Seminar
Prosecutors struggle with high levels of victim recantation in domestic violence cases. For years prosecutors and advocates believed that victims recanted because perpetrators overtly threatened and coerced them. However, this perspective offers an incomplete picture because it neglects other complex interpersonal dynamics influencing the victim's decision-making process. We use concepts from family systems and attachment theories to re-conceptualize recantation a complicated bi-directional, interpersonal process grounded in the intimacy needs of both partners. Specifically, recantation serves to alleviate both the victim and perpetrator's fears of being without each other, and also ensures that the victim and perpetrator will have future opportunities for working out their intimacy needs - even if working out these needs involves violence to do so. Significantly, this approach to recantation need not oppose the dominant approach, which prioritizes the coercive influence of the perpetrator but may, in fact, help to further explain that influence by situating it within a more comprehensive and complex interpersonal dynamic. Transcripts of telephone conversations of couples taped over the length of the perpetrator's jail stay at the King County Detention Facility in Seattle, Washington will be used to illustrate this re-conceptualization of recantation.