The Burden of Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence, Experience, and Persuasion

Abstract

In domestic violence cases, the production of legal evidence faces several challenges. While scholars have amply discussed the issues of intimacy, dependency, and ambivalence, their relationship with evidence and persuasion appears undertheorized. The Italian context is particularly suitable for analyzing this issue, as the testimony of the victim is central in cases of intimate partner violence. Drawing on ethnographic research into domestic violence and the law, I analyze the two components of the burden of proof: evidence and persuasion. The first corresponds to the reconstruction of facts based on eliciting the victim's experience in the form of a story; the second to how the persuasiveness of testimony is judged based on the performance of authenticity. Questioning the notion that one of the qualities of evidence—in law as in anthropology—is to be free of human intention, the article suggests that these two components of proof appear, in cases of intimate violence, not only mutually implicated but also in a relationship of intractable contradiction.