Comment #: VA174
Rating:1.0
Comments:
Unfortunately, the justice system is a place where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose because women telling stories of abuse by their male partners are simply not believed. Entering Judge Sutton's courtroom is clear that she either lacks the training or just doesn't care to bother to listen to survivors of violence share their stories. How can a judge determine reasonable credibility of fear in less than 2 minutes with no supporting evidence or further questioning? Let's call a spade a spade and say that Judge Sutton improperly discounts implausible women’s stories of abuse based on a failure to understand both the symptoms arising from neurological and psychological trauma and the practical constraints on survivors’ lives. Two distinct harms arise from this pervasive pattern of credibility discounting and experiential dismissal. First, the discrediting of survivors constitutes its own psychic injury—an institutional betrayal that echoes the psychological abuse women suffer at the hands of individual perpetrators. Second, the pronounced, nearly instinctive penchant for devaluing women’s testimony is so deeply embedded within survivors’ experience that it becomes a potent, independent obstacle to their efforts to obtain safety and justice.

Family court is a place to support taxpaying citizens, not a place for a power-wielding judge to silence and criminalize survivors with threats who have gathered all their strength they could muster to come to the courthouse. I pray that Judge Sutton and her loved ones never experience what she put us through, but since 1 in 3 women will experience intimate partner violence in her lifetime, may the odds forever be in her favor.