In all jurisdictions the police are expected to play a key frontline role in protecting women from male violence and investigating crimes with a view to prosecuting perpetrators of violence against women. Yet there is growing evidence that significant numbers of police officers are abusers themselves - both in their offical roles and in their off-duty lives.
How can individual police officers be held to account where the system requires their own police colleagues to investigate them? What efforts if any have been made to challenge the systems that have enabled police abusers to abuse their power? What has litigation achieved?
Speaker:
Bronwyn Pithey
(South Africa)
Bio:
Bronwyn is an admitted Advocate in the High Court of South Africa, working for the Women’s Legal Centre (WLC) in Cape Town, South Africa. WLC is an African feminist public interest law centre. Bronwyn leads the Women’s Right to be Free from Violence Programme and is currently involved in several constitutional litigation cases challenging the constitutionality of legislation, the implementation of judgments and laws, and access to justice for marginalised and vulnerable women. Prior to the WLC she was an advocate in the Sexual Offences and Community Affairs Unit of the National Prosecuting Authority of South Africa from 2000 to 2015. She has been intricately involved in the development and drafting of numerous pieces of legislation regarding violence against women. She is the co-editor of the Sexual Offences Commentary on the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act 32 of 2007 (Juta). She holds LLB and LLM degrees from the University of Cape Town.
Contributor:
Tamar Ezer
(USA)
Bio:
Tamar Ezer is the Acting Director and a Lecturer in Law with the Human Rights Clinic and the Faculty Director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Miami. Prior to that, Ezer taught and supervised projects at Yale Law School as a Lecturer in Law, Visiting Scholar with the Schell Center for International Human Rights, and Executive Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy.- Additionally, Ezer served as Deputy Director of the Law and Health Initiative of the Open Society Public Health Program, where she focused on legal advocacy to advance health and human rights in Eastern and Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
Chaired by:
Harriet Wistrich
(UK)
Bio:
Harriet Wistrich is a UK lawyer and director of Centre for Women’s Justice. She has thirty years’ experience focussing on holding the state to account, particularly the police and prosecution services. Harriet’s practice started through campaigning around women who kill their abusers. She has represented many women who have appealed their murder convictions, including victim of coercive control, Sally Challen.