Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice

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At the start, Kennedy warns that this book is not to be treated as an academic account but as a polemic, her own take on how our law fails women.

Helena Kennedy argues that women should be present in evert level of law -- this is because jurists are human beings, and, as such, are informed and influenced by their backgrounds, community and experiences. e. the group who are far more likely to be the perpetrators than the survivors of this particular crime. Unlike Germaine Greer, who recently wrote a provocative and alienating book about it, based in part on a set of assumptions I found particularly hard to recognise, Kennedy brings us cold, hard facts about how women are treated by the criminal justice system, including rape victims still expected to answer questions in the vein of: “whether her vagina was naturally lubricated to enable penetration, thereby encouraging the jury to infer that some gratification was being found”. In my opinion, one great example could be in the first chapter, where she compares the “escalation of the numbers of women being sent to prison” in the early 90s and the start of the 2000s.I read this book during the summer before coming to Oxford and it has proved surprisingly useful in my studies so far. The given statistics will convince you of the existence of prejudice and double standards for women everywhere in the court: whether it is behind the Bar or the bars. Helena Kennedy is a barrister working in criminal law, and she sees in the current spate of miscarriages of justice coming to light an opportunity for radical reform in the courts… except it's 1992. Just as Eve discovered that the fruit was good for eating when she tasted it for herself, Kripal is interested in the ways that firsthand religious experiences with the holy and the sacred can change us in profound, full-bodied ways such that we can never see ourselves and the world in the same way again.

Helena Kennedy focuses on the treatment of women in our courts - at the prejudices of judges, the misconceptions of jurors, the labyrinths of court procedures and the influence of the media. Precisely these arguments about 'irreparable damage to the family' have been used to counter the introduction of every piece of reforming legislation for the benefit of women in the last hundred years.

Those most susceptible to this injustice are women, the young, the working class, immigrants, the Irish, black people and homosexuals.

And once you “eat of such fruit,” childhood innocence is lost — just as Adam and Eve could never go back to their previous naked and carefree life in the Garden. As we know, too much or too little of any specific hormones can have big impacts on our health and it's why treatments like HRT need to be closely supervised by a doctor. Meanwhile, battered women who finally snap and kill their tormentors are being prosecuted for murder, and mothers who miss a probation appointment because it was scheduled during the school run are being imprisoned. During that downtime, I was drawn to all the work being done in the start-up space around women’s health, FemTech, and FamTech. it did get a bit repetitive at points and it took on a rather informal tone but i suppose if you like that then it won't be a problem.This book highlights that sexism is so pervasive in courts, things are never quite so straightforward. There is still a troubling, largely unconscious, perception that entitlement to a woman's body is something that can be debated.

She incriminates women as much as men and talks an equal share about female criminals as she does about female victims. Not only does it tackle women's issues brilliantly, but it never fails to keep in mind that class and race are also major factors in women's discriminations. Kennedy’s understanding of women is intersectional – not because that has become fashionable, but because she has been representing black defendants for decades, and understands the cycle of social deprivation, poverty, institutional neglect and crime they face. That's not to say the book is not worth reading since it contains its more than fair share of 'inside stories', analysis and theoretical accounts. It is indeed shocking that double standards can affect the outcome of the trial and a woman who gets prosecuted, might suffer an even harsher sentence than her male counterparts for equivalent crimes only because she came to a court with a deep v-cut dress.It will give you an understanding of how law interacts with wider society and how rules will impact different groups in different ways. Keep in mind what Eve sees for herself after the snake hisses in her ear that if you eat the forbidden fruit, “You will not die…[rather,] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” — meaning like an adult. is skilful and her eloquent argument against the 'Chivalry Theory' changed the misconceptions I had about women being treated more gently than men in our legal system. But the ancient Gnostics saw that the snake was hissing at us too: warning us not to long for some allegedly perfect past (that we now see never existed and was merely the limited knowledge of childhood innocence), and encouraging us to transgress the false limitations of childhood and move toward the future: toward growing up, toward being religious in a way that welcomes and integrates adult knowledge and adult sexuality as normal, natural, and healthy parts of life (Kripal 15).