Battered Woman Syndrome
The “Battered Woman Syndrome” comes from the book, The Battered Woman by Dr. Lenore Walker. In this book, she notes that there are four general characteristics of the syndrome:

1. a belief that the violence was the victim’s fault;
2. the inability for the victim to place the fault for the violence elsewhere;
3. the victim fears for her life and/or the life of her children;
4. an irrational fear that the Batterer is omnipresent / omniscient.

Why is this important to you? Probably because the DA will do everything it can to introduce this concept to the jury at your upcoming trial for domestic violence. Your case may have absolutely nothing to do with “Battered Woman Syndrome”, but the if the DA can get the cop talking about his training on the issue, the DA can at the very least create the impression that your intimate partner is a battered woman/man. Even worse, the DA might be able to get the cop to “diagnose” your spouse as a battered woman/man!

Only a trained and experienced psychologist can make this diagnosis with any degree of reliability. (And this assumes that the theories are even valid.)

Why does the DA want to slip this into your trial? Apart from simply sounding bad, it helps the DA explain away why so many “victims” recant the day after the domestic violence incident. The idea goes like this: the victim recants because she feels guilty that her husband got arrested and she fears that upon release, he will come back to harm her further and in worse ways than initially.

The DA will use this theory against you to supplement their utter inability to explain why a victim might not show up at court to testify against her husband, or why she might recant and say that it didn’t happen at all, or at least as the police have recorded it.

The simple truth is that oftentimes the police get it wrong. Sometimes police will badger a “victim” to say what they want to hear so that they can make the arrest that they want to make. Other times police will misconstrue or mischaracterize something a “victim” might say. For example: we recently had a case where the sheriff’s deputy asked the victim if there were children in the home. The victim answered that yes, there were indeed children in the home. She meant that her children resided with her in the home, yet the deputy gallantly wrote down that the children observed the alleged violence, thus turning a simple misdemeanor shoving into a felonious assault!

The Primary Aggressor Theory
The Primary Aggressor Theory is simple in its concept, but it is routinely twisted by the DA in a trial situation.

The initial concept was that a police officer would determine who threw the first punch, or who began the assaultive behavior. Simple enough.

The DA will try to use this at your trial if you claim “Self Defense”—she hit you first and you were just defending yourself, or trying to calm her down (Shades of Warren Moon, there). The DA will then introduce the Primary Aggressor Theory to explain that, even though she hit you first, she was a long-term victim of YOUR domestic violence and thus was really pre-empting your forthcoming violence upon her, or actually was a delayed act of self-defense to your repeated, consistent violence upon her.

Not the same ideas, are they? This is the joy of being in the Domestic Violence Mill—logic, reason, and common sense need not apply.