Yearly Archives: 2015
Dec 1, 2015 Robert Leckey
Arguments in equality litigation, speech in parliamentary hearings, and campaigns to sway public opinion need a simple, punchy message. We’re just like you. Marriage is about love and we love too. Mariage pour tous. As I have observed elsewhere, the end of litigation and political lobbying may open space for research of a particular character. Research unconnected to an immediate political imperative such as the push for equal marriage may have the luxury of asking more questions than it answers. It may challenge or complicate assumptions about what would best deliver equality to a group. With the media spotlight aimed elsewhere, one may even acknowledge a group’s internal diversity and potential fractures – and ask how solidly it hangs together.
Sue Westwood’s lovely paper on wills by older lesbians and gay men occupies this space. With civil partnership around for more than a decade and same-sex marriage enacted in England and Wales (2013), it’s more comfortable to bracket formal equality’s discourse of sameness and ask about difference. Drawn from the wider socio-legal study of Westwood’s doctoral research, the paper presents findings from interviews with 15 older lesbians and gay men. Westwood reports difference between heterosexuals and her research participants and within the latter group. We see distinctions among participants based on class, marital status and family form, and – uncomfortably for those cleaving to the ideal of a single LGBT “community” – sex. A couple of gay respondents admit candidly that their male-centred friendship networks result from avoiding women.
Westwood uses theory to illuminate her findings. The major organizing device is Ray Pahl and Liz Spencer’s nuanced taxonomy that conjugates friends and family in six types of “personal communities” (e.g. friend-like, friend-enveloped, partner-focussed). The principal theoretical current with which Westwood engages, and against which she carefully pushes back, is the anthropological and sociological discourse of Kath Weston and others respecting gay men and lesbians’ “families of choice.” This discourse reads gay and lesbian kinship as based on friendship and voluntarism, free from obligation. With hindsight and sensitivity to the legal situation at the time, it might be fair to attribute exaggeration of gay and lesbian agency in this discourse to an understandable and urgent instinct for political resistance.
In any event, Westwood complicates this discourse. Only some of the participants’ relationship networks are friendship-based. Moreover, her participants reveal values of duty and obligation in decision-making about their estates. A sense of duty leads some to leave property to members of their legal kinship network from whom they are estranged. Moreover, they may do so while leaving nothing to close gay or lesbian friends who carry out substantial caring work. If wills demarcate “family” and familial obligation, some participants fall back on decidedly conventional definitions of family.
Westwood’s paper also participates in an important effort to integrate wills and inheritance into broader understandings of family practices and regulation. I think here of work by, for example, Angela Campbell, Gillian Douglas, Daniel Monk and Daphna Hacker. If each of us has a most-reviled doctrinal division in the law curriculum and legal knowledge that obstructs research and thought, the segregation of family law from successions may be mine. This area is rich since, at least in principle, testators have such freedom to depart from the statute’s default distribution.
Sue Westwood’s paper is a compelling invitation to look at wills as a source of evidence about kinship – taking complexities and contingencies into account. It reminds us that while some equality issues related to sexual orientation may be “solved,” many cross-cutting inequalities remain – and these may be unsusceptible to legislative reform.
Nov 3, 2015 Kim Brooks
There’s a growing body of work that explores the contours of nonhuman animals and law. Just to illustrate, see previous Jotwell posts in Jurisprudence (here and here) and in Legal History. Maneesha Deckha’s article, “Vulnerability, Equality, and Animals”, brings that body of literature squarely into engagement with equality theory.
I read everything Professor Deckha writes: not because I am always on board with where her analysis takes her, but because I’m always left asking questions I hadn’t thought through before. This piece is yet one more illustration of her ability to connect unexpected dots; to press on boundaries that had not been explicitly articulated before; and to draw the reader in.
Deckha’s claim is straightforward: vulnerability discourse provides a more fruitful avenue to advance non-human animals’ interests in the law because it avoids some of the conventional traps of equality discourse. In setting up the context, Deckha adeptly presents a taxonomy and summary of traditional animal equality arguments. On the one side, she presents Peter Singer’s approach which takes as a foundation equal consideration of interests. On the other hand, she points to Tom Regan who bases his position on rights that take as their foundation the presence of an exalted set of traits. These kinds of sameness arguments have obvious limits in the legal context, where legal scholars, legislators, and courts have been slow to accept (or perhaps more accurately have not accepted) claims that nonhuman animals are “equal to” their human companions.
And so begins Deckha’s turn to vulnerability as a motivating force for advancing the legal claims of non-human animals. Deckha pays due tribute to Martha Fineman’s work. Among other contributions, Deckha’s piece provides a succinct review of the bridge from vulnerability theory as applied to humans to the starting ground where it might be extended (and boundaries pressed) to include non-human animals within its analytical frame. This extension of the literature matters because it makes non-human animals meaningful subjects of legal protection; not because of their proximity to (or sameness to) humans but rather because they live vulnerable and precarious lives. Anthropomorphizing, be gone.
The thick contribution Deckha makes in the piece is to unveil an analysis of the legal landscape for animals through the lens of vulnerability and to address head on potential criticisms of that analysis. Deckha provides a case study driven from the dissenting opinion in Reece v. City of Edmonton (2011 ABCA 238, 513 AR 177). Reece focused on the well-being of an elephant, Lucy, living in the Edmonton Valley Zoo without a companion. The heart of the claim was a dispute about whether Lucy should be moved to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee where she would have a companion. Deckha uses the Chief Justice’s dissent as a model of how insights about animal vulnerability can inform legal decision-making with the result that non-human animals, and Lucy in this particular instance, are treated as “relational being[s] in a sanctuary rather than .. visual object[s] of commercial attraction subject to an oppressive human gaze and detailed control and surveillance …” (p. 68-69).
Deckha does not shy away from the hard question: “how can real and transgressive change happen for animals through a legal system that is deeply entrenched in the liberal humanist tradition” (p. 69)? This is, of course, part of the broader inquiry into whether law offers the potential for transformation that many equality-minded (vulnerability-minded?) scholars care about.
While our answer(s) to that question remain a work-in-progress, my recommendation on this article does not. This is a piece worth reading.
Oct 12, 2015 Camille Nelson
Michael E. Waterstone, Disability Constitutional Law, 63 Emory L.J. 527 (2014).
Constitutional Law should be harnessed in the service of disability law. That it has not been a central site for the advocacy of the disability rights movement is something that Professor Waterstone bemoans. In this Emory Law Journal article, he traces the seemingly bifurcated trajectories of the LGBT and Disability Rights movements, insofar as their use of constitutional strategy is concerned. Through a careful analysis of these moves, Prof. Waterstone concludes that the Disability Rights movement has suffered setbacks through constitutional law, but the time is ripe to recoup the use of constitutional law to advance the umbrella of disability rights. Harkening to recent victories in LGBT movements, this article seeks to lay a foundation for Disability Constitutional Law.
Prof. Waterstone acknowledges that there likely exists amongst disability rights advocates an understandable reluctance to engage constitutional law stemming from the Cleburne case, and its unfortunate legacy for the disability rights movement. While the holding in Cleburne struck down an ordinance infringing the Equal Protection rights of persons with “mental retardation,” the case has proven less progressive and unsupportive of disability rights broadly speaking. In holding that this disability classification was only entitled to rational basis scrutiny, the decision has become concretized in a way that, for practical purposes, has meant that “the most restrictive aspects” of the majority decision have “stayed frozen in time for people with disabilities.” (P. 529.) Additionally, subsequent Supreme Court decisions have stretched Cleburne’s application to include a “diverse universe of people with disabilities,” thereby casting too long a shadow of rational basis scrutiny in the disability rights arena. (P. 542.) Specifically, in holding that the decision in Cleburne on mental retardation included a vastly expanded category of “the disabled,” the Court in University of Alabama v. Garrett significantly expanded the reach of Cleburne in a way that has proven hard to overcome.
This legacy of constitutional opaqueness is disconcerting, especially given the ways in which LGBT advocates have successfully utilized the constitutional arena. Clearly there are opportunities to push forward a disability constitutional agenda in intentional ways.
Though there have been setbacks for the movement, Prof. Waterstone analyzes the more rapid pace and progress of the LGBT movement through carefully strategized constitutional law advocacy. He suggests that, while there are obviously differences in the movements (“LGBT and disability causes are of course different, operating in different political and legal spaces” (P. 531) disability law can and should do more to, similarly, push for fulfillment of the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and full citizenship. Drawing analogies to the LGBT movement, Prof. Waterstone notes both, admittedly umbrella, groups have a history of prejudice and segregation, and continue to experience stigma due to their long histories of discrimination. (P. 533.)
Prof. Waterstone believes a rejuvenated constitutional law strategy for disability rights might correct a central error in Cleburne by creating a space for Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence that is uncoupled from pity and benevolence, and which is instead moored to historical oppression and a commitment to “contextualized Equal Protection review for state laws that facially discriminate against people with disabilities.” (P. 533.) While Cleburne is far from perfect (i.e. the majority stated, “while racial minorities and women are all monolithic for purposes of state classification, people with mental retardation are not ‘cut from the same pattern.’” (P. 538.) and the majority opinion has been interpreted as assuming mentally retarded people to “be a class of naturally inferior people.” (P. 541.) and has proven to be challenging precedent for disability rights advocates, proponents of marriage equality have faired better at harnessing the power of this precedent. LGBT activists “have mobilized more effectively and done more with Cleburne and the Equal Protection Clause in both federal and state courts.” (P. 564.) As such, Prof. Waterstone urges that “[t]heir campaigns offer important lessons for disability advocates.” (P. 564.)
Prof. Waterstone surfaces several examples of statutes that facially discriminate, particularly in the areas of “family law, voting, commitment proceedings [] the provision of benefits,” bars to professional licensing, and of course employment and public accommodation. (P. 548–55.) As daunting as it might seem, and despite the majority decision in Cleburne, there remains a glimmer of hope not just from the progressive vision articulated in Cleburne by the respective concurrences and dissents of Justices Marshall and Blackmun, who preferred heightened scrutiny of state action on the basis of disability, but also because of the compelling dissent of Justice Breyer in Garrett, which “demonstrated an amenability to a more nuanced consideration of the constitutional dimension of state discrimination on the basis of disability.”
Thus Prof. Waterstone’s piece sheds light on a more comprehensive and contextual path for disability rights advocacy, one that recognizes the constitutional building blocks in a similar way as have “LGBT advocates [] proven particularly adept at showing what is possible under state law [by using] Cleburne to help secure heightened scrutiny for marriage laws that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.” To demonstrate this potential, Prof. Waterstone highlights a promising Connecticut case.
In Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health, a marriage equality case, the Supreme Court of Connecticut recognized its authority to evolve the Connecticut constitution as “an instrument of progress, [] intended to stand for a great length of time and [] not [to…] interpret[] [it] too narrowly or too literally so that it fails to have contemporary effectiveness for all of our citizens.” In so doing, the Connecticut court acknowledged its “greater latitude” to weigh additional factors beyond the more narrow Supreme Court focus on the history of invidious discrimination and whether the distinguishing characteristic relates to one’s ability to contribute to society, but also to consider immutability and political powerlessness. (P. 573–74.) Using Justice Marshall’s concurrence and dissent in Cleburne as a roadmap, the Connecticut court interpreted the Equal Protection Clause by focusing on “the social and cultural isolation of the excluded group.” (P. 574.) Importantly, the court also took the view that protective legislation acknowledged, and did not indicate the end of, intentional discrimination. (P. 574.) Together with a few other cases, Prof. Waterstone holds the Kerrigan case up for disability rights activists – its embrace of four constitutional factors, instead of just two, offers a more robust analysis which he interprets as boding well for disabled individuals. I hope he is right.
Sep 3, 2015 Val Napoleon
Tracey Lindberg,
Birdie (2015).
I have thought about Tracey Lindberg’s novel, Birdie every day since I read it. The novel is an irreverent, evocative, funny, and hard-hitting book that causes me to think and ask questions about Indigenous law in recent history and today through the lives of the women unflinchingly drawn by Lindberg. I propose that Birdie be approached as a Cree law text—as a performance of law with difficult questions expressed and examined through narrative. This jot is an invitation to readers to join me in discerning law through one of the forms of Indigenous pedagogy and precedent, the narrative or story. I propose a brief legal analysis of Birdie based on the Cree law research completed by Hadley Friedland with the Indigenous Law Research Unit, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria.
Cree elder and storyteller, Louie Bird explains that in Cree society, the tasks of both telling and listening to stories are highly intellectual and demanding processes, beyond entertainment. He invites readers to attend to the stories by looking for questions, explanations, and subjects. He constantly challenges the reader to keep thinking by interrupting a story to ask, “So … why does the story say that?” Or, to ask whether a central character was using power properly. Bird’s comment on one story was, “So that is the mystery put into this story to make you think.”
Cases are law stories about something that has happened and that are publicly recorded in a particular way to be recalled in future collaborative legal reasoning through specific problems. In the same way, Birdie is a Cree law story placed in northern Alberta (near fictitious Little Loon First Nation) about a woman whose life is a personal chronicle of colonial law and history. But it is far more than this. It is also about Cree law that is undermined by colonization, but which has not disappeared, and it is represented by Bernice (Birdie) herself and by the women around her. Cree law is also represented by the concept of pimatisewin (the good life) and through the metaphor of a tree of life called the Kohkom (grandmother) Tree. The Kohkom Tree appears to be dying; it is at once disrespected by non-Indigenous peoples and honoured by Indigenous peoples who search for it. Throughout the narrative, Bernice and the other women gather eclectic ingredients (everything from muskeg, lemon, oolichan grease, cumin, and moose intestine to cheezies and more) for the creation a final healing feast for both the Kohkom Tree and Bernice.
As a child, Bernice experiences the love of powerful women including her mother, the complex Maggie. These women are linked by “an absolute reliance on only themselves”, and are hurt by the too familiar and relentless colonial encounters of violence, racism, alcohol and drugs, and poverty. Lindberg describes the women as being weighed down by the over-responsibility of carrying the load dropped by men who left – to work or not, to cities, to prison, or to just disappear. And, “Bernice wonders how far back, how many generations ago, it was that women took on children, family, home and provisioning”. These women are not perfect. They are flawed and scarred in the way that survivors often are, and they fail to protect Bernice from her uncles who sexually assault her from the age of eleven. Bernice survives by retreating into herself and into silence, and she internalizes the violence wrought upon her.
The women disappear from her life, and Maggie leaves for the infamous (for Indigenous women anyway) downtown eastside of Vancouver. Bernice ends up in Edmonton, living with her aunt (at Pecker Palace), in foster homes, and on the street—in a city where an Indigenous woman was set on fire in a dumpster. She is bullied and ridiculed for being fat, being poor, being a girl/woman, and for being Indigenous. When she returns to visit home, her Uncle Larry tries to assault her again and this time she is able to defend herself. He suffers a heart attack, she refuses to help him, and in desperation she sets a fire and is terribly burned in her escape.
She becomes anisinowin (lost, the act of losing one’s way or being lost) and is scraped off the streets to be placed in a sanatorium for a year. She makes her way to Gibsons, BC following a curious lifeline in the form of a childhood love for Jesse, the young Indigenous man in the TV series, the Beachcombers. She works as a baker for Lola’s Little Slice of Heaven, the forges a friendship and love across difference. Lola does not seem to notice or mind Bernice’s silence. But Bernice continues to retreat deeper into herself where she travels, dreams, searches for meaning and connections, and finally reaches the memory of Uncle Larry and the fire. Her Auntie Val and sister/cousin Freda arrive and with Lola, they try to retrieve her from what appears to be her death bed. They perform ceremony represented by working together to mix and measure, sift and sieve, whip and pour, stir and simmer, chop and dice—to prepare a feast for either Bernice’s imminent death or her recovery.
As with any law case, what one learns from stories or law cases depends on the question asked. There are many ways one could go with Birdie—into same sex relationships, into who can reside on reserve, into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, into family law or child protection, into mental health or homeless issues, into displacement from land—the book has all this richness and potential. What I want to ask about is Bernice’s role in the death of her uncle Larry. Would she be found guilty or not guilty according to Cree law? The facts are mostly set out above with the exception of the complicit role played by the women in Bernice’s life who suspected or knew about her abuse.
So what are the legal processes in Cree legal traditions? First, who would the authoritative decision-makers be for Bernice? Cree law has four decision-making groups (i.e., medicine people, elders, family, and community group) depending on the problem to be resolved, their particular role (e.g., persuasive or directive) is determined by the nature of the problem. Here, it appears that Bernice’s family members would be responsible to act and to remedy harm, and prevent future harm. But, if the harm of child sexual abuse and sexual assault is identified as affecting the safety of the community, then the community would have to be involved in the decision-making. Given the sexual abuse of Freda and likely others, this could be framed as a community safety issue with ongoing potential danger thereby both the family and community would likely be identified as possible decision-makers.
Second, what are the necessary procedural steps to determine a legal response? The immediate steps in Bernice’s case are: (i) observing and collecting corroborative evidence, (ii) identifying the appropriate decision-makers to deliberate, determine, and implement a response, and (iii) seeking guidance from those with relevant understanding and expertise. The other steps of recognizing warning signals, warning others, and taking safety precautions would seem to apply to a larger framing of child sexual assault and its prevention as a community issue, and so could also be considered as part of the legal response in Bernice’s case. The corroborating evidence would include the failure of the other adults to protect Bernice and their failure in recognizing the harm to her, and the repeated sexual assaults by Larry and others. At the time Larry’s final assault on Bernice, she protected Freda (whom Larry had also assaulted) who was with her by urging her to run. Alone Bernice defended herself and Larry had a heart attack, falling to the floor. She refused to save Larry and instead set the house on fire while he was still alive. She suffered terribly from burns and trauma compounded by years of abuse, retreating into silence and becoming more vulnerable as a result.
There are a number of possible legal responses and resolutions in Cree law including healing (the predominant and preferred response), avoidance or separation, having Bernice acknowledge responsibility, her reintegration, allowing natural or spiritual consequences, or finally, incapacitation (in the case of severe ongoing danger to the community). I would argue that the first response to Bernice under Cree law would be healing, but with ongoing support and monitoring for possible future dangerous behaviour, mainly to herself. The Cree stories (precedent case law) support this response and she would be treated not as a faceless danger, but as a family member.
Bernice and the people around her would have a number of legal obligations including the responsibility to help when asked, to prevent future harms, and to warn others once they are aware of risks and dangers. Bernice’s obligation would be to give back once she received help. Bernice would have a number of substantive rights namely the right to safety and protection, and the right to be helped when incapable or vulnerable. She would also have procedural rights including the right to have her case corroborated by evidence and observation before any action is taken, the right to be heard, and the right to a decision made through an open, collective deliberation guided by appropriate consultation. The overall deliberation would be guided by general legal principles of contextualizing responses, valuing and acknowledging relationships, and reciprocity and interdependence.
Through the book, we can see Bernice’s Auntie Val and Sister/Cousin Freda, along with Lola fulfilling the Cree legal processes, determined the legal response of healing, and being guided by Cree legal principles. They fulfilled their legal obligations and they recognized Bernice’s substantive and procedural rights. All of this is in Birdie—told a way that is lyrical with a punch. It is completely Cree in humour and is funnier than one would think possible, and it employs the story form to cause thinking, questioning, and responding to real life issues. Bernice’s experiences are real, lived everyday across Canada.
Birdie portrays Cree lawlessness through the breakdown and suffering of Bernice at the hands of her uncles and in the non-response of her family and community, by her abandonment. It portrays the women coming together, through their hardships to rebuild Cree lawfulness by taking responsibility for Bernice and healing her, and ultimately integrating her back into their lives. They invite the rest of her relatives to the feast and in doing so, they bring the collective together around Bernice.
I went to Tracey Lindberg’s reading when the book was released. One of the questions was about Larry and whether Lindberg had factored in the likely abuse that he would have suffered. Lindberg responded that she had also experienced abuse, but that she has not abused anyone else. If Larry had lived in the story, whether he was abused is a different legal question and would have to be dealt with as a separately in Cree law. If Larry had not died, his abuse of Bernice could also be framed in Cree law and reasoned through in order to determine a legal response for his actions.
I urge all to read Birdie and to seriously engage with its complexity, to enjoy the humor (it is called darkly comic on the inside front cover), and to be provoked into asking questions and into complex conversations.
Jul 15, 2015 Toni Williams
Escaping Battered Credit: A Proposal for Repairing Credit Reports Damaged by Domestic Violence expands and develops Angela Littwin’s pioneering work on “coerced debt” within violent and abusive relationships. Littwin’s first study on this topic, Coerced Debt: The Role of Consumer Credit in Domestic Violence, offers a preliminary account of various ways in which “coerced debt” occurs, how it is experienced and its potentially devastating consequences for abused women. Escaping Battered Credit considers potential legal responses to the problem in the context of abusive relationships, and takes on the challenge of crafting a partial remedy that fits within the institutional structure of US consumer credit markets.
Littwin describes coerced debt as occurring “when the abuser in a violent relationship obtains credit in the victim’s name via fraud or duress” (P. 365), and defaults on the debt. Typical practices range from basic identity theft, as when the abuser applies for a credit in his partner’s name without telling her, through resort to physical and psychological violence to coerce abused women to apply for credit or release equity in their homes, to abusers structuring loan transactions to ensure that they enjoy the benefits of credit and the women they have abused are left with the debt liabilities. Coerced debt is related to the well-documented problems of “sexually transmitted debt” in which so-called “surety wives” guarantee loans to their businessmen spouses under circumstances of duress, fraud, or misinformation; and coercive microcredit which occurs when gender specific peer-lending programs expose poor women to the risks of being coerced into borrowing on behalf of their spouses. All three instances subject abused women to risks of liabilities to creditors to which they did not freely consent and against which law offers little protection, illustrating how market relations of credit and debt may constitute specific instruments of oppression within familial and intimate relationships, particularly, although by no means only, as those relationships fail.
The distinctive aspect of Littwin’s work, and the importance of her contribution, is its departure from the conventional focus on (the limits of the) law’s capacity to protect coerced debtors against creditors’ claims. Escaping Battered Credit instead examines the implications for coerced debtors of the role of credit reporting intermediaries in consumer finance markets. The paper shows that how the interaction of the familial and market relations that constitute coerced debt has pernicious consequences for abused women because of the range of service providers and market actors who make use of the information held by credit reporting agencies. Because access to the most basic and essential sites of social provisioning, including tenancies, utilities, and in the United States apparently jobs, are now mediated by credit reporting agencies, an abused woman saddled with a credit record damaged by coerced debt may be unable to secure shelter or work and as such lack the means to establish a household independently of the abuser.
This problem is not easy to address because of how consumer credit markets are currently constituted. Credit reporting has become integral to the mass delivery of consumer credit because it appears to respond to what is perceived to be the definitive failure in consumer finance, that is, an information asymmetry that potentially enables borrowers strategically to take advantage of lenders limited information about borrowers’ capacities and inclinations to repay loans. Information theory holds that by providing creditors with low cost access to information about borrowers’ past performance on credit transactions, credit reporting agencies help lenders to screen out unreliable borrowers, deter opportunistic debtors from defaulting on loans and enable responsible lenders to see when a borrower may not be able to service a requested loan.
These purported benefits of screening and sanctioning are based on an assumption that the information held about each individual accurately reflects her conduct and propensity to repay. But Littwin’s study shows that this assumption does not hold true in cases of battered credit when the debtor may not even have known about the loan or may have been coerced into assuming it. Even though information about default on a coerced debt may not contribute meaningful information to the market it will nonetheless be recorded on a credit record and from there affect future access to credit and credit-based services. Despite the circumstances of the creation of coerced debt there is little chance of a coerced debtor securing removal of the loan from her records because the coercion of an intimate partner will rarely operate as a defence to the claims of an “innocent” creditor. In the odd cases where removal from a record should be possible because the debt is unenforceable the coerced debtor will encounter error-correction processes that are arduous and seldom able to rectify records even in the simplest cases of mistakes within the reporting system. (Pp. 379-89.) Finding little reason to believe that credit-reporting intermediaries respond to situations of coerced debt in ways that respect equality interests, Littwin proposes instead a remedy based on selective blocking of access to information about debts that a family court has certified are coerced.
The proposed remedy is pragmatic because it concerns information about payment records rather than complex questions of substantive responsibilities for coerced debt and and as the author herself acknowledges the remedy is partial because it responds only to the subset of battered credit cases in which courts play a formal role in dissolution of the family as an economic unit. Although Escaping Battered Credit does not purport to provide a definitive legal solution to the harms of coerced debt, the article is nonetheless important to equality scholarship for its insights into the ways in which market institutions associated with debt and debt default, such as credit reporting, may be wielded as a threat or instrument of control within abusive relationships.
