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ABSTRACT
How does a person come to understand his or her problems in terms of rights? This is a critical problem for the battered women's movement as well as for other human rights movements that rely on rights awareness to encourage victims to seek help from the law. The adoption of a rights consciousness requires experiences with the legal system that confirm that subjectivity. Rights-defined selves emerge from supportive encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers. This empirical study shows how victims of violence against women come to take on rights consciousness.
I. INTRODUCTION
From civil rights to human rights, rights talk remains a dominant framework for contemporary social justice movements. But seeing oneself as a rights-- bearing subject whose problems are violations of these rights is far from universal. How does a person come to understand his or her problems in terms of rights? It is the contention of this article that the adoption of a rights consciousness requires experiences with the legal system that reinforce this subjectivity. Adoption of rights-defined selves depends on encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers that reflect back this identity. Indications that the problem is trivial, that the victim does not really have these rights, or that the offender does not deserve punishment undermine this subjectivity. How to persuade victims to take on a rights-- defined self is a critical problem for the battered women's movement, which relies heavily on rights talk to encourage abused women to seek help from the law.' It is also fundamental to a range of other rights-based social reform movements that depend on victim activism and rights claiming in order to promote change such as disability rights and employment rights. The human rights movement depends both on government compliance with international treaties and victim advocacy for these rights. Thus, examining how vulnerable populations come to see their difficulties as human rights violations is a fundamental question for human rights activists. This empirical study shows how victims of violence against women come to take on rights consciousness. It describes an interaction between consciousness, experience, and institutional receptivity that is critical to human rights practice.
The battered women's movement has always relied on a criminal justice component to its activism, which...