AC 20.3Narrative I affirm.

From Merriam-Websters Dictionary of Law1, deadly force is force that is intended to cause or that carries a substantial risk of causing death or serious bodily injury. From Human Rights Watch2 03, Domestic violence includes murder, negligent homicide, justifiable
homicide

, kidnapping, rape, forcible sodomy, sexual assault with an object, forcible fondling, robbery, aggravated assault, simple assault or

intimidation, where the victim to offender relationship is based on marriage, family ties, [or] a romantic relationship or a former marriage. The claim about justice made by the resolution should be examined through the concrete experiences of victims rather than the discourse of abstract academic theory for five reasons: First, concepts of justice are grounded in moral intuitions that refer not to rationalist abstractions but to concrete experiences of right and wrong. Mappes and Zembaty3 write: The adequacy or inadequacy of a moral theory cannot be determined by inspecting the principles which constitute it. Instead, rational assessment requires an on-going process in which general principles are revised and refined through confrontation with the rich complexity of our considered judgements about particular cases, while our judgments about particular cases are gradually structured and modified by our provisional acceptance of general principles. Since our considered judgements about particular cases may often be more sensitive and sure than our assessments of abstract principles, careful attention to accurately described, concrete moral situations is essential for theorizing about justice. The most accurate descriptions of domestic violence come from those who experience it first-hand, since attempts to describe the position of battered women from outside inevitably do injustice to their experiences.

1 2

Merriam-Websters Dictionary of Law, 1993 Human Rights Watch, 2003, online, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/nepal0903/3.htm 3 Thomas A. Mappes and Jane S. Zembaty, Biomedical Ethics, 1991

Second, Random House4 defines the indefinite article a as any; [or] a single. Thus, my textual burden is not to justify deadly force for all victims of abuse but to show that it can be circumstantially justified for at least one victim. Since the text of the topic is the only basis for research and pre-round prep, meeting this textual burden is sufficient to affirm. Third, the complexity of the phenomenon of domestic violence means that any attempt to discuss it substantively in a 45-minute debate round requires massive contextualization. Attempts to generalize the experiences of victims require greater attention to the details of dozens of individual experiences than the time limits of debate allow. Focusing on particular instances of abuse does not deny or denigrate other forms of abuse, but simply recognizes the inevitability of these limits. Thus, the round is most educationally meaningful when we focus on the experiences of particular victims. The aff has the right to set ground for debate to facilitate AC argumentation and compensate for time skew, so this contextualization should occur in the AC. Fourth, analysis from academic experts making generalized claims about domestic violence deny legitimacy to the experiences of victims, perpetuating and adding social sanction to their oppression. Justice for Women5 in 95: Syndromes and disorders medicalise and universalise women and children's experiences, transforming complex, variable and frequently realistic responses into a symptomatology. We are in danger of ending up with a sick/sick model in the legal processing of domestic homicide where the violent men are sick and the abused women crazy. The space feminists have fought forto enable women and children to tell their own stories, and to be supported in doing so by women who have devoted much of their lives to challenging mens violenceis increasingly being usurped by professionals who see the individual once or twice to assess them. Who we invest with the expertise of possessing knowledge about sexual violence has implications beyond individual cases.
4

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2006, online, www.dictionary.com 5 Justice for Women, Battered Womens Syndrome: Help or Hinderance?, 1995, online, http://www.jfw.org.uk/BWS.HTM

Fifth, listening to stories is more epistemologically sound than traditional claim-warrantimpact forms of debate in that it highlights aspects of social reality methodologically overlooked by academic argumentation. Ewick and Sibley6 write: The first is epistemological. It is argued that narratives have the capacity to reveal truths about the social world that are flattened or silenced by an insistence on more traditional methods of social science and legal scholarship. According to this view, social identities and social action, indeed all aspects of the social world, are storied. Consequently, narrative is not just a form that is imposed upon social life (Sommers 1992); rather, it is constitutive of that which it represents. To attempt to examine lives, experiences, consciousness, or action outside of the narratives that constitute them, it is argued, is to distort through abstraction and decontextualization, depriving events and persons of meaning (Barthes 1966; Mishler 1986; Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; White 1987). Thus, the AC will affirm through the narrative of Brenda Aris, who was convicted of second-degree murder for killing her abusive husband and sentenced to seventeen years to life in prison: I was 16 when I met my husband, he was seven years older than I. He was charming. I was attracted to him. He was attracted to me. He was the first guy that ever paid attention to me. I was very shy, I wasn't very cute, and he charmed me. I fell in love with him. I then got pregnant by him and I married him. And I was married to him for ten years. We had three children. They're three years apart. And during our marriage, it started out one day, before we got married that he abused me. We had been at a friend's house, we were going to stay overnight, he had been drinking, he didn't want to drive, so we stayed there. He decided he wanted to have sex with me that night, on their living room floor and I told him, no, because I was afraid someone would see us. He insisted, he slapped me and he forced sex on me. And I didn't scream and I didn't cry out for help because I was ashamed of what these people would think of me if I said something. The next day, I told myself I would never see this guy again. I didn't for a while. He started coming over to my house, apologizing, telling me it wasn't his fault, he was drunk, and he didn't know what he was doing. It would never happen again and he really wanted to continue to see me. I then, I eventually gave in. I started seeing him again. I ended up getting pregnant. And he wanted me to marry him and something told me no. He then came to my house and told my parents that he had
6

Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Sibley, Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Towards a Sociology of Narrative, Law & Society Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1995), pp. 197-226

gotten me pregnant and that he wanted to do the right thing and marry but I did not want to marry him. My parents then told me, my mother took me aside and said, how would you like to grow up without a father, what would that be like for you? And that's all she had to tell me. I then just said, okay, I'll marry him. She continues, describing the night she killed her husband: Before the incident happened, that's when I took him back out of fear, not out of love. I had lost my apartment because he would use my money for drugs. We then had to move into a garage. At that time, he had me totally isolated. My car broke down, he refused to fix it because he wanted to keep me from family and friends. We had no phone and the events occurred everyday. The kids would get to the point, where we would walk to the store, the grocery store and the kids, in the market, would say, Mommy, could you hurry up? We don't want Daddy to be mad. And for a child, you know, to say that, the kids had to walk on eggshells with me. They didn't want to disrupt him, they didn't want to set him off and they went through this with me. Do you want me to go into the night it happened? The night that it happened, we had been living, like I said, with someone else in their home and he was having a party that evening and people were drunk and getting high. And he was very upset with me because I was unable to provide him with drugs that everyone else was getting high and he wasn't. He was upset with me. I was laughing with some friends and talking and he called me over. He thought we were laughing at him. He had been on drugs. He was on speed, and so he was, like, paranoid. He backhanded me to the ground and told me to go to my room and stay there. Mind you our room, it's actually a garage. It consists of a padlock on the outside of the bedroom door. Not on the inside. Um, when, when the person we lived with would come home from work, he told me to go in there and stay there. And he locked, he'd lock the room. He just had to do that one time and I, and I just begged him, you know, whenever you want me to go there, tell me to go there but, please, don't ever lock that again. It was a horrifying feeling to be locked in there. So, this night, he told me to go to my room and stay there until he tells me to come out. I didn't want to cause a scene. I didn't want people to see what he was doing to me. I didn't want them to see, you know, the names he was calling me. And so, I went and I stayed in the room. I stayed there for a while. I then had to use the restroom and when I got up to use the restroom he came in, banging down the bedroom door, the bathroom door, because I had left the bedroom. He then persisted on kicking me, hitting me, pushing me and yelling at me. He was upset that I had, he said, you know, no bitch is ever going to laugh at me and get away with it. He was very angry with me that night. He kept saying, he's had it with me. Someone finally banged on the bathroom door and said, you know, can I talk to Brenda? And he says, when I'm through with her. He then finally let me out and at that point, she says, can I help you? Can we get you out of here? And I said, he will not let you take me. And I didn't want to get anyone else involved because I, I knew of his temper and he would hurt people. And I never wanted to be responsible for him hurting someone else, trying to help me.

So, I then just asked the person, my oldest daughter is still awake, could you take her with you? This isn't over. He's not done with me. And so she then took my oldest daughter with her. I then went back to the room and stayed them. He continued to go out and drink with the, with the party. He then came back into the room and started beating me and started calling me names and telling me he's totally had it with me, and that he didn't think he was going to let me live 'til morning. And I honestly believed him. It was something in his eyes that night, He just kept, over and over, he didn't think he would let me live. And he then passed out. I thought he was faking, waiting for me to get up and leave again so he can jump on me and I waited there for a little while. And then I finally got up to get some ice for my face, it was hurting. And I went out to my kitchen. And the party was still going on but nobody was paying attention to me, they didn't even pay attention to me when I was getting beat in that room. Nobody heard me screaming. I was actually screaming that night. Usually, I don't yell out because I'm afraid someone will come help me and that person will get hurt. But, this night, I was actually yelling out because he was pulling my hair so hard, I thought he was breaking my neck. Thus, you affirm the resolution on the basis of Brendas story as a justification for her use of deadly force. But further, there are five pre-fiat advantages to the ACs introduction of Brendas narrative into the round: First, narratives are micro-politically liberatory since they allow oppressed groups to participate in social discourse. Ewick and Sibley7 write: A second and related
claim made for

narrative scholarship is overtly political. Some scholars contend that narratives have significant

subversive or transformative potential. A central, if not the central, concern underlying narrative studies...is to give voice to the subject: to collect,
interpret, and present materials about human experiences that preserve this voice of the subject (Bell 1991:245; see Rollins 1995).

By allowing the silenced to

speak, by refusing the flattening and distorting effects of traditional logico-scientific methods and
dissertative modes of representation,

narrative scholarship participates in rewriting social life in [liberatory] ways that

are, or can be, liberatory

. Thus, reading the narrative in round serves to micro-politically empower battered

women like Brenda Aris. Second, the reading of the narrative provides five unique advantages. Daniel Solorzano and Tara Yosso write: Storytelling is both a method of telling the story of those whose
7

Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Sibley, Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Towards a Sociology of Narrative, Law & Society Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1995), pp. 197-226

experiences have not been told (i.e. those on the margins of society) and a tool for analyzing and challenging the stories of those in power and whose story is a natural part of the dominant discourse. Stories serve five pedagogical functions: (1) they build community among the margins of society; (2) they challenge the perceived wisdom of those at societys center; (3) they open new windows into the reality of those at the margins of society by showing the possibilities beyond the ones they live and that they are not alone in their position; (4) they teach others that, by combining elements from both the story and the current reality, one can construct another world that is richer than either the story or reality alone; and (5) they provide a context to understand and transform established belief systems. [O]ppressed groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation. Thus, encouraging narrative argumentation makes furthers the pedagogical goals of debate and improves it as a forum for social criticism. Third, in the context of domestic violence, examining the stories of victims is key to undermining stereotypes that contribute to victimization and prevent us from meaningfully understanding and solving for domestic violence. Zanita Fenton8 writes: Third, feminists strive to use context to evaluate justice, rather than merely to provide more abstraction and theory. Examining the reality of women's experiences has been the means by which feminists have tried to alter[s] the abstraction upon which the law is based. Abstraction is also the means by which individuals formulate stereotype. One means of disestablishing stereotype is also by providing context and disconfirming information. Part II explores the nature and formation of stereotype and how social power drives the formation and perpetuation of stereotype. Society uses stereotype as a tool for controlling the relative status of groups, such as African Americans and women, and of
individuals, such as

victims of domestic abuse. Stereotypes of race and/or gender depend upon and reinforce each other, and

Zanita E. Fenton (Assistant Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School. A.B., Princeton University, 1990; J.D., Harvard Law School, 1993), Domestic Violence in Black and White: Racialized Gender Stereotypes in Gender Violence, 1998, Columbia Journal of Gender & Law (8 Colum. J. Gender & L. 1)

serve as justifications for the perpetuation of violence. In addition, sex and sexuality are integral to the power dynamic enabling the
formation of these stereotypes. Finally,

the stereotypes associated with domestic violence and victimhood, also dependent upon

race and gender stereotypes,

condition the environment, both within the home and in society, for the

acceptance of physical violence. Thus, the narrative serves to undermine stereotypes about victims of domestic abuse and thus to mobilize social action to solve the problem. Fourth, narrative debate forces us to rejustify concepts of affirmation and topicality in order to redefine exclusionary universals. Judith Butler notes: Consider [When] subjects who have been excluded from the exclusionary definition of the universal seize the language of enfranchisement and set into motion a performative contradiction claiming to be covered by that universal. This kind of speech appears at first to be impossible or contradictory, but it constitutes one way to expose[s] the limits of current notions of universality, and to constitute[s] a challenge to those existing standards to become more expansive and inclusive. Being able to utter the performative contradiction is hardly a self defeating enterprise; on the contrary, performative contradiction is crucial to the continuing revision and elaboration of historical standards of universality proper to the futural movement of democracy. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it who demand that the universal ought to be inclusive of them. Thus, the ACs demand for the inclusion of Brenda Ariss narrative in debate, even if ultimately misguided, serves to expose the limitations of our current assumptions about the nature of debate and they ways in which those assumptions are potentially exclusionary. Fifth, performance cases micropolitcally solve for this exclusion by challenging dominant forms of argumentation. Jessica Kulynych explains, Only the act of resistance provides any meaningful sense of citizenship in the privatized contemporary world Resistance [is a]

successor concept to [the] notion of political action: where the space for action is usurped, where action in the strict sense is no longer possible, resistance becomes the primary vehicle of spontaneity and agonistic subjectivity. [Individual] resistance recognizes disciplinary power, enables action in the face of power, enables innovation in deliberation, and thus allows us to see the world of political action differently. Affirming the narrative completes the act of resistance by accepting the narrative as a legitimate form of argumentation, opening debate up to the voices of those at the bottom of society. Arguments in debate are included and excluded based on their ability to pick up ballots. By including the narrative voice in the debate community, we are able to challenge exclusionary trends and provide inclusion to voices silenced both in and out of the community. This precludes other impacts in the round since its the only impact that matters outside of the round.