Abstract
Broken: Women's stories of intimate and institutional harm and repair (2024), written by Lisa Young Larance, a professional social work practitioner, scholar, and educator, is an insightful qualitative study of a group of women who have been unfortunately caught between the limbo of domestic violence and the strictures of the legal system. Based on Lisa Young Larance's decades of work experience and fieldwork observation in North American communities, Broken is a profound and timely exploration of current community-based carceral responses, as well as a critical reflection on gender-based violence and the victim-offender binary in which women of different races are confined. Based on the personal narratives of the women she interviewed, Lisa Young Larance calls for prompt, compassionate action in Broken, to reevaluate probation, the criminal legal system, and child protective services (CPS). The author also grapples with the complicated realities, such as domestic violence and coercive control, that the women she studied have survived and confronted.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part examines the “breakage” caused by probation, CPS, and court-ordered anti-violence interventions (AVIs), while the second centers on the women's efforts to heal and repair their lives after their encounters with these systems. In her search for first-hand data and experience, Lisa Young Larance has undertaken years of fieldwork, during which she conducted 51 in-depth interviews with 33 women with traumatic experiences in contact with AVIs due to criminal or family court mandates. The authenticity of these women's voices in recounting their stories and personal experiences with AVIs bolsters Lisa Young Larance's interrogation of the victim-offender binary and her proposal of alternative approaches that prioritize healing over punishment.
In the first part of Broken, Lisa Young Larance's proposal of reconsidering the victim-offender binary is grounded in her “appreciation for the US battered women's movement's history and victories” (p. 9), while considering feminist epistemology, standpoint theory, and intersectionality. These frameworks allow her to center the voices of the marginalized women she has interviewed — particularly those who are low-income with diverse identities — and highlight how their intersecting identities shape their experiences with domestic violence and the legal system. One of Lisa Young Larance's central arguments against the victim-offender binary is that it rigidly categorizes individuals as either victims or offenders, while neglecting their complex experiences with violence. With a rigorous and empathetic methodology, Young Larance employs a mixed qualitative approach to provide detailed data about the interviewed women who have had contact with AVI programs. Their personal narratives challenge the dominant legal system, which continuously perpetrates harm and vilifies women who use force unwisely in their relationships, while validating their actions as an instinctive response to systemic oppression and intimate harm. As Lisa Young Larance demonstrates with her interviews with these women, this binary is particularly detrimental to women who have been unfairly accused of using force in self-defense when confronting coercive domestic and sexual violence. Long based on this binary, the current legal system in the U.S. often resorts to disproportionate and punitive responses, such as mandatory arrest policies, probation, and court-ordered AVIs, which further marginalize and harm these women who have already experienced the multidimensional trauma of being broken.
To illustrate the central argument in Broken, Lisa Young Larance guides readers, with an empathetic and humanistic tone, into the real-life stories of a group of women, such as the pseudonymous Essence and Valerie. As a Black woman with a history of childhood sexual assault and mental health challenges, Essence was wrongfully arrested and put on probation when she defended herself against an abusive partner. She was later portrayed as the aggressor by her partner and the police, although she was the one who had almost died of strangulation through domestic violence. Valerie, on the other hand, was arrested for assaulting her abusive boyfriend after years of enduring his violence. The legal system labeled both women as offenders, while their histories of victimization and the context of their actions were neglected.
Through the carefully documented stories of women like Essence and Valerie, Lisa Young Larance provides a critical analysis of how probation and CPS, often seen as alternatives to incarceration, can exacerbate the harms that those mandated interventions are meant to address. Probation officers, for example, wield significant discretionary power in monitoring and enforcing court orders, thus leading to further breakage in the already torn lives of women in trouble. While some officers use their discretion to provide support, others reinforce the women's vulnerabilities through punitive measures, such as random drug testing, mandatory AVI attendance, and strict reporting requirements. Similarly, CPS caseworkers often replicate intimate harm through a “failure to protect ideology” (p. 36) and underscore the victim-offender binary by viewing mothers as “failed” or “unfit” if they have been involved in domestic violence. Lisa Young Larance describes how the involvement of CPS can lead to the removal of children, thus further traumatizing mothers who are already struggling to survive. The women interviewed in Broken often describe CPS as more threatening than their abusive partner, because the system's interventions can feel like a form of “institutional betrayal” (p. 26).
According to Lisa Young Larance's definition, the key concept of “breakage” in Broken is “physical and emotional, life-altering, integral to the fabric of [women's] lives, and rooted in betrayal and shame” (p. 25), — that is, the harm that women endure because of both intimate and systemic violence. Lisa Young Larance considers breakage to be a more accurate and compassionate way of understanding the experiences of women who have both survived and caused harm than the simplistic categories of victim and offender. As Lisa Young Larance indicates, breakage is, on the one hand, the consequence of individual acts of violence, while it is compounded, on the other hand, by the structural oppression and institutional failures that shape these women's lives. The women in Broken suffer from their breakage in various ways — some as the result of childhood abuse, others through coercive control in intimate relationships, or through the trauma of navigating the legal system. For example, Emersyn, who was abused by her father and later by her partner, describes how her breakage manifested in her attempts to retaliate against her partner's infidelity. Her actions, while harmful, were rooted in a lifetime of betrayal and trauma. Explicit as this is, breakage is the framework that Lisa Young Larance uses for a more holistic understanding of these women's tragic experiences, highlighting their need for healing and repair “across lives, institutions, and communities” (p. 37).
In addition to her critical analysis of the current legal system, Lisa Young Larance provides hope and solutions for women and the system to heal and repair, both individually and collectively. She advocates for a reimagining of the legal and social systems that currently fail women while emphasizing the need for trauma-informed, intersectional approaches that address the root causes of violence and breakage. Although the stories of the 33 women interviewed in Broken are powerful and illuminating, they represent a relatively small sample. Future research is needed to widen the scope and include more diverse samples to further explore the themes of breakage and the victim-offender binary. Ultimately, by centering the women's voices, Broken is a call to action that urges scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to create more compassionate systems of care and move beyond mere the victim-offender binary toward healing, repair, and justice.
