AT LEAST one woman dies at the hands of an intimate partner each week in Australia, according to a Geelong criminologist. demanding tougher laws on domestic violence resulting in homicide.
“While legal responses are improving, it is essential that the law’s response to lethal domestic violence does not serve to blame the victim and excuse the actions of the offender,” said Deakin University’s Dr Kate Fitz-Gibbon said.
She recently released Homicide Law Reform, Gender and the Provocation Defence, a book about injustices stemming from the use of provocation as a defence against murder cases.
Dr Fitz-Gibbon offers lessons to legal experts on the law’s response to lethal violence in Australia and the United Kingdom.
“I have long held a concern that the partial defence of provocation does exactly that and this book documents the many injustices of its operation and the need for meaningful change,’’ she said.
Her book opens with the high-profile Victorian case of James Ramage who controversially claimed his wife had provoked him and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter instead of murder.
Dr Fitz-Gibbon said she was as appalled as the general community that Ramage benefitted from the availability of a provocation defence.
“The case illustrates the dangers of a partial defence of provocation when used by men who kill wives who have threatened to leave them or are alleged to have been unfaithful. In the Ramage case the law’s response meant that it was Julie Ramage, not her undisputed killer husband that was put on trial.
“Importantly, and what my research revealed, is that the Ramage case is not a one-off injustice of the provocation defence. These cases are unfortunately littered throughout Australian case law.
“Through the operation of the provocation defence, the criminal law has too readily partially excused the contexts within which men kill while simultaneously failing to understand the contexts within which women kill an abusive intimate partner. This is unsatisfactory.
“It is essential that our courts send a clear message of the unacceptability of lethal domestic violence and do not promote victim blaming narratives that act to partially excuse the use of lethal violence in response to relationship separation or infidelity.”
The povocation defence was abolished in Victoria in 2005 but remains available in several Australian states and territories and in comparable jurisdictions internationally.
