Making Your Home a Shelter

The development of bilateral electronic monitoring (BEM) exemplifies how shifts in the culture of control (Garland, 2001), including a focus on domestic violence (DV) victims' emotional welfare and integration into proceedings, can alter abused partners' everyday lives. As a protective strategy, BEM provides DV victims with an alternative to relocating to a shelter. The subjective sense of safety engendered by program involvement emerges gradually, as everyday environments are re-evaluated in light of an estranged partner's absence; through social interactions with family members, friends, and justice agents; and as the understanding of what it means to be protected develops. The use of BEM technology to promote victim welfare rather than as a strictly evidentiary tool suggests that this expression of the new paradigm of justice is oriented toward victim re-entry into civil society.