From a speech given by Rev.

Marie Fortune at the

“First National Conference on Battered Women and
Justice” in 1988. Rev. Fortune is an ordained
minister in the United Church of Christ and founder
and Executive director for the Prevention of Sexual
and domestic Violence in Seattle, Washington.

A Feminist Vision of
Justice
Alice Walker begins her book, The Color Purple, with
this: “You better not tell nobodybut God. It’d kill
your mammy.” So Celieproceeds to tell God the
truth about her life. In her first letter to God,
Celiedescribes the rape by her stepfather. When she
cries out in pain, her stepfather chokes her and says,
“You’d better shut up and get used to it.” Celie
writes, “But I don’t never get used to it.”

We are here because we don’t never get used to it.

We never get used to the injustice of woman abuse.
We never get used to the injustice of woman abuse.
We never get used to it because we know it is wrong.
We know it is a sin, if you will. Woman abuse is
wrong because it violates the right relation between
what should exist between a woman and her partner
and her community. “Right relation” means a
relationship based on trust, respect, safety,
mutuality of power, and protection of those who are
vulnerable. The injustice of woman battering is the
brokenness done to the body and spirit, and to
relationships.

Justice is understood as what is right, fair and

deserved. It refers to the healing of brokenness and
assurance of protection from this violence in the
future. Justice is made when the victim feels
empowered and whole again, when the situation has
been made right, and when her well-being is
assured. Justice is made when the offender also has
been made whole by being called into account for
the damage that he has caused, acknowledging his
responsibility for it, and changing his behavior so
that it is never repeated.

Justice is not a word that we use comfortably. It is a

word which seems to have lost its meaning, and so
we seldom use it. Perhaps our hope of achieving
what is fair and right and deserved for those who
have historically been denied it has waned. In our
cynicism, we no longer even envision justice as a
possibility, or we have passed justice-making on to
the justice system. If it does not happen there—and
it frequently does not—it will not happen at all.

Yet we long for justice. In our anger at what we see

being done to women. In our own experiences of
violence. In our frustration at working with the
woman who wants to “forgive and forget.” In our
despair at working with a woman of color who is
unwilling to use the legal system because it has
never protected her before. In our feelings of
powerlessness when we see batterers go from one
abusive relationship to the next. In all of these
situations, we long for justice. But it is a longing
unfulfilled—a vision which we come to accept as
impossible.

It is in the midst of these feelings that I am

convinced that we actually long for healing, for
restoration, for reconciliation. We use words like
“justice” or “forgiveness” in hopes that these are the
means to accomplish that which we long for. We long
for this healing from very depths of our being, not
expecting that everything is going to be made fine
again, or just like it was before, but that it will be
made right in some way—that the brokenness which
resulted from the acts of abuse will be made whole
somehow. This is what we long for whether we are
victim, friend, helper, or abuser. We long to be made
whole again. We long for justice.

Most of us here do what we do out of our longing for

justice. In describing justice-making today, I will not
be telling you anything inside and outside the legal
and criminal justice systems because our intuitions
about justice have been right. I want to describe,
ethically, what we already about making justice.

The imperative to make justice from a feminist

perspective is based on five assumptions:

First, embodiment is a crucial fact of our existence

and requires that we take violation of bodily integrity
seriously. In other words, our bodies matter and
what is done to them matters a great deal.

Second, our relationships between and among one

another are very important.
Third, people can and should act in the face of
injustice, rather than remain passive and silent.

Fourth, we must begin with the lived experience of

women.

Fifth, we must take the side of the powerless and

victimized; in this case, battered women.

So what does this mean to a victim of abuse? It

means that he truth of her abuse is important
because it violates bodily integrity and because it
shatters any relationship she might have had with
the offender and with her community. It means that
she AND we can act in response to her abuse. It
means that whatever we do begins with her
experience and that our job is to take her side and
stand by her throughout the process of justice-
making. The goal of justice-making is the restoration
of right relationship, whether between the woman
and her community, her family or her offender.

What is required to make justice? What does it look

like to try to restore right relation? I think there is a
long list of things that we do and that we can do.
The most important one is truth-telling. The silence
which surrounds the violence is broken. Truth-telling
is not merely a rendering of facts; it is giving voice to
a reality.

But the truth told also must be a truth heard or it is

of no use. Hearing the truth means acknowledging
that the violence has occurred. This
acknowledgement needs to be spoken simply and
clearly: “You have been harmed by this person. It
was not your fault. It was wrong. It should never
have happened. We regret that it happened to you.
We will do all we can to protect you in the future.”
These very simple words mean a great deal to a
person who has been victimized. This
acknowledgement can come from a friend, from a
pastor, from a family member and from the legal
system. But it needs to come from somewhere.

Compassion is the willingness to suffer with,

combined with efforts to alleviate the suffering.
Rather than trying to minimize, explain away, or
avoid the suffering of others, we need to be present
with them.

Protecting the vulnerable from further abuse means

that we do whatever is necessary to protect the
victim and other from further harm. This may mean
restraint of an offender prior to and after conviction,
or it may mean helping the battered woman change
her identity and move to another state.

Accountability is the confrontation with the offender,

the one responsible for the violence, which hopefully
results in his confession and acknowledgment of his
responsibility for the harm done. Willard Gaylin, in
his book, The Killing of Bonnie Garland,
expresses it this way: “…those of us who transgress
adequately for our crimes, we are being treated as
less than persons…As a tribute and a testament to
the aggressor’s freedom, we must dignify him by
making him pay for the evil actions he commits. We
show our respect by making him accountable.”

Restitution, making payment for damage done by

the violence, is a concrete means of renewing right
relation. Not only does material restitution help pay
for actual expenses incurred as a result of the
victimization, but it is also highly symbolic. It’s a
tangible sign of an attempt to restore that which was
broken by the violence.

Finally, vindication for victims is the substance of

justice. Vindication refers not to vengeance and
retaliation, but to exoneration and justification of
those harmed. To be vindicated is to be set free
from the bondage of victimization.

What happens when there is no justice for the

abused woman, no support for her protection, no one
to stop the abuser? In the absence of justice for an
abused woman, she may choose to use physical
force to defend herself. She may choose her life
over his. The number of women defendants who
have assaulted or killed an abuser are simply an
indictment of the failure of the failure of the
community—not just the legal system—to have
made justice for them.

Given the current reality of this failure, what are the

ethical issues which a feminist analysis raises around
the question of self-defense? Whenever any of us
kills another human being, we should be called into
account for our actions. But any person should have
the moral and legal right to defend themselves in
the face of physical threat or terror. Self-defense is
the accounting we give when we choose to take a
life rather than be killed ourselves.

Self-defense is gender neutral. Any person, male or

female, should have that right. But within that, we
must pay attention to the specificity of
women’sexperience when we choose to defend
ourselves against male violence. We need to utilize
information about battered women in order to
explain and justify an act of self-defense. We need
to use a standard of judgment which takes account
of women’s experience: What should a reasonable
woman do in this situation to protect herself and her
children? We need to understand a context that
there analogous to that of a hostage held by a
terrorist, in which a pre-emptive strike may be the
only reasonable course of action.

In beginning to address some of these issues, we are

working to make justice for battered women who kill
and thus face the further injustice of the legal
system and the community which tries to shame her.
The reality is that here are some major blocks to
justice-making in our society, as we all know. One of
the primary blocks to justice for all women is the
serious distortion of our experience which comes to
us from many directions, but particularly comes to
us through the media.

There is a deep, primal fear of women’s violence—of

women using self-defense in response to our
victimization. It accompanies an equally strong
desire not to see the truth of violence against
women in our society. Because of this distortion of
our reality, justice is hard to come by.

A second factor which makes justice a rarity is the

adversarial nature of our legal system. In my
naivete, I used to believe that the police and the
courts and the judges were supposed to protect the
powerless; in this case, battered women and their
children. Imagine my surprise when I began to
understand patriarchy. I began understand why our
reality, as women, is so distorted and why the
system was never intended to protect us.

The bottom line is that we can and must struggle to

change the system in order to lessen the damage it
does to women. But as long as we live in the
patriarch, the justice we make will only be
approximate. Approximate justice is well our efforts
because it lessens our suffering. But it will never be
all that we deserve.

We are like the persistent widow in the parable that

Jesus told: “…in a certain city was a judge who
neither feared God nor regarded the people; and
there was a woman in that city who kept coming to
him and saying’ Vindicate me against my adversary’.
For a while he refused; but afterward he said to
himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor regard the
people, yet because this widow bothers me, I will
vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her
continual coming.’ And the Lord said, ‘Hear what the
unrighteous judge says. And will not God vindicate
the elect, who cry to God day and night? Will God
delay long over them? I tell you God will vindicate
them speedily.’” (Luke 18:1-8)

You bet she will. She holds out for us a vision of a

justice that is life-giving, that enables restoration,
which creates the possibilityof reconciliation and
renewal of right relationship. This is the justice that
creates the possibility of reconciliation and renewal
of right relationship. This is the justice that we must
demand from our churches and synagogues, from
our legal system, from our family, and from our
friends.

Is such justice possible? You bet it is, because we

are making it possible. We make it possible
because, like Celiein The Color Purple, we never get
used to the violence, and because we never let go of
the anger we feel when we see or hear about, or
experience violence against women. Such justice is
possible because we are making it possible.

We make it possible when we make safe places for

women to tell the truth about their experience. We
make it possible when we hear and acknowledge the
truth. We make it possible when we stand with her
in compassion as her advocate. We make it possible
when we protect the vulnerable from further abuse.
wemake it possible when we call abusers to account
for their actions. We make it possible when we
require that restitution be made to battered women
and their children. We make it possible when we
vindicate a battered woman speedily, removing the
shame which society has laid upon her.

We make it possible because, to paraphrase our

sister Andrea Dworkin, in our hearts we are
mourners for all those who have not survived. In our
lives we are both celebrant and proof of women’s
capacity and will to survive, to become, toact, to
change self and society. And each year we are
stronger and there are more of us. Thank God.