Modern Concepts About Violence Towards Women Are Actually 650+ Years Old

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Another modern approach being used to combat and break the cycle of violence towards women is restorative justice. While this method of instilling justice to the abusers continues to evolve, there are numerous recent examples of both legal and non-legal justice that men suffered as a result of their abuse towards women. For example, consider technology-firm CEO Gurbaksh Chahal who was fired for a domestic violence conviction in April 2014 (Satlin). The tech executive was fired by his Board of Directors after pleading guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence, while also slipping past 45 other felony violence charges, against his girlfriend (Satlin). While this CEO somehow managed to avoid jail time, the loss of his high-ranking job position is certainly a costly consequence. Rather than only disciplining Chahal with legal consequences, such as required counseling or probation time, modern society has evolved to further carry these consequences into virtually all aspects of the abuser’s life, including their professional life. In addition to numerous examples of domestic violence consequences becoming more well-known, many legal jurisdictions and law-enforcement agencies are working to make their sentencing stricter in an attempt to teach a lasting and more effective lesson to abusers. For example, the state of New York recently toughened its legal penalties for repeat offenders of domestic violence (Lehman). By making punishments stricter and giving law-enforcement agencies more legal weighting to work with, society’s usage of restorative justice will begin to extend beyond just locking up violent men and begin to transform those abusers’ thinking. While the modern day usage of restorative justice typically entails longer and stricter punishments that affect abusers in almost every aspect of life, the Wife of Bath first used restorative justice in her tale by forcing the knight to finally consider women’s perspectives and desires in order to break the cycle of violence when it occurs and to prevent it from occurring again in the future. Specifically within the Wife’s tale, she tells her fellow pilgrims of the knight who saw a maiden walking past him and “by utter force, he took away her maidenhead” (Chaucer 888). After committing this horrific act, the knight is taken to the King where he is to be put to death; however, despite the King’s law, “the queen and other ladies as well / so long prayed the king for grace / until he granted him his life right there” (Chaucer 894-6). In a rather surprising turn for the Wife of Bath’s tale, the Queen tells the condemned knight, “I grant thee life, if thou canst tell me / what thing it is that women most desire” (Chaucer 904-5). On his journey home after a year’s time, the knight encounters an old, ugly wife who asks the knight what he is truly seeking. As the knight explains he must find out what women truly desire, the old wife makes the young knight promise to fulfill any request she gives him if she is able to give him the correct response and save his life. Upon arrival back to the Queen, the knight says that “women desire to have sovereignty / as well over her husband as her love / and to be in mastery above him” (Chaucer 1038-40). After the Queen and her ladies could not deny the knight’s response as being incorrect, the young knight’s life is saved as he is subsequently forced to submit to the old wife’s request for him. Within the Wife of Bath’s tale, she exhibits an application of restorative justice aimed not only at making men suffer for their past transgressions, but also having them learn why it was wrong as to prevent them from happening again in the future. The Wife uses the Queen’s sentencing of the knight as a form of restorative justice “to rescue the young rapist from vengeful masculine justice so she can set him on the right track” (Leicester 164). Rather than make a public showing of the knight’s execution, the Queen elects to give him the option to save his life in exchange for the correct response to what women desire most. By choosing this particular question, she is forcing the knight to think from the women’s perspective and leave his own realm of masculine thoughts and desires. While she could have simply had the knight killed in front of everyone to show what happens to rapists in their kingdom, she gives him the chance to serve as more than just an example to others and actually “uses her power to improve and educate the flawed knight” (Knoetze 46). Overall, when used properly, the concept of restorative justice should go further than just make amends for the abuser’s violent behavior. In modern times, this entails punishments that extend past financial or other legal repercussions for emotional, verbal or physical violence towards women and begins to teach men lessons as to why these behaviors are worthy of punishments in the first place. Within the Wife’s tale, her usage of restorative justice does just that, as both the Queen and Loathly Lady force the knight to leave his selfish realm of thoughts and desires in order to understand a woman’s point of view. By doing so, both the Queen and Loathly Lady work to prevent the knight from ever exhibiting this cycle of violence again in the future. While justice for women who suffer forms of violence at the hands of men has certainly become a more prevalent focus with wide-spread societal recognition of the issue in modern times, the Wife of Bath actually first uses this concept successfully in her tale to show men that violence will have consequences while also teaching them to understand and appreciate women’s perspective.

A third, modern approach being used to break the cycle of violence towards women is the utilization of wisdom. As previously mentioned in the discussion of guilt in modern times, the widespread interconnectivity of social media and the Internet within current society presents an incredibly different realm of possibilities in fighting and preventing the cycle of violence against women. By having a much larger audience that is easily accessible, female victims of violence can now share their own experiences to help break the current cycle of violence by encouraging victims to have courage and come forward and to help educate the rest of society to prevent the cycle from continually occurring. For example, consider the recent #WhyILeft campaign on Twitter as a result of the Ray Rice domestic violence incident in 2014. Beverly Gooden, the founder of the social media campaign, “grew fed up with the victim-blaming nonsense she saw on her Twitter feed, and decided to share her own story of abuse” (Hannum). While the campaign also focused on not shaming women who have stayed committed to a violent relationship, former victims “joined the conversation to share their most vulnerable memories of what kept them trapped in the