Forensic Psychology For Dummies (104 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
PTSD and insanity pleas
The use of PTSD as part of an insanity plea was used controversially in a Canadian court decision in a case of a sexual assault of a child. The defendant claimed that he had PTSD as the result of an incident while on a peace-keeping mission in Bosnia. He’d interrupted a sexual assault on a child by killing the attacker. He argued in court that the assault of which he was accused was the result of a re-enactment of that event in Bosnia. The judge accepted that he was insane at the time of the crime, being unable to appreciate the nature of what he was doing.
Many experts are concerned about this extension of PTSD to be an insanity defence in crimes of intimate violence. The extent of blackouts and memory loss as part of PTSD, as in so many other areas of memory, are extremely difficult to validate.
The main use of PTSD is in accident claims, where it provides a well-tried and clear set of criteria for assessing the psychological impact of the accident. This can contribute to decisions about compensation or even consideration of the punishment if someone had caused the accident. However, even this apparently obvious application is open to question. Considerable evidence suggests that the impact of any trauma depends on the psychological wellbeing of the person who suffers the event before it occurs. Also, the experiences after the trauma, such as social support or loss of employment, can have an impact on the development of PTSD. Most problematic is the clear indication that PTSD may be more long-lasting and severe if ongoing litigation is involved in which it could play a role, as would be the case if a person is seeking compensation.
Battered woman syndrome
When a woman brings a charge of assault against her husband or partner, claiming that he frequently battered her, the defence may assert that the wife stayed with her husband over many years and so the assaults can’t have been as bad as she claims. Consequently, opposing lawyers sometimes use the
battered woman syndrome
to explain why a woman suffers extensive physical abuse over a period of time and yet still fails to leave the relationship, even when the abuser is absent or asleep.
The characteristics of the syndrome revolve around the idea that the victim is taught by the offender to become helpless.
Learned helplessness
is a phenomena first observed in animals that were unable to escape from electric shocks in unpleasant experiments. They eventually stop trying to avoid the shocks and just lie there listlessly. This passivity in relation to unavoidable, random abuse has since been found in many individuals.
As well as this feeling of helplessness, women suffering from battered woman syndrome also display the following associated behaviours:
Development of ways of surviving (for example, through appeasement rather than escaping).
The abuse may well have psychological blackmail components too, such as telling the victim that her children will be taken from her if she reports the violence. All this abuse is often supported by an irrational belief that the perpetrator is all-powerful and all-knowing.
An important aspect of battered woman syndrome is that a cycle of abuse evolves: tension builds up, the assault occurs and then the offender is contrite and remorseful; tension increases again, another assault takes place and so on. This cycle can occur many times before the victim reports what’s happening and tries to get help from the authorities.
The acceptability of this syndrome, as for all the others described in this section, is dependent on the jurisdiction and the particular judge. In some states and areas of the UK there are general guidelines to judges as to which syndromes are acceptable as mitigating evidence. However, because they are not illnesses caused by a bacterium that can be seen under a microscope, but patterns of behaviour that are interpreted by experts, there will always be debates in any legal proceedings as to whether the syndrome is relevant to a particular case.
Some experts regard battered woman syndrome as a form of PTSD (check out the preceding section).
Parental alienation syndrome
In child custody cases in the US and Canada, usually as part of divorce proceedings, lawyers have identified cases in which a child exhibits extreme reactions against one parent. Dr Richard Gardner named this behaviour
parental alienation syndrome,
which he describes as ‘a parental campaign of unjustified disparagement against another loving parent’. This is usually inferred from various reports available to the court, especially what any children involved say or do.
The crucial aspects of this syndrome are: