Battered Person Syndrome as an Innovative and Acceptable Term

 This guest post is from Rocio Desiree Watson, Regent Law 3L:

In 1984, Lenore E. Walker proposed the concept of battered woman syndrome, describing it as consisting of the pattern of the signs and symptoms that have been found to occur after a woman has been physically, sexually, and/or psychologically abused in an intimate relationship, when the partner, generally a man, exerted power and control over the woman to coerce her into doing whatever he wanted, without regard for her rights or feelings.

Since this concept was proposed, the man was always perceived as the aggressor, and women viewed as damsels in distress falling prey to the terrible abuse inflicted by their male partners. Although this has been the case in many situations, it has given society an incorrect perception of the roles in the household and swayed views to believe that women could never be the aggressor, leaving men afraid to defend themselves when physically attacked, and fearing a one-sided legal defense believing the woman’s claims and discarding the man’s.

A few years later Suzanne K. Steinmetz coined the controversial term battered husband syndrome and received lots of criticism centering on whether one really differentiates between victim and batterer and whether gender symmetry really exists in this context of violence. Although the diagnosis mainly centered on women, it was occasionally applied to men when employing the term battered person syndrome, especially as part of a legal defense.

To offer a more neutral way of judging cases and situations, the term battered woman syndrome and the term battered husband syndrome have been replaced by the term battered person syndrome, or battered spouse syndrome. This has been widely recognized, accepted, and further used as a legal defense without gender clarification. The new term can improve the former in providing a unitary syndrome and account for the characteristics unique to male victimization.

Men under societal pressures are often criticized if they show weakness or appear victimized in any way. This has further kept male victims from coming forward or reporting the abuse they endure behind closed doors. Now that there is a term that embraces both genders, making it clear that a human being who is exposed to severe abuse for extended periods of time is susceptible to extreme trauma; this has allowed for reports to increase, for lives to be saved, and for the unpredictable actions taken by the abused to terminate the abuse from their counterparts be potentially recognized as a defense to a crime, rather than a crime itself.