Thread by @ethanruns

Before it became Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year, I knew “gaslighting” was a good word for my book: Chapter 7, “How Judges Gaslight Domestic Violence Victims in Divorce Trials”
pbs.org/newshour/arts/…

#2 “Profoundly at odds with the legal meaning of domestic violence and female abuse victims’ own understandings of what brought them to court were the revisionist, gaslighting narratives of their husbands, their family members, and judges.”

#3 “Judges discursively transformed what plaintiffs understood as intolerable and unlawful abuse constituting grounds for divorce into innocent misunderstandings and mistakes on the part of caring husbands, and in so doing gaslighted plaintiffs…

#4 …by calling into question their sense of reality (Sweet 2019). In response to a plaintiff’s request for a divorce on the grounds of ‘the defendant’s ceaseless physical abuse and domestic violence,’ the defendant responded by stating, …

#5 …‘I was not calm enough, truly did beat her, and regret what I did; no matter what, it is wrong to hit people, and I admit my mistake.’ In its holding, the court declared: ‘The defendant is sincere about repenting, mending his ways, …

#6 …and putting an absolute end to heated behavior. … The plaintiff’s grounds for divorce do not meet the statutory requirement stipulated by the Marriage Law that mutual affection has broken down, …

#7 …and the court therefore denies support of the plaintiff’s petition’ (Decision #1575160, Luohe Municipal Shaoling District People’s Court, Henan Province, July 28, 2015).”
Case ID (2015)召民二初字232号, archived at perma.cc/YMH3-ECQG.

#8 The book is #OpenAccess.
cambridge.org/core/books/dec…