovechó de usted. Y eso ¿cuándo sucedió señora, más o menos?”, translated as, O.K., during an incident, you said that he had sexually, you, you, that he took advantage of you? And when did that happen, more or less ma’am? Furthermore, with only one exception, in each of the other affidavits, the interviewers maintain the euphemistic speech of the victims. It seems then that the divergent narrative outcomes of interviews #20 and #21 of the same woman may be the product of discourse-level alternation and co-occurrence rules (Ervin-Tripp 1986). Alternation is the linguistic phenomenon which enables speakers to chose between possible and/or competing forms to express themselves, while co-occurrence deals with the notion that once a choice among alternate ways of saying something has been made, the speaker will continue in that vein so that every form thereafter will conform to the initial choice. Ervin-Tripp (1986: 233) argues, “Once a selection has been made, however, later occurrences within the same utterance, conversation, or even between the same dyad may be predictable.” These narrators and interlocutors exhibit their sociolinguistic competence by selecting from among their alternatives those terms that refer to sexual assault that they believe should cooccur with the degree of euphemistic speech employed by their conversational partner throughout the interview. In other words, the service providers should select terms that are consistent with the level of directness used by victims to discuss sexual assault. It seems, however, that some interviewers are more willing to break the rules of selection and co-occurrence for the sake of meaning when they need to disambiguate an utterance. This was shown above in Excerpt 9.7 where the victim’s ambiguous utterance, “y luego quiere sexo por, por donde no se debe,” or and then he wants sex where sex is not supposed to be had, and I am not the kind of person that ( ), required the service provider to ask, “¿So, intentó violarla señora?” (So, did he try to rape you ma’am?). But even when this is done in the oral exchange, the affidavit is generally written in compliance with the victim’s norms and ways of speaking about sexual assault. We have seen that in the affidavit corresponding to this particular incident, the paralegal wrote, “((Abuser’s name)) began arguing with me and attempted to force me to have anal sex with him.”

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

In the interview shown in Excerpts 9.14 and 9.15, which produced the erroneous affidavit, it may be that neither the interviewer, nor the interpreter was willing to break the rules of alternation and co-occurrence to disambiguate the victim’s language. They did not introduce the word “violar” or rape into the discourse or directly ask the victim if the abuser was succcessful in his attempts to rape her. These interviews suggest that legalese and lay norms and ways of speaking about sexual assault, both of which may include vague and ambiguous euphemisms about sexual assault, can have an impact on the development of the final narrative product. Most of what women have to say in these interviews is indelicate, disagreeable and difficult to talk about, and Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative model suggests that the more distasteful the past experience, the more likely it would be that narrators would pare the linear narrative down to just its bare bones: the complicating action. But it seems that making reports of rape may be more difficult than making reports of other types of family violence. Although intertextuality is clearly a source of narrative discrepancy, here we see that the taboo topic of sexual violence may be as well. The data in this chapter suggest that institutional memory can only ever be as complete as the negotiation that takes place to create meaning. Certainly these data present evidence to support the claim that one of the reasons that sexual assault reporting is so difficult is because of the social stigma that gets attached to the crime. However, these interviews also suggest that the real question is not necessarily whether women disclose, but rather how they disclose sexual violence. And to round out this equation, we also need to ask how interviewers receive such information, and perhaps even more importantly, whether interviewers create a discursive space where victims feel that they can disclose such violence. Consonant with the findings of González-López (2000), who notes that Mexican-American immigrant women did not disclose their sexual assault victimization to anyone while in Mexico, but were able to discuss sexual violence in the U.S., are those of Berman from Indonesia. Berman (1998: 44–45) notes that when Javanese women learned of a well-publicized rape crisis center, where they could talk about their experiences of sexual aggression, their “letters, describing their pain and suffering flooded the center, although very few women. . .ever appeared in person to request shelter or assistance.” These findings are analogous to mine: Both within the physical setting of a larger social context and within the immediate conversational setting of an interview, women find ways to attempt to inscribe their victimization in institutional memory when a context is created that enables it.

 Chapter 9

The institution’s ability to record incidents of sexual assault is important for several reasons. For individual victims seeking justice, consistent accounts of the event are requisite in an adversarial legal system that allows for the impeachment of victim testimony by raising doubt about its veracity through the exaggeration of discrepancies in their stories (Conley & O’Barr 1998; Frohmann 1991; Matoesian 2000). Moreover, Bergen (1996), Dziegielewski, Resnick, and Krause (1996), and Kelly and Radford (1998) inform us that the interviewer to whom the victim of domestic violence is currently speaking may be the only one with whom she talks before returning to the abuser. Therefore, these researchers argue, undisclosed sexual violence can have a negative impact on victims who return to the abusive situation with incomplete safety and treatment plans. Securing disclosure of sexual violence from individual victims will help to make institutional memory more complete. At present, as Dwyer, Smokowski, Bricourt and Wodarski (1996) also point out, within sociolegal agencies there are definitional problems and variable commitments to maintaining records of sexual assault. At the D.A.s Office, for example, the topic of sexual assault did not figure into the battery of questions with which paralegals open interviews in order to secure statistics about family violence. While most victims were asked if they had ever been threatened with a gun or a knife, none was ever asked in the ‘questions for our office’, or any other time in the interview, if she had been raped. At the Clinic, volunteers also were supposed to ask clients a series of questions regarding their experience for the Clinic’s records. While volunteer-interviewers did routinely ask clients if they had ever been sexually assaulted, the recording generally stopped with the client’s answer of either ‘yes,’ or ‘no’. Obviously, such answers do not reveal much about the nature of the crime and of women’s experiences with it. And if these data are at all generalizable, it may be that with the way the question is phrased, some women, who say “no”, would probably answer “yes” to a question regarding whether they had ever been forced to have sex. It is likely that statistics compiled to represent the incidence of rape in the U.S. are at best incomplete, and perhaps even worse, completely misleading. We see that beyond the individual miscarriages of justice that may result as a consequence of intertextual problems that arise as interpretive ideologies of narrative come together with other sociocultural phenomena such as linguistic taboo, there are many other reasons to understand narrative variation and representational resources. From a sociopragmatic standpoint, institutional archives can never really be complete. We may however come to understand some omissions, absences and inconsistencies if we realize that any semblance of thoroughness depends on the care with which the original in-

Beyond the storytelling taboo 

teraction was carried out. These data suggest that in some cases women who want to report sexual violence are unsuccessful in doing so, not simply because they are ashamed, but because their interlocutors are more comfortable talking about culturally less offensive and conversationally less sensitive crimes.

Notes . In eighteen of the twenty-two cases, the interviewees report that their intimate-partners sexually assaulted them. There are two different interviews in this corpus in which the same woman narrates about a single incident to two separate sets of interviewers/interpreters. In one of the remaining two cases, one woman complains that her husband harasses her by constantly revisiting the fact that she had been sexually assaulted by her stepfather when she was six years old, and the other discusses the molestation of her daughters. . By ‘categorize’, I mean those instances in which victims actually use the word rape itself (cf. Conley & O’Barr 1998). This is because sometimes survivors narrate all of the events leading up to and constituting the rape, before they actually employ the word rape. In these cases, as we will see, the eventual categorization – as opposed to an initial classification – are not examples of survivor avoidance of the presumed taboo word, since the word rape is precisely the one that is considered taboo. . But see Trinch (2001b) for the other possible (semantic) reasons why women might avoid the term rape. . For a more in-depth examination of how I analyze these victims’ utterances see Trinch (2001b). . Again, see the work of Berk-Seligson (1990a) on interpreters. . However, as was discussed in Chapter 8, when women do utilize linearity as the structuring principle of their narratives, this request to start with the last incident becomes a challenge for them. . Besides the victim’s pattern of avoidance and euphemistic speech with regard to the sexaul assault incident, there is one more piece of evidence that supports the claim that some Latina women show extreme reluctance to disclose sexual assault. Before the paralegal in this interview would agree to recommend the victim for a protective order, she required the victim to make a police report. While I was not present for the interview between the victim and the Anglo male officer who took the report, I was able to obtain a copy of the report. Interestingly, the police report includes only the penultimate incident and makes no mention of the sexual assault which occurred some three weeks after the penultimate incident. Although there is no way of knowing for sure why the sexual assault does not appear in the police report, it is highly unlikely given the time lapse between the day the victim made the report and the date of the penultimate incident (more than three weeks earlier) that the police officer would have deleted the most recent abusive incident in favor of recording only the penultimate one. Usually, the police department, as does the District Attorney’s Office, prefers that the most current incidents be reported.

 Chapter 9 . Grimes (1971, 1978) provides a classification of the various types of euphemisms used as substitutes for taboo words. In the example above, the interviewer’s use of the phrase “no lo hacía,” according to Grimes’ classification is considered a general expression, meaning that it is devoid of any semantic meaning because without context it would be impossible to interpret. . Using Grimes’ (1971, 1978) system of classifying euphemism, I consider the boldface utterances here to be examples of ellipses, or the elimination of offensive terms from the discourse that requires that the context evoke their meaning. . This client never revealed to the second set of interviewers that she had been in the Clinic just days before. They did ask her if she had ever filed for a protective order, and she said that she had not. It was never clear to anyone why she came back to the Clinic or why she did not reveal that she had been there before. From my experience in the Clinic, it is likely that she, like so many other women, never returned to get her final paperwork completed from the first interview, and thus, since so much was left undone, she thought that she had never filed before. It could also be that the victim decided to start over, rather than sign the original affidavit and fill out the remaining paperwork, because she knew that the first interview did not produce a narrative of the whole story. . Although the reader should refer to the prior analysis of the service provider’s use of the word ‘wanted’. This sentence employs syntactic ambiguity in English as it is not clear whether he actually rapes her or not. . It is interesting that the victim answers this question, “Did he rape you?” as she hears it in English with a response in English. It may be that she uses English because she perceives the subject of rape to be too taboo in Mexican culture, and thus she uses her other language to discuss it. González-López (2000), in a study about the impact of immigration to the U.S. on Mexican-American’s sexuality, reports that many of the Mexican-American women in her study who were survivors of sexual violence told her that when in Mexico they had never disclosed to anyone that they had been assaulted, and that it was only once in the U.S. that they began talking about their experiences of sexual violence.

Chapter 10

Discrepant versions and the margins Truth or consequence for Latina battered women?

Throughout this book, I have focused on the differences between lay and institutional norms of narrating experiences of domestic violence. Utilizing the definition of genre proposed by Bakhtin (1986), I have argued that stories and reports can be conceptualized as distinct types of narrative genres. Each genre, for the most part, has its own set of lexical items, phraseological structures, compositional components and thematic content. More important now than the salient linguistic differences between genres, this analysis brings to light the resultant discrepancies that occur from the process of imposing the written report on the oral story genre. Beyond just the genre differences in content and form, however, there is the even more important point: There exists a distinguishable hierarchy of narrative genres that is established through and supported by interpretive ideologies of narrative found in North American culture. That is, the way certain linguistic forms come to represent – either as icon, or as index – the particular cultural values with which they are associated in identifiable speech settings is not simply the result of the generic frame. Rather the grouping of features itself is a crucial component of the very genre it aids in constituting (cf. Hanks 1987). An analysis of how interpretive ideologies steer the transformation of one text into another challenges any claim that a certain genre, for example the report genre, is somehow inherently more complex, more complete, and/or more decontextualized. In fact, certain linguistic features, such as linearity, specificity of times, dates and quantities, event singularity, and recency merely point to and even stand in for the interpretive ideologies linked to the common expectations listeners have of narrators and their narratives. Analyzing narrative as a pragmatic tool, employed by narrators to achieve any number of interactional and communicative goals requires a re-examination of the notion of narrative performance. In the case of the protective order interview, the written narrative text becomes separated or detached from the narrator in significant linguistic and interactional ways. Once in-

 Chapter 10

scribed in the affidavit, narrators no longer perform their narratives in the manner commonly defined by sociolinguistics as doing what Hymes calls “break[ing]through into performance”. Yet, the text of the written report is also created for very pragmatic purposes. As a pragmatic text, it is also highly performative. The affidavit not only tells what happened, but it does so in a particular way, for a special audience and for a specific reason. Therefore, in addition to a more traditional analysis of narrative performance, often described and defined as those texts that narrators bring to life through the utilization of linguistic resources such as code-switching (Alvarez 1991), repetition, reported speech, evaluation (Labov & Waletzky 1967), frequent alternation between use of the conversational historical past (i.e., the present) and the regular preterit tenses (Silva-Corvalán 1983; Wolfsson 1978), I argue that such linguistic resources – whether brought together or avoided – serve to construct different types of performative texts. These interviews have been analyzed for their extrapolative power to understand two separate but related phenomena. The first is how the coconstruction of pre-trial witness testimony can render meaning vulnerable in subsequent legal proceedings where only one of the text’s authors, namely the victim, will be held responsible for inconsistent statements. The second problem that this analysis addresses is the way in which institutions favor, and thus permit certain types of representation, while they resist and eventually, as seems to be the case for the interviews in this study, prohibit others (Briggs 1997). The data presented in Conley and O’Barr (1998), O’Barr and Conley (1996), Sarat and Felstiner (1995), Merry (1990) and Wodak (1985) suggest that legal professionals such as judges, court clerks, prosecutors and divorce attorneys view certain norms and ways of speaking negatively and as lacking in authority. My findings in this study corroborate these claims. I suggest, however, that not only are there preferred norms and ways of speaking in institutional settings, but also that voices that diverge from what appears to be the legal standard are at risk of being altered and perhaps even marginalized. Because certain generic representations of the account of abuse are considered by the system to be inadequate, they are relegated to a position in which they are standardized through an intensely collaborative process of narrative production. Upon hearing these women for the first time, one might conclude that they have trouble organizing their narratives. Like the lay litigants’ accounts studied by Conley and O’Barr (1998, 1990) and Wodak (1985), portions of the accounts given by most of these survivors could be characterized as non-linear narratives. It is also the case that some of the narratives examined in this cor-

Discrepant versions and the margins 

pus are marked by imprecise numerical dates and durations of events (O’Barr & Conley 1996). Likewise, in all of the interview data examined here, the survivors introduce incidents and events that at best seem to be considered by interviewers as beyond the legal scope of the problem at hand (Sarat & Felstiner 1995). At worst, the evidence of abuse interjected by victims might even be perceived as “superfluous, unimportant or rambling” information (Conley & O’Barr 1998). A closer listen, however, reveals that those who rule on these accounts must be either incapable of or unwilling to understand the organization of victims’ accounts of abuse. The paralegals are employed to be the ears for higher judicial authorities. Through transformational work they perform on victims’ narratives, they, like the Tzotzil elders who mediate marital squabbles in Haviland’s (1996) study, ultimately become “the victim’s mouth”. They translate these narratives of violence and domestic discord into the language that the court considers to be logical. Conley and O’Barr (1998: 73) report that small claims court judges deem relationally-oriented litigants, who are usually women, to be “hard to follow, irrational, and even crazy”. They find, however, the following logic underlying these accounts: “I am a needy person. I meet my obligations to other members of the social network and help them when they are in need. Therefore the law should help me now” (Conley & O’Barr 1998: 73). In this study, I have focused more on linguistic form, particularly narrative organization and content, than I have on the underlying cultural logic of the survivors’ narratives. However, just as Conley and O’Barr argue that lay litigants’ disputes are logically organized, Latina survivors’ narratives, while divergent from the needs and desires of legal professionals, are indeed linguistically organized. For example, survivors have few problems providing precise times and dates for recently occurring incidents, but their orientations lack exactitude for events that occurred in the more distant past. Furthermore, Latina survivors’ narratives are indeed organized by time, but in some instances, time is expressed in alternative, but logical ways. Survivors tend to orient events that took place in the more distant past by paralleling the occurrence about which they narrate with important events in their children’s lives. In the vast majority of the interviews observed, recorded and transcribed, linear Labovian narratives are present. Thus, the data indicate that these minority women are capable of narrating in a linear way. Nevertheless Latina survivors also often express events in generic past and present time narratives. And at times, with their employment of kernels, they also organize narratives in a more episodic manner. I have argued that the generic time narratives rep-

 Chapter 10

resent the phenomenon of habitual abuse, and therefore, it is understandable that survivors would select this narrative-type. Linear narratives that represent one-time occurrences seem an inaccurate or inadequate discursive mode for achieving the survivors’ communicative goal of expressing recurrent and cyclical conduct and mistreatment. Perhaps the nature of intimate partner abuse, consisting of multiple and varied offenses that occur over a long period of time, is what encourages the use of kernel narrative types as well. As women remember incidents, they appear to bring them up in interviews in the event that paralegals might consider them worthy of fuller development. Moreover, most of the incidents that survivors introduce into their oral narratives are considered by other agencies serving battered women to be categorical types of abuse. The economic, mental and emotional abuse described in Latina women’s narratives, while perhaps considered to be far beyond what is required or needed by the court, corresponds to what professionals working in advocacy agencies regard as harmful behavior. Though these types of controlling behaviors might be considered inappropriate by paralegals, it nonetheless cannot constitute abuse as the law defines it in terms of domestic violence. It could be that these women’s narratives take on a relational-like form for two additional reasons. First, the women in these cases are involved in disputes over a relationship, arguably one of the most critical relationships from among their entire social network, as abusers are either current or former intimatepartners, who are often the fathers of their children. And second, domestic violence does not tend to occur in the way that other forms of violence do, namely in a perfectly linear trajectory. As a psychotherapist in one of the training sessions that I attended stated, “[In cases of domestic violence] nobody gets hit with a two-by-four on the first date.” By this remark, the therapist meant that emotional, economic and mental abuse usually begin long before the physical violence, and then once physical violence starts, these other forms co-exist with it. Furthermore, as any case manager who works with battered women will attest, between physically violent outbursts there are moments in which abusers show remorse, promise to get help and refrain from physical agression. When the dynamics of intimate-partner violence are considered, it becomes clearer why the narratives take the forms that they do. The narrative, like the abusive relationship itself, is marked by linear accounts of particular and recent violent or abusive incidents and by generic past time and present time accounts that provide the background to explain how a relationship with sporadic episodes of abuse has been sustained over a period of time. The narratives studied here resound of long-term and troubled relationships that are

Discrepant versions and the margins 

wrought with emotional content. And yet it is rarely the case that the survivors themselves are too distraught to narrate or that their stories lack focus and all specificity. Thus, rather than arguing, as Conley and O’Barr (1998) have, that these types of litigants have not acquired the language of the court, I ask whether the problem might be that the courts have not adequately learned how to deal with cases involving emotional and indeterminable disputing that may come packaged more commonly in story form. It might be that the complicated nature of these cases requires a compound narrative made up of the three salient narrative-types. Merry’s (1990) description of neighborhood and family law disputes parallels my ethnographic description of the Latina women’s narratives collected for this study. Nor do these conflict situations follow an even course of development. Disputes have been described as following a trajectory, a metaphor suggesting a smooth, gradual evolution over time; but the problems. . . observed [have] more the character of prolonged periods of stasis followed by moments of rapid, catastrophic change. . . . The prevailing mode of dealing with neighborhood and family problems seem[s] to be avoidance and inaction, putting up with a difficult situation as long as possible. . . . (Merry 1990: 95)

As Brenneis (1996) points out, narratives [are supposed to] have beginnings, middles and endings, but disputes, while they may have beginnings and middles, do not necessarily have end points. A major gap between the story genre and the report genre is that an abuse report ends with “and the police were called, and the abuser was arrested,” while the relationship, which is the core element of the abuse story, continues. Moreover, as Merry (1990: 1) states, family law (and neighborhood dispute) cases are considered by judges, prosecutors, and court clerks to be “garbage cases,” which she explains to mean “frivolous and troublesome, and as evidence that people ‘use’ the court.” Her observations concur with mine. These types of cases are “matter out of place”, because court officials do not see them as problems that belong within the legal realm. Yet, these survivors continue to seek legal solutions to their problems with intimate-partners, and in so doing, they attempt to negotiate a space within legal institutions where their stories can be heard. However, this negotiation is not without a loss and certainly not without a cost. One might argue that paralegals adeptly perform the transformational operations required to blend the divergent legal and linguistic logic of both the survivors and the law into a single narrative fabric with recoverable heteroglossic fibers (Bakhtin 1981). Yet, such a facile conclusion cannot be made without examining, as I have attempted to do here, what the price is of having voice

 Chapter 10

in this particular process. We must ask: What is lost in the representation of domestic violence as singular, unconnected incidents for the purpose of constructing an account of abuse to obtain a protective order? The protective order interview is both a link in a chain of multiple speech events and a link that has been removed, so to speak, from the center of the sociolegal chain. As a link in the chain, some discrepancies in victims’ stories emerge due to the collaborative process of narration that necessarily entails some form of manipulating the telling of the events recounted. These alterations occur in spite of the paralegals’ attempts to minimize the gaps between the oral story and written report versions. One of the primary reasons suggested to explain why gap-minimizing techniques such as ordering, defining and controlling what can be said are employed by paralegals, is that within the face-to-face interaction where the narrative production takes place, the victims are not powerless to merely follow the rules of the interview. They assert themselves and their stories by narrating out-of-turn and by adding information that they believe to be important and relevant. The entextualization process inherent to the creation of oral texts is not sufficiently constraining to keep survivors from narrating as they see fit. And thus, beyond the site of narrative production, there may be consequences for the victim. As the paralegals are forced to work under time constraints and within the limits of the space constraints of the affidavit, they must do what Stygall (1994) calls “reducing the facts to law,” or filtering incidents and portions of events that clients consider to be pertinent and relevant to their case and to the way they represent themselves. In this way, we see that the paralegals are employed by the system to manage and handle the narratives of these survivors before higher judicial authorities hear them. Applying Merry’s observation that domestic disputes and family law in “plain court” are like “matter out of place” to the stories of domestic violence studied here, I suggest that the system’s solution to the challenge of divergent norms and ways of speaking, of knowing, and of narrating experience is to remove them from the center and relegate them to the peripheral space of a paralegal’s office. In this marginal institutional space, the paralegal is often the only legal authority that actually hears the survivor’s story. The data show that for the most part she hears it well, whether it is told in Spanish, in English or in a code-switching variety. The paralegals not only serve the court and the District Attorney’s Office by keeping issues that are not central to the law out of primary legal spaces and by binding the survivor’s account to the generic discourse of a written affidavit, but they also serve to keep Spanish out of the system as well. The paralegal successfully accomplishes the production of the survivor’s narrative for the important short-term benefit of securing a protec-

Discrepant versions and the margins 

tive order, which, for the time being, seems to be the only remedy the legal system can offer these women. In the long run though, the transformation that the system requires the paralegals to do produces a fragmented or incomplete text from which discrepancies emerge between what victims said and what they sign affidavits swearing to have said. The persistence of different norms and ways of speaking between victims and their intended interlocutors, namely the assistant district attorney and the judge, is evident as topics, time and subjective responsibility are transformed by the paralegals. In addition, referents needed to talk about taboo topics without producing offense have been shown to include ambiguous euphemisms that affect the interpretation of utterances and ultimately of narrative development. While the concept of time may be negotiated within the interviews, as paralegals attempt to direct victims to focus on specific events, and victims linguistically resist the representation of some forms of abuse as a singular happening, the data presented here show that in the written affidavit, time is nonnegotiable as iterative events are almost categorically recast as singular incidents. Certain speech acts, such as confirmation checks, have been depicted as a linguistic technique that functions like a verbal agreement between victims and paralegals who utilize them to introduce new meaning into the oral narrative in order to obtain the victim’s permission to include it on the affidavit. And women’s abilities to create themselves as experts on abuse, with respect to their situations and their abusers by giving their reasons, justifications and rationales for having acted in certain ways are erased by interviewers whose job it is to totalize, at least temporarily, the victim-aspect of a client’s identity. And finally, I have shown how the evaluative devices that victims introduce and include to explain and justify their actions or inaction, arguably as a defense mechanism to thwart the criticism they have come to expect from interlocutors, are erased in the narrative account of the affidavit. I interpret such omissions as potentially dangerous to the victim’s credibility as one can imagine how what sounds like a logical explanation within the narrative might sound like nothing more than a vain attempt to remove self-guilt if questioned by an adversarial defense attorney. Narrative, as manifest in different speech genres that happen to carry with them culturally noticeable linguistic and interpretive ideologies, is not a solid, uniform, linguistic unit. The discovery that, at a sociolinguistic level, the report genre disfigures victims’ representations of violence makes it is impossible to conclude that the narrative contained in the affidavit is inherently more factual, more ‘future-oriented’, more clearly documented, or more rational than its oral counterpart (cf. Jönsson & Linell 1991). The constellation of linguistic features

 Chapter 10

that makeup the report does not transparently represent what happened, but only acts as if it does. These features, brought together in this sphere of communication, for this particular audience, stand in as a cultural icon for clarity, truth, and rationality. Likewise, the linguistic resources that narrators bring together to tell oral stories create texts not for the sole purpose of making them come alive per se, but rather to lend them a ring of realness, authenticity, credibility, worthwhile, urgency and importance. By “break[ing]through into performance” victims do not necessarily wish to entertain their interlocutors, but they certainly want them to be interested in their cases. It is likely that victims use narrative resources that are germane to storytelling to gain their interlocutors’ sympathy and understanding. Thus, although these survivors of intimatepartner violence may be seeking a solution to the violence in their home, they may not think that the protective order is the only means to that end. Earlier, I juxtaposed the literary testimonial narrative produced by Elisabeth Burgos Debray and Rigoberta Menchú (see Chapter 3) with legal testimony to argue that the issues involving their co-production are similar. While the stories that survivors of domestic violence tell are not testimonios per se, they do present a challenge to legal discourse as their tellings confront the definitional constraints that the law insists on imposing on them (Sarat & Felstiner 1995). Yet, in the marginal space of the paralegal’s office, legal discourse prevails as the women’s stories are absorbed by it. Unlike Menchú who, according to Beverley (1993: 84), tells a story publicly that “signifies the need for a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world must be brought into question,” these women’s voices, their meanings, and the totality of their experiences have been removed from the public realm of institutions and placed in a marginal area where they may be in danger of losing their confrontational nature as they are recast in the image of ‘normal narrative’ legal testimony. For the survivors in this study though, the risk to meaning and the cost of representation created by the act of co-narration are unforeseeable in the protective order interview. As the victims sign the affidavit, they give up the discursive power that their stories might carry into the public realm of a court of law. In essence, they must settle for the fragmented and institutionalized version of their stories, unconscious of how inaccuracies or discrepancies might affect them beyond the protective order interview. Thus, data presented in this book suggest that narrative production undergoes a process of institutionalization in legal settings when lay litigants’ norms and ways of narrating diverge from the preferred, favored and expected narrative forms found in agencies and institutions. As these women enter the institution to tell their stories, what they say in person and the linguistic resources,

Discrepant versions and the margins 

or the means they employ, to define and represent their reality, their own story, are significantly changed to become something else. On the one hand, this can be interpreted as “giving voice” to victims of domestic violence to ensure that they are heard. On the other hand, it can be seen as mutating or erasing the victims’ voices, leaving a historical record in the form of a court document that does more to reflect what the law considers to be important in these cases than it does to represent what the women’s experiences are and what they consider to be of relevance. However, the interaction clients have with a service provider itself might offer to victims a narrative space from which they may be able to obtain at least an acknowledgement regarding the gravity of their situation and/or among other possibilities, a chance to construct themselves as authorities on their problems (Young 1993). Fenton (1999) too argues that not providing women a legal forum in which to tell their stories is a systemic form of silencing them. Fenton goes as far as to conclude that the legal system, in not permitting victims to have ‘voice’ through a full narration of the domestic violence story, is dangerously close to becoming an accomplice in the crimes of violence committed against women. But, having ‘voice’ and being (rendered) ‘silent’ are not binary states of being from which women themselves move in and out. Instead, they are complex personal and political stances that people attempt to take when engaged with others in the process of trying to gain rights to represent and to representation of social realities. That is, women do not merely choose to come forward and speak or remain in silence in battering relationships. Instead, once engaged, they encounter elements that either enable or hinder their abilities to represent their lived experience. As interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function come together with the ways in which genres ideologically mediate narrative messages, the act of transformation for immediate and archival purposes ascribes ‘voice’, but renders critical characteristics of it silent. My analysis of Latina women’s narratives of domestic violence has cut a broad cloth in its attempt to understand narrative alteration. In so doing, I have tried to underscore the fact that norms and ways Latina women exploit to represent violence are re-presented and in some cases, altered by the system. This linguistic case study of the transformation of oral stories into written reports is one means by which we might glimpse an answer to Spivak’s (1988) question: Can the subaltern speak? Beverley (1999: 2) reminds us that “[p]ower is related to representation: which representations have cognitive authority or can secure hegemony, which do not have authority or are not hegemonic.” Obviously the Latina women in this study speak, but what they say is intercepted and inter-

 Chapter 10

preted according to hegemonic notions of narrative and narrators that reproduce positions of the powerful and the powerless that are indexed by genre along gendered lines. In this case, the reproduction of women’s powerlessness is achieved through omission, alteration, disfiguration and distortion of their stories in order to achieve a temporary and individual solution to the insidious and societal problem of violence against women.

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Appendix

Glossary of legal terms*

abuse: 1. A departure from legal or reasonable use; misuse. 2. Physical or mental maltreatment. adversary system: A procedural system, such as the Anglo-American legal system, involving active and unhindered parties contesting with each other to put forth a case before an independent decision-maker. affidavit: A voluntary declaration of facts written down and sworn to by the declarant before an officer authorized to administer oaths. A great deal of evidence is submitted by affidavit, especially in pretrial matters. arrest: The taking or keeping of a person in custody by legal authority, especially in response to a criminal charge. assault: Criminal and tort law. The threat or use of force on another that causes that person to have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. assistant district attorney: One of the prosecutors employed by the state and serving under the authority of either the elected or appointed official who oversees the prosecution of all criminal cases in a particular judicial district. bar association: An organization of members of the legal profession. charge: To accuse a person of criminal conduct. child support: A parent’s legal obligation to contribute to the economic maintenance and education of a child. The obligation is enforceable both civilly and criminally. In a custody or divorce action, child support is the money legally owed by one parent to the other for the expenses incurred for children of the marriage. civil court: A court with jurisdiction over noncriminal cases.

 Appendix

civil law: The law of civil or private rights, as opposed to criminal law or administrative law. complainant: The party who brings a legal complaint against another; especially, the plaintiff in a civil suit. A complainant may also be a person who, under oath, signs a statement (called a ‘complaint’) establishing reasonable grounds to believe that some named person has committed a crime. coverture: the condition of being a married woman under former law, a woman under coverture was allowed to sue only through the personality of her husband. criminal law: The body of law defining offenses against the community at large, regulating how suspects are investigated, charged and tried, and establishing punishment for convicted offenders. criminal offense: A violation of the law; a crime. A social harm that the law makes punishable. custody: The care, control, and maintenance of a child awarded by a court to a relative, usually one of the parents, in a divorce or separation proceeding. D.A.: Common abbraviation for District Attorney. defendant: A person sued in a civil proceeding or accused in a criminal proceeding. district attorney: A public official appointed or elected to represent the state in criminal cases in a particular judicial district; PROSECUTOR. –Abbr. D.A. Also termed public prosecutor, state’s attorney. district attorney’s office: The office of a public official appointed or elected to represent the state in criminal cases in a particular judicial district. docket: A formal record in which a judge or court clerk briefly notes all the proceedings and filings in a court case. domestic violence: Violence between members of a household, usually spouses; an assault or other violent act committed by one member of a household. ex parte: As an adverb, on or from one party only, usually without notice to or argument from the adverse party. As an adjective, done or made at the instance and for the benefit of one party only, and without notice to, or argument by, any person adversely interested.

Glossary of legal terms 

family code/family law: The body of law dealing with marriage, divorce, adoption, child custody, child support and other domestic relations. felony: A serious crime usually punishable by imprisonment for more than one year or by death. Examples include murder, rape, arson and burglary. harassment: Words, conduct, or action (usually repeated or persistent) that, being directed at a specific person, annoys, alarms, or causes substantial emotional distress in that person and serves no legitimate purpose. Harassment is actionable in some circumstances, as when a creditor uses threatening or abusive tactics to collect a debt. Sexual harassment consists in verbal or physical abuse of a sexual nature. hearsay: Traditionally, testimony that is given by a witness who relates not what he or she knows personally, but what others have said, and that is therefore dependent on the credibility of someone other than the witness. Such testimony is generally inadmissible under the rules of evidence. impeach: To discredit the veracity of a witness. injunction: A court order commanding or preventing an action. To get an injunction, the complainant must show that there is no plain, adequate, and complete remedy at law and that an irreparable injury will result unless relief is granted. jurisprudence: 1. Originally (in the 18th century), the study of the first principles of the law of nature, the civil law, and the law of nations. 2. More modernly, the study of the general or fundamental elements of a particular legal system, as opposed to its practical and concrete details. 3. The study of legal systems in general. litigant: A party to a lawsuit. mediation: A method of nonbinding dispute resolution involving a neutral third party who tries to help the disputing parties reach a mutually agreeable solution. misdemeanor: A crime that is less serious than a felony and is usually punishable by fine, penalty, forfeiture, or confinement (usually for a brief term) in a place, other than prison (such as a county jail). Also termed minor crime or summary offense. oath: 1. A solemn declaration, accompanied by a swearing to God or a revered person or thing, that one’s statement is true or that one will be bound to a

 Appendix

promise. The person making the oath implicitly invites punishment if the statement is untrue or the promise broken. The legal effect of an oath is to subject the person to penalties for perjury if the testimony is false. P.O.: Common abbreviation for protective order. paralegal: A person who assists a lawyer in duties related to the practice of law but who is not a licensed attorney. parental kidnapping: The kidnapping of a child by one parent in violation of the other parent’s custody or visitation rights. pro bono: Being or involving uncompensated legal services performed especially for the public good. pro se: One who represents oneself in a court proceeding without assistance of a lawyer. Also termed pro per. protective order: A court order prohibiting or restricting a person from harassing, threatening and. . .even approaching another specified person. This type of order is issued most commonly in cases of domestic violence. Also termed protection from abuse (pfa); protection order, restraining order. small claims court: A court that informally and expeditiously adjudicates claims that seek damages below a specified monetary amount, usually claims to collect small accounts or debts. rape: Unlawful sexual activity, especially intercourse, with a person without consent and usually by force or threat of injury. sexual assault: Sexual intercourse with another person without that person’s consent. Several state statutes have abolished the crime of rape and replaced it with sexual assault. Sexual assault may also be defined as offensive sexual contact with another person exclusive of rape. spousal abuse: Physical, sexual or psychological abuse inflicted by one spouse on another spouse. state bar association: An association or group of attorneys that have been admitted to practice law in a given state. State bar associations are usually created by statute, and membership is often mandatory for those who practice law in the state. Unlike voluntary, professional development bar associations, such as the American Bar Association, state bar associations often have the authority to regulate the legal profession, by undertaking such matters as disciplining attor-

Glossary of legal terms 

neys and bringing lawsuits against those who participate in the unauthorized practice of law. testimony: Evidence that a competent witness under oath or affirmation gives at trial or in an affidavit or deposition. Also termed personal evidence. violation: An infraction or breach of the law; a transgression.

Note * Legal definitions come from Black’s Law Dictionary: Seventh Edition (1999).

Author index

A Allan, K. 229, 230, 237 Alonso, A. 34 Álvarez, C. 24, 26, 119 Arias, A. 44, 54 Arthur, B. 1 Asmus, M. 60 Atkinson, J. M. 5 Auer, P. 21 Azevedo, M. 226 B Bailey, B. 49 Bakhtin, M. 4, 42, 51, 125, 126, 269, 273 Bamberg, M. 2 Barthes, R. 23 Bauman, R. 2, 4, 5, 12, 14, 22, 38, 51, 52, 122, 123, 126–128, 188, 214, 215 Bergen, R. K. 177, 225, 242, 266 Berk-Seligson, S. 1, 7, 22, 36, 106, 118, 223, 267 Berman, L. 226, 265 Betancourt, H. 46 Beverley, J. 43, 44, 276, 277 Blommaert, J. 2, 51 Bloomfield, L. 230 Blum, S. D. 17, 18 Bodman, J. 48 Bogoch, B. 49 Bolis, M. 187 Bonilla-Santiago, G. 190 Bourdieu, P. 5, 51 Bradford, G. 1 Brenneis, D. 29, 30, 273

Bricourt, J. 266 Briggs, C. 2, 4, 5, 12, 14, 41–45, 49, 51, 52, 60, 106, 107, 121–123, 126–128, 183, 188, 214, 215, 270 Brown, A. 89, 164, 227, 230 Brown, P. 89, 164, 227, 230 Bulcaen, C. 51 Burgos-Debray, E. 43, 54, 55 Burridge, K. 229, 230, 237 Butler, J. 22, 38 Buzawa, C. G. 85 Buzawa, E. S. 85 C Capps, L. 36 Carranza, M. A. 1 Chávez, C. 190 Chafe, W. 125, 178 Chandler, S. M. 7 Chatman, S. 23 Cicourel, A. V. 12, 60, 164 Clair, R. P. 59, 60 Cohen, S. 3 Conley, J. M. 2, 5, 25, 49, 93, 106, 117, 124, 134, 155, 160, 161, 176, 177, 196, 237, 248, 266, 267, 270, 271, 273 Cook-Gumperz, J. 33 Cortazzi, M. 1993 23, 29 Coulthard, M. 217, 219 D Dahl, P. 35 Daniels, C. R. 198 de la Vega, E. 226

 Author index

Diaz-Duque, O. F. 2, 7, 226 Dingwall, R. 170 Douglas, M. 220, 221, 223 Drew, P. 5, 126 Dumas, B. 35 Dunn, B. 74, 180 Duranti, A. 43, 121 Dwyer, D. C. 266 Dziegielewski, S. F. 266 E Eaton, M. 14 Eggins, S. 125, 128, 216 Ehrlich, S. 38, 200, 201, 205, 212 Eisenstein, M. 48 Enchautegui, M. 7 Enright, K. 190 Ervin-Tripp, S. 264 Ewick, P. 5, 42 F Fairclough, N. 51, 216 Fanshel, D. 23–26, 28 Felman, S. 3 Felstiner, W. 5, 138, 270, 271, 276 Fenton, Z. 277 Fiksdal, S. 41, 80 Fisher, E. R. 2, 7 Fisher, S. 2, 7 Fitzgerald, L. 227 Ford, D. A. 190 Foucault, M. 165 Franco, J. N. 257 Frank, G. 33, 167 Frohmann, L. 6, 266 G Gamache, D. 60 García, C. 48, 70, 88, 190 García, D. 48, 70, 88, 190 Gavey, N. 242 Germain, A. 226 Giles, H. 1 Goffman, E. 5, 12, 22, 43, 57–59, 67, 87, 115, 159, 178

Gondolf, E. W. 7 González, M. 190 González-López, G. 265, 268 Goodman, L. A. 227 Gottman, J. M. 160 Greatbatch, D. 170 Grice, H. P. 174 Grimes, L. 226, 230, 268 Grossen, M. 80 Guha, R. 183 Gumperz, J. J. 5, 48, 95, 119, 122 Gunnarsson, B. 33 H Hall, K. 45 Hanks, W. F. 269 Haviland, J. B. 29, 165, 271 Heise, L. 226 Heritage, J. 5, 40, 72 Herman, J. L. 115, 119, 197 Hickmann, M. 21 Hirsch, S. F. 2, 38, 52–54, 222 Holmes, K. E. 7, 187, 226 Holtzworht-Munroe, A. 160 Hymes, D. 2, 7, 17, 18, 22, 29, 43, 46, 51, 159, 220, 270 I Irvine, J. M. 226 J Jönsson, L. 202, 275 Jacobson, N. S. 160 Jacquemet, M. 123, 125 Jaworski, A. 156 Jefferson, G. 5, 24, 41, 42, 131, 156 Johnstone, B. 45 K Kalcik, S. 111 Kany, C. 226, 230 Kashima, Y. 46 Keita, G. 227

Author index 

Kelly, L. 266 Kerstetter, W. A. 6 Klein, A. R. 61 Koss, M. 227 Krause, N. 266 Kress, G. 5, 219 Kroskrity, P. V. 45 L Labov, W. 2, 11, 23–28, 36, 38, 39, 41, 99, 102, 105, 156, 172, 188, 192, 265, 270 LaFree, G. 8 Lakoff, R. 230 Lamb, S. 14, 242 Larrain, S. 226 Laub, D. 3 Lazarus-Black, M. 190, 221, 248, 249 Le Vine, E. 257 Lefley, H. 226 Levinson, S. 89, 164, 230 Linde, C. 3, 17, 24, 25, 32, 35, 40, 187 Linell, P. 202, 275 Lippi-Green, R. 1 Lipstadt, D. 49 Livia, A. 45 Low, G. 225 Lucy, J. 21 M MacLeod, L. 85 Mandelbaum, J. 47 Marcos, L. 46, 48 Marcus, I. 36, 197 Marin, G. 46, 48 Martin, P. Y. 8, 125, 128, 181, 216 Maryns, K. 2 Maschke, K. J. 198 Matoesian, G. M. 5, 6, 19, 20, 29, 187, 200, 266 Mawby, R. I 34 Maynard, D. 5 McFerron, J. 7 Medrano, L. 226

Menchú, R. 43, 44, 50, 54, 55, 276 Merry, S. E. 34, 49, 118, 134, 189, 220, 270, 273, 274 Mertz, E. 19 Mey, J. L. 51, 95 Michael, R. 226 Mills, L. 89, 180 Mumby, D. K. 59, 60 N Norrick, N. R.

31, 165

O O’Barr 2, 5, 25, 49, 93, 106, 117, 124, 134, 160, 161, 176, 177, 196, 237, 248, 266, 267, 270, 271, 273 O’Grady 21 Oboler, S. 14 Ochs, E. 5, 31, 36, 125, 165 Ong, W. J. 125 Organista, K. C. 225 P Philips, S. 5, 17, 128, 165, 231 Pitanguy, J. 226 Polanyi, L. 5, 11, 24, 30, 31, 40, 41, 53, 54, 108, 109, 115, 121, 144, 159, 165, 172, 192 Pomerantz, A. 5 Poplack, S. 119 Powell, M. R. 8, 181 Powesland, P. 1 Profit, N. J. 85 Propp, V. 23 Ptacek, J. 85, 134, 144 R Raikes, A. 226 Rarrar, D. 1 Rennie, H. 242 Resnick, C. 266 Richards, J. C. 125 Riessman, C. K. 2, 7, 49 Rivera, J. 190

 Author index

Romero, M. 197 Rodríguez, T. 226 Roth, A. 39 Ruch, L. O. 7 Rumsey, A. 18, 19, 21, 26, 29, 192 Russell, D. 177, 225 Russo, N. 227 Ryan, E. B. 1 S Sacks, H. 5, 24, 41, 131, 156 Sanchez, R. 7 Sanday, P. R. 6 Sarat, A. 5, 138, 270, 271, 276 Scarry, E. 197 Schegloff, E. A. 5, 24, 41, 50, 131, 138, 156 Schiffrin, D. 5, 20, 26, 31, 40, 43, 45, 165, 171, 172, 208 Scollon, R. 46, 48, 50, 80, 131 Shepard, M. F. 89 Sherzer, J. 30 Shultz, J. 41, 80 Silbey, S. 5 Silva-Corvalán 8, 36, 270 Skerry, P. 14 Slembrouck, S. 217, 219 Smith, R. C. 5, 165 Smokowski, P. 266 Sommer, D. 43 Sorjonen, M. L. 126 Sperber, D. 174 Spivak, G. 277 Stanko, E. 6 Stoll, D. 43–45, 54 Stratman, J. F. 35 Stuart, G. 160 Stygall, G. 5, 125, 274 T Tannen, D. 7, 49, 118, 125, 171, 174, 178, 179, 181, 190, 247 Taylor, C. E. 5, 165 Thomas, D. 198 Tiersma, P. 33 Toolan, M. 23, 246

Torres, S. 197 Triandis, H. C. 46 Trinch, S. L. 36, 81, 89, 106, 118, 171, 227, 228, 267 Trujillo, M. 46, 48 Turner, V. 118 U Ullmann, S. 226, 230 V Valdés, G. 103, 190 Valencia, R. R. 7 van der Kolk, B. A. 3 van Dijk, T. A. 59, 124 van Leuween, T. 34 Vershueren, J. 34 W Waletzky, J. 2, 11, 23–28, 36, 38, 39, 41, 99, 102, 105, 172, 188, 192, 265, 270 Walker, A. G. 23, 60, 217, 219 Walker, G. 23, 60, 217, 219 Walklate, S. 34 Watts, C. 226 White, G. 33, 225 Williams, J. E. 7, 187, 226 Wilson, D. 54, 174 Wilson, R. 54, 174 Wodak, R. 5, 7, 25, 49, 51, 187, 216, 270 Wodarski, J. 266 Wolfson, N. 22 Wood, L. 242 Woodbury, H. 5 Woolard, K. A. 17 Y Yllö, K. 225, 227 Young, M. A. 225, 227 Z Zwi, A.

226

Subject index

A abogado 72 abuse 37, 65, 66, 69, 72–80, 85, 87 accounts of 1–4 common themes of 197–199 defining 173 eliciting reports of 97–99 ethnic composition of survivors of 10–13 experts on 180 and institutional memory 31–34 interviewer responses to narratives of 110–112, 114–119 narrative representations of 110–112, 114–119 and (not) obtaining protective orders 91–94, 162–165 and police reports 90–91 sexual 231–233, 235, 237, 238, 241–243 temporal contextualization of 106–108, 208–211 verbal 19 abuser 8, 14 and child custody 86 and criminal charges 39 and ex parte orders 65 and the sociolegal system 75–78 and warning letters 11, 118 victim’s representation of 183–185, 187–190, 193–198, 200–208 act of advocacy 89, 187 of aggression 20

disappearing 131, 143 of interpreting 190 Married Women’s Property 36 of narrating 34 of sexual assault 256, 261 of sexual violence 227, 235, 237 speech 94, 216 of telling 16, 29 of transformation 277 Violence Against Women 76, 77 advocacy 8, 60, 7–73, 131, 163 agencies 197, 272 defining 171 and gatekeeping 89 oriented institutions 153 work 79–82 affidavit 12, 33, 79, 106, 108, 111 constitution of 98–100 disappearing acts and 127–130, 139–144 and hearsay narratives 134–135 as legal genre 127–130, 159 and representation 155, 231–233 sample 37, 100 and sexual violence 231–233, 235, 236, 239–243, 251, 254–258, 263–265 as speech act 94 and stories vs. reports 115–118, 175–176, 180, 181, 183, 187–188, 192–196, 199–208, 214–219, 274–276 structure of 121, 161 as text 121–125 and voice 221, 295, 299

 Subject index

African-American as ethnic group 225 judges 79 social categories of 45 women 10 aggravate 201, 235 alteration and deletion 129 in global organization of narrative 206–214 and narrative transformation 3, 79, 152, 199, 277–278 and negotiation of sexual assault story 250–264 purpose of 225 of time 192 alternation and co-occurence 264, 265, 270 Anglo as ethnic group 45 judge 78 linguistic norms 7 men 10 women 242, 257, 258, 261 animator 156, 159, 202 anomalous 184, 187, 194 Anytown 7–9, 16, 34, 38, 60–62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 74, 76, 78, 79, 85, 87, 91, 157, 190, 210 apologizing 48 archives 6, 44, 91, 191, 227, 266 assistant district attorney 62, 86, 98, 99, 101, 115, 127, 130, 159, 188, 196, 275, 295 audience 32, 40, 47, 63, 115, 117, 138, 190, 270, 276 Australia 18 authenticity 43, 217, 276 author 38, 39, 54, 115, 156, 159, 202 authority 1, 2, 52, 54, 106, 180, 295 cultural performance of 22, 33, 91, 206, 270, 274, 277 institutional 80, 87, 163 and narrative ideologies 118, 127, 191, 220, 222, 247, 248

of the narrator 50 signs of 5 B back-channeling device 156, 247 background 8, 104, 140, 168, 170–172, 176, 177, 227, 272 bailiff 64 battered women backgrounds of 7–8 as experts 86, 180 and institutions 12–13, 58, 82, 126–127 and Latinas 197 and the margins of the Crimina Justice System 189, 221 and narrative 272 and protective orders 162–163, 212 services for 61–78 bilingual 8, 46, 97, 103, 145 border 221 C Canada 200, 201, 212 case managers 66–69, 71–74, 79, 83, 84 child custody 39, 63, 75, 76, 78, 146, 148, 150, 297 children and custody 76–78, 86, 201 as interpreters 180–183, 190 and narrative 31 and the protective order interview 47, 62–67, 69, 91, 163 and threats 103, 105–108, 114 threats to take 118, 157, 197 as witnesses 138, 140, 142, 182, 183, 190 and Youth Services 127 class 25, 51, 67, 135, 136, 165 client 14 advocacy and gatekeeping 80–83, 87–91

Subject index 

eliciting reports from 94–98 ethnographic details about 162 and the District Attorney’s Office 70, 72 intake forms 9 and interactive institutions 58–60 interviews 69 and legal services 76 and narrative turns 130–141 population in the Shelter 66 co-authorship 115 co-narrators 47 co-occurrence 264, 265 co-performance 115 co-production 5, 12, 125, 276 coda 23, 26, 112, 114, 138, 139 code-switching 103, 119, 193, 270, 274 cognate 72 collaborators 153 common ground 31 complicating action and affidavits 99, 101, 104–105 and chronology 208 initiating events for 186–187 interpreting the 230, 261, 265 and the Labovian model 23, 25–26 lack of 112 and the women speaking 114, 172, 181–184 confirmation checks 202–204, 216, 275 conflict 11, 29, 85, 161, 165, 273 content of affidavits 217, 220 and disappearing discoures 129, 150 and form of particular texts 17 narrative structure, function and 35 referential meaning and 29 relevant 174–175 semantic 22

and speech event 49 and speech genre 4, 51, 54 of stories and reports 156, 161, 271, 272 thematic 13, 125,127, 269 context and the appearance or absence of narrative elements 40–44 -dependent texts 17 and genre 126, 128 influence of 46–47, 49 interactional work and 20, 22 interpreting meaning from 244, 259 interview 263, 265, 268 of narrative production 53, 121–124, 229–231 pragmatic 102 the reporting 226, 250 as world spoken of and world spoken in 230 contextualization cues 48, 95–97, 122, 136, 174, 215 control abuser 111, 119, 197 discursive 91, 94, 97, 121, 131, 210, 247, 249 and interactive institutions 58 organizational 60 conversation analysis 41, 225 conversational historical present 220, 252 counselor 77, 245 court 116, 189 and direct quotation 21–23 injunction 4 and protective orders 61–64, 75–79, 84–86, 162–163 small claims 2, 49, 93, 106, 196, 270–274 courthouse 78, 91, 162, 190 courtroom 5, 21, 63, 64, 78, 84, 123, 192 coverture 33, 36, 296

 Subject index

credibility cultural performance of 22, 206 icons for 91 impeaching credibility 199–200 and narrative 26, 43 questioning of 144, 152 and the recent complaint rule 212, 214 and representations of abuse 1 and stories and reports 54 and victims 6, 132, 161, 166, 180, 243, 247, 275, 276 and written accounts 33 Critical Intervention Teams 73, 74 culture 11, 16, 18, 32, 46, 48, 50, 52–54, 125, 178, 216, 222, 223, 226, 268, 269 Cycle of Violence 69, 73

D danger of missing information 151 of narrative transformation 28, 54, 276 physical 134, 197 declaration 146, 148, 241, 295, 297 decontextualization 122–124 decontextualize 52, 123 defendant 14, 93, 94, 232, 236, 241, 257, 296 dialogue 35, 58, 71, 111, 153 directness 228–233, 235–238, 239, 264 direct quotes 20, 21 direct reported speech 19, 20 disclosure 266 of abuse 69 and ethnicity 48 of sexual violence 225, 227, 233, 241, 244, 250, 257 discourse markers 172, 208, 217 distance 45, 48, 97, 128 docket 78, 84, 86, 296 domestic violence processing 8

domestic violence questionnaire form 93, 98, 215 E empowerment 85, 89, 135 English American 72 and bilingualism 8, 104–105, 119 and children 190 as contextulization cue 97 and interpreters 150–151 and interviewers 145 narratives in 30–31, 219–220 and police officers 182–183 and reported speech 18–20 sociolinguistic competence in 45–47, 145 entextualization 17, 122, 159, 164, 166, 174, 235, 274 entextualize 52, 123, 158 ethnicity 10, 25, 45, 46, 49, 51 ethnography 57, 194, 249 of speaking 43, 48 euphemism 226, 230, 235, 237, 238, 241, 244, 250, 255, 257, 263, 268 evaluation clauses 26 evaluative 26, 105, 176–181, 191, 247, 261, 275 exiting 67 expectation 16–18, 22, 23, 35, 36, 38, 43, 174, 178, 247 expert 164 F face 2, 15, 37, 89, 136, 187, 190, 207, 241, 252 family code 130, 153, 297 features bundling of 21 context-sensitive 44–45 semantic 229, 230, 235, 269, 275, 276 feminist 86, 198 fieldwork 7, 77, 227

Subject index 

forced sex 229, 233, 242, 250, 251, 255, 263 frames 90, 97, 107, 178, 179, 181 G gap intertextual 128, 214–216, 273 gatekeeping 80–82, 88, 89, 131 gender 22, 25, 45, 48, 49, 51–53, 177, 221, 249, 257 generic past time narrative 108, 109 generic present time narrative 110, 112, 136, 139, 141, 193, 195 género 52 genre 269, 273, 275, 278 narrative 4, 8, 12, 52, 144, 156 report 39, 91, 97, 159, 161, 162, 164, 175, 177, 188–190, 246–248 and representation 125–128 and social hierarchies 51–53 story 39, 91, 159, 161, 164, 165, 177, 214–216 goal 2, 5, 28, 40, 122, 125, 139, 155, 161, 215, 272 grassroots 32, 34, 81 Gricean maxim 174 Guatemala 43, 44, 54 H harassment 63, 78, 93, 118, 134, 173, 194, 297 hearsay 134, 135, 139, 141, 297 hegemonic 50, 155, 248, 277 hegemony 249, 277 hierarchies 51, 61 Hispanic 14, 46, 127 humanists 43 human rights 198 I icon 269, 276 iconicity 38 identity 275

of battered women 77, 107, 242 client 86–87 complexities of 45 as ethnographer 83 interactive institutions and 58–59, 71–72 legal 33 performing 202–205 victim-of-a-crime 164–165, 198, 223 Immigrant Survivor Project 76 Immigration and Naturalization Services 111 incident report 210 index 51, 52, 107, 202, 220, 269 Indigenous 43, 44 indirect reported speech 19 inequality 51, 59, 60 institutionalization 5, 57, 276 institutional memory 3, 32–35, 69, 228, 232, 236 and culture 221 and discrepancy 155–157, 227, 238–239, 243, 265–266 incomplete 155–157 and interactive institutions 57–58, 65 and public documents 39 recording 173 and representations of abuse 99, 191, 194, 249–250 intake forms 12, 92, 99, 102, 105, 117, 173, 211 interactional achievement 5 interactional goals 43 interactional trouble 118, 151, 170, 208, 247 interactive institutions 58–60, 79, 82, 83 intercultural communication 9, 12, 13, 46 interpreters children as 190 in court proceedings 22, 223 and discrepancy 145, 151

 Subject index

influence of 263, 267 family and friends as 77, 240 volunteer 86 interpretive ideologies 16, 50, 225, 266, 269, 275, 277 intertextual 4, 9, 50, 128, 164, 165, 215, 228, 266 intertextuality 12, 50, 126, 174, 265 J judge and affidavits 99, 101, 115–117, 144, 159, 196, 275 and discrepancy 152 presiding over protective order hearings 63, 77, 78 and referrals for protective orders 127 K kernel narrative 112, 121, 134, 141, 240, 272 L Labovian narrative and affidavits 117, 156 vs. generic narrative types 192, 196 and linear structure 93, 99 and normal narrative 111, 187 and reports 159 victim’s resisting 249 language 5–7 ideologies 17–23, 37–39, 50, 51, 91 and interpretive ideologies of narrative 17–23, 26, 37–39 of the interview 45–52 legal 35, 216 Latina 1–3, 7–13, 225–229, 271–273 Latino 7–10, 14, 45, 46, 48, 79, 226 law 6–9 and divorce 74–77

and Immigration and Naturalization Services 111 and language 35 and language ideology 18, 21 and protective orders 61–63, 71, 111, 162–164, 271–274, 276, 277 lay litigants 35, 49, 117, 134, 155, 160, 196, 270, 271, 276 legalese 202, 229, 231, 237, 265 Legal Services 57, 72, 74–76, 79, 81, 85, 127, 298 liminality 118 linear narrative 102–104, 114, 160, 265 linguistic ideology 6, 11, 12, 18, 19, 34, 36, 53, 54 literature 36, 52, 65, 66, 68, 73, 125, 187, 190, 225 logic 23, 28, 30, 91, 191, 220, 271, 273 M manipulation 13 marginalization 3 marital rape 177, 229 mediation Court 77, 78, 84 Menchú 43, 44, 50, 54, 55, 276 metalanguage 51, 95, 174, 215 metalinguistic 52, 166, 170, 174 metaphorical 244 Mexican-American 14, 103, 104, 119, 257, 258, 265, 268 Mexico 34, 190, 265, 268 mitigate 90, 201, 235 N narrative clauses 25, 41, 104, 179 function 16, 26, 28, 31, 36, 38 path 80, 247 performance 22, 26, 38, 52, 119, 123, 132, 269, 270 for pragmatic purposes 270

Subject index

production 6, 12, 22, 32, 37–40, 45, 47, 49, 58, 124, 196, 230, 270, 274, 276, 277 resources 101, 102, 117, 125, 276 structure 11, 15, 17, 23, 25, 31, 35, 36, 39, 93, 99, 111, 188 trajectory 151, 165, 247 turn 118, 129, 132, 133, 138, 139, 143, 150, 174, 176 negative face 89 Ngarinyin 18 non-standard 1, 2, 221 norms and ways of narrating 2, 91, 121, 145, 171, 221, 250, 276 of speaking 7, 46, 48, 49, 264, 265, 270, 274, 275 O obscenities 18–20, 183, 202, 258, 259 official version 37 omission 121, 132, 166, 174, 191, 278 opposition 121, 261 oral narrative 101, 275 and euphemistic speech 252, 256 and gap-minimizing, gap-maximizing techniques 216, 219 vs. written narrative 121–125, 128, 132, 159, 176, 180, 181, 188, 193, 199, 200, 206 orientation clauses 24, 25, 100, 104, 106, 161, 196, 218 overall evaluation 100, 101, 218 overall orientation 92, 99, 100, 218 ownership 37, 38, 49, 50 P packaging 50, 51, 125 perception 35, 155, 191, 221 performance 22

breakthrough into 270, 276 cultural 217, 220 and entextualization 17, narrative 38, 52, 54, 123, 132, 269 performative texts 22, 91, 219, 270 phonological 1, 2 phonology 104 plagiarism 50 police 34, 66, 68–71, 73, 74, 81 and narrative resolutions 161 reports cost of 69 functions of 33 importance of making 70, 88–90 referrals from 126–127 as Spanish or English speakers 190 complaints about 198, 30 politeness 48, 89 positive face 89 pragmatics of inclusion 248 principal 156, 159, 178, 181, 202 prior discourse 19, 50, 71, 127 Pro Bono Law Clinic 7–9, 18, 21, 62, 63, 71, 85, 87, 118, 132, 145, 162, 163, 222 protective orders Anytown’s District Attorney’s Office and 61–62 applying for 91–101 definition of 4 and divorce 74–75 institutions providing 7 process of applying for 37–39 social characteristics of applicants for 9–11 Someville’s Pro Bono Law Clinic and 62–65 R rape accounts and discrepancies 260–268



 Subject index

and euphemism 250–252, 255, 256, 258 and Latina women 225, 227–234 processing 8 recent complaint rule 212 representations of 205–207 and utmost resistance 200–201 and ways of recording 236–244 recency 173, 212, 269 reference 19 drive for 26, 28 referential function 11, 28, 35, 38 vs. social meaning 29 vs. strategic meaning 20, 21, 23, 26 relevance 24, 53, 123, 134, 144, 277 report affidavits and the 99–102 discrepancies and the 135, 144 of domestic violence 8 eliciting a 94–99, 115–117 official 3, 13 vs. story genre 151–152, 155–156, 159–162, 164–166, 210–212, 269–271, 273–275 textual production of the 122–129 written 4, 195–198, 214–216 reported speech 19, 20, 52, 177, 220, 228, 270 representation 12–13, 22, 91, 155, 219, 221, 270, 273, 275–277 and authenticity 50 internal 178 and ownership 37 and sexual violence 241, 243, 248, 251 and signs of authority 5–6 of truth 26, 28, 44 victim’s 183, 189, 204 representational resources 5, 194, 219, 266 resistance 165, 261

collective 249 to institutionalization 5, 117 physical actions of 204–205, 238 sites of 143, 238 restraining orders 85, 249 revisionist history 49 Rigoberta Menchú 43, 44, 54, 55, 276 routines and responsibilities 131 Rule of Narrative Sequencing 25, 28 S self-defense 203, 204 sexual assault 263–267 narrative discrepancy and 235–243 and negotiation of meaning 246, 247, 250, 252, 254–261 taboo topic of 213 stories and reports of 225–228 ways of recording 231–233 sexuality 225, 226, 268 shelter residents 65, 67 as interactive institution 65–67 workers 83, 84 silence 45, 55, 136–138, 144, 156, 277 small claims court 2, 49, 93, 106, 196, 271, 298 social order 1, 29 stigma 265 societal bilingualism 8, 104 sociolinguistic competence 45, 231, 264 sociolinguistics 2, 23, 270 sociopragmatic failure 48 solidarity 48, 165 Someville 7, 8, 18, 60–62, 64, 71, 77, 78, 84, 85, 87, 190, 241 Spanish 8, 52, 72, 129, 194, 229 and abuse 182–183 and authority 274

Subject index

and code-switching 220 as contextualization cue 97 and discrepancy 150, 252, 262 and English 18–20, 104 and interpreters 77, 78 and language of the interview 45–47, 217–219 and monolingual English-speaking Latina interviewers 119 and monolingual English-speaking service providers 190, 274 speak outs 32 specificity 21, 22, 106, 269, 273 spectrum 228–231, 235–237, 239, 256 speech act 48, 94, 131, 171 speech community 1, 225, 226 speech genres 38, 51, 52, 125, 126, 225, 275 spheres of communication 51, 220 standard 1, 2, 18, 26, 76, 86, 87, 99, 188, 212, 270 Standard Average European 18, 26 story and discrepancy 155, 166, 183 entextualization of 123–127 as narrative genre 38–39, 41–44, 144, 151–152, 235 vs. report 3–4, 13, 101–102, 111, 115–117, 157–161, 164, 175–178, 188–189, 201–203, 208 structure 30–32, 38, 39, 41–44, 195–196 themes 198, 211 subaltern 49, 277

T taboo 213, 220, 221, 225, 226, 231, 237, 242, 243, 248–250, 253, 254, 265–268, 275 temporal juncture 25, 99, 104, 172, 211, 214 terrorism 197 testimonial narrative 276 testimonio 43, 44 textual production 122, 215 thematic content 4, 13, 125, 127, 220, 269 total institutions 12, 57–60, 67, 83 training manual 21, 22, 70, 144, 153 transformation 3, 21, 39, 128, 155, 192, 195, 222, 225, 269, 275, 277 trauma 3, 81, 115, 119 truth 1, 2, 6, 15, 17, 18, 22, 26, 28, 29, 35, 38, 42–44, 49, 51, 94, 123, 125, 191, 214, 226, 269, 276 turn-taking 40–42, 131 U Ungarinyin

18, 19

V variation 9, 125, 186, 227, 231, 237, 266 Violence Against Women Act 76, 77 voice 50, 55, 135, 159, 194, 221, 273, 277 W walk-in 68 wife rape 227 written language 219

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In the series IMPACT: STUDIES IN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1. PÜTZ, Martin (ed.): Language Choices. Conditions, constraints, and consequences. 1997. 2. KIBBEE, Douglas A. (ed.): Language Legislation and Linguistic Rights. Selected Proceedings of the Language Legislation and Linguistic Rights Conference, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March, 1996. 1998. 3. LINELL, Per: Approaching Dialogue. Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives. 1998. 4. OWENS, Jonathan: Neighborhood and Ancestry. Variation in the spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria. 1998. 5. ANDREWS, David R.: Sociocultural Perspectives on Language Change in Diaspora. Soviet immigrants in the United States. 1999. 6. RICENTO, Thomas (ed.): Ideology, Politics and Language Policies. Focus on English. 2000. 7. McCAFFERTY, Kevin: Ethnicity and Language Change. English in (London)Derry, Northern Ireland. 2001. 8. ARMSTRONG, Nigel: Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French. A comparative approach. 2001. 9. HELLINGER, Marlis and Hadumod BUßMANN (eds.): Gender Across Languages. The linguistic representation of women and men: Volume I. 2001. 10. HELLINGER, Marlis and Hadumod BUßMANN (eds.): Gender Across Languages. The linguistic representation of women and men. Volume 2. 2002. 11. HELLINGER, Marlis and Hadumod BUßMANN (eds.): Gender Across Languages. The linguistic representation of women and men. Volume 3. 2003. 12. OKITA, Toshie: Invisible Work. Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families. 2002. 13. OAKES, Leigh: Language and National Identity. Comparing France and Sweden. 2001. 14. WEBB, Vic: Language in South Africa. The role of language in national transformation, reconstruction and development. 2002. 15. BOXER, Diana: Applying Sociolinguistics. Domains and face-to-face interaction. 2002. 16. BRITAIN, David and Jenny CHESHIRE (eds.): Social Dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill. 2003. 17. TRINCH, Shonna L.: Latinas' Narratives of Domestic Abuse. Discrepant versions of violence. 2003. 18. DEUMERT, Ana and Wim VANDENBUSSCHE (eds.): Germanic Standardizations. Past to Present. N.Y.P.