Type:	Journal Article
Title:	Delivering demons, punishing wives: false imprisonment, exorcism and other matrimonial duties in a late 20th century manslaughter case
Other Titles:	Punishment and society
Authors:	Ferber, Sarah Howe, Adrian
Keywords:	Legal issues;Religious groups;Representations of women;Homicide
Year:	2005
Publisher:	Sage Publications
Citation:	7 (2), April 2005
Notes:	This article gives an analysis of Australia’s ‘exorcism-manslaughter’ case, R v Vollmer and Others,:in which a woman (Joan Vollmer) underwent an ‘exorcism’ done by 4 people which ended in her death. It examines how the taken-for-granted distinctions between crime and punishment, exorcism and punishment, law and religion, church and state, reasonable and unreasonable and between a demon (demonic possession) and a woman, were collapsed during the trial. It argues how the assumption of police and the media that the case was bizarre hides its relative ordinariness. It discusses how a wife has been killed but the punishing violence inflicted on her body has been diminished and reinterpreted in the legal discourse as blaming her for something which she has precipitated. Most importantly, it highlights how western law tolerates violence against women.
URI:	https://anrows.intersearch.com.au/anrowsjspui/handle/1/14145
ISSN:	1462-4745
Appears in Collections:	Journal Articles

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