Lawyers Manual - Unified Court System

184 Jill Laurie Goodman
assist her in contacting the police and District Attorney’s Office, and she may
need an immediate referral to a rape crisis center. Stopping the sexual violence
is important not only because it is a form of abuse to which no one should be
subjected, but also because as long as it continues your client may be too fragile
to cope with any of the complex legal, emotional, and practical problems
encountered by domestic violence victims.
The sexual assault also may be important because legally it may be the most
serious offense her abuser has committed. Raising the sexual assault in
pleadings, motion papers, or oral arguments may be your most effective means
of getting the relief she needs, be it an order of protection, custody of her
children, permission to proceed confidentially in a lawsuit, or the immigration
remedies available to battered women.
Knowing about the sexual violence also may be critical to understanding the
nature of the abuse. It may be fundamental to the methods her abuser uses to
maintain power and control and the fear in which she lives. As a lawyer, you need
to do more than present a series of discrete facts, however believable each may be
in itself. The success of any legal proceeding depends on a theory or narrative that
makes the actions of the parties plausible. If the abuser has raped your client or
has forced her to engage in sexual acts that she finds repulsive or painful, if sexual
abuse is part of his arsenal of abuse, his actions are likely to have a profound
effect on how your client behaves. Explaining how much your client fears her
abuser — and many proceedings on behalf of abused women come down to the
issue of fear — is difficult without presenting the facts of the sexual abuse.
Interviewing
Important as sexual assault may be to your client’s experiences of abuse, she
probably will not volunteer information about sexual violence. The abuse may have
been intensely painful and humiliating and, for that reason, difficult to discuss. She
may be ashamed to talk about sexual matters with a stranger, particularly someone
who may be from a different culture, ethnicity, or class. Most likely she has
internalized to some extent the cultural message that rape by a husband or
intimate partner is not real rape. Particularly if she is married, she may believe
that her abuser has a right to use her sexually, no matter how much she hates it
or how much it hurts, and that she herself is to blame. Perhaps she does not
know that rape by her husband is a crime. If she is an immigrant, language
barriers and traditional cultural notions may exacerbate all of these difficulties.
If you are going to hear about sexual abuse, you will need to call on your
most sharply-honed interviewing skills. You should approach the topic gently,