Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr George Radics, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Law has the power to construct social norms, values and behaviours, and as such the legal vision and practices of the criminal law may serve to produce and perpetuate fixed social norms and identities. In the realm of femicide, the power of the law exerts itself by constructing a legal ‘objective’ conceptualization of ‘reasonable’ sexual jealousy within the social framework of human nature and behaviour. Although the ‘reasonableness’ legal standard is presented as a gender-neutral objective standard, the legal framework is not and cannot be detached from the social system within which it is interpreted and applied when it comes to conceptualize ‘reasonableness’ and construct its version of the course of events that have led to the perpetration of a homicidal crime. This legal conceptualization then serves as a standard against which the victim’s and defendant’s actions are judged and defined.

Using an interpretive critical analysis of femicide case law and its underlying social gendered basic assumptions, the seminar will demonstrate the ways in which social norms, attitudes and beliefs towards sexual jealousy, matrimony, loss of control, morality, gender and homicide – are entangled and intertwined in the structure and function of criminal law. In line with the Israeli criminal law requiring a normative, prescriptive, objective standard of ‘reasonableness’ – men who kill their female ex-intimate partners are construed, socio-legally, judicially and morally – as ‘Reasonable Wife Killers’. At the same time, female homicide victims are blamed for morally instigating, precipitating and provoking their own killing – thus ‘deserving’ their gruesome, premature and undue death.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Hava Dayan heads the MA Program in Crime, Law and Society, in the School of Criminology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Dr Dayan received her undergraduate degree in Sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1986), her MA degree in Sociology with a specialization in Social Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Cum Laude, 1990), her PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore (2001) and her LLB from the University of Haifa (2006). Dr Dayan conducts research in the field of criminal law and society, with a particular interest in gender and crime. Her most recent published papers explore several issues pertaining to lethal violence against women (femicide, uxoricide, battered women who kill their abuser, honor killing, and legal criminal doctrines related to the phenomenon of femicide and sexual crimes). Her recent book, published by Routledge, is titled Femicide and the Law: American Criminal Doctrines. The book offers a critical socio-legal analysis of various common law criminal doctrines and the way they deal with the homicide of women, ‘femicide’. In addition to examining various socio-legal aspects of femicide, the book proposes various legislative amendments to common criminal law, aimed at combating and effectively eradicating the phenomenon of femicide. Dr Dayan is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow with the Changing Family in Asia Cluster in the Asia Research Institute and plans to embark on a study of femicide in Hong Kong.

REGISTRATION

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