Abstract
A new film offers some important lessons for doctors who suspect cases of domestic violence, writes Piyal Sen
A man is sleeping in his bed; soon, his pyjamas are aflame. He wakes up in a panic and raises the alarm. The fire brigade and police arrive to find a woman huddled in a corner of the lawn with the children. A police officer escorts her to the police station and a detective constable aggressively interrogates her. The next day she is produced in court, formally charged, and remanded in prison. The husband dies six days later. Thus began the events leading to the trial of Regina v Ahluwalia, which introduced the concept of battered women's syndrome for the first time as a legal defence in UK criminal courts. This term, developed by American psychologist Leonora Walker, is a type of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is characterised by a state of “learned helplessness” to explain the apparent passivity of many victims of violence, and “diminished perception of alternatives,” which suggests that the victim cannot see any way out of her situation. It can be used to support a defence of provocation.
The film Provoked is largely based on Kiranjit Ahluwalia's life, drawn from her autobiography Circle of Light and written with Rahila Gupta of the Southall Black Sisters, a campaign group that champions the rights of Asian and African-Caribbean women in the UK. Kiranjit, an Indian housewife, had an arranged marriage with Deepak Ahluwalia, a British Asian factory worker, and was subjected to severe violence and forms of mental torture for 10 years. She ultimately set fire to her husband's bedroom while he was asleep. The film starts with her life from the time of the attack, and follows it until her eventual release. It shows her experience in a women's prison, her attempts to have regular contact with her children while in custody, and finally, her trial and subsequent leave to appeal. Her experience of violence in the marriage is shown through flashbacks. Other characters appear, like a volunteer from the Southall Black Sisters, a fellow female prisoner who has also killed her partner, as well as legal and medical professionals involved with the case.
The film has some powerful moments. For example, in prison, Kiranjit hesitates when asked to take off her jewellery, including the mangalsutra and kara (symbols of marriage for a Sikh woman). Later on, she says, “for the first time, I feel free.” There is also the sequence in court where Kiranjit's QC, when discussing what is “reasonable,” turns towards Kiranjit and says, “Reasonable to whom, my lord? You? Me? To a woman who suffered violence, abuse, and humiliation of the highest order for 10 years, who feared for both her own life and the life of her young children, I myself could not, would not, presume to know what would be reasonable for such a woman.”
For a medical audience, two important lessons can be drawn from the film. The first can be drawn from the medical evidence given by a doctor in court, who had seen an injured Kiranjit in hospital and suspected that she was the victim of domestic violence, but was unable to question her privately because of her husband. A referral to a social worker at that stage, particularly as she had young children, might have helped to avert the subsequent tragedy. Now there are much clearer guidelines for doctors when seeing a suspected case of domestic violence. The Ahluwalia case played an important role in raising awareness about this problem. The other important lesson is one of offering an opinion only within the boundaries of one's knowledge, even when pushed by lawyers in court. Kiranjit's defence team sought the advice of a mental health professional, who refused to be drawn on the issue of provocation but mentioned her endogenous depression as grounds for supporting the defence of diminished responsibility. Her legal team, though initially unhappy, did eventually decide to use this statement in court, and this proved to be the deciding factor.
In the real Ahluwalia case, there was a retrial where a large body of psychiatric evidence supported the defence of diminished responsibility. This meant that Kiranjit suffered from an “abnormality of mind” which “substantially impaired” her responsibility for the killing. Kiranjit was freed, deemed to have already served her substantially reduced sentence. Soon after the successful outcome in the Ahluwalia case, other women also achieved similar outcomes in comparable cases. All this was not shown in the film.
Such a film should bring a message of hope to all the Kiranjit Ahluwalias who still live in our midst. For their sake, one sincerely hopes that the film gets a wide viewing. After all, the problem of domestic violence is not limited to the Asian community.
Doctors should offer an opinion only within the boundaries of their knowledge, even when pushed by lawyers in court