Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women's Human Rights to Protection from Violence

How does a person come to understand his or her problems in terms of rights? This is a critical problem for the battered women's movement as well as for other human rights movements that rely on rights awareness to encourage victims to seek help from the law. The adoption of a rights consciousness requires experiences with the legal system that confirm that subjectivity. Rights-defined selves emerge from supportive encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers. This empirical study shows how victims of violence against women come to take on rights consciousness.