Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse

In the American legal system valid witness-testimony is supposed to be invariable and unchanging, so defense attorneys highlight seeming inconsistencies in victims’ accounts to impeach their credibility. This book offers an examination of how and why victims of domestic violence might seem to be ‘changing their stories,’ in the criminal justice system, which may leave them vulnerable to attack and criticism. Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant versions of violence investigates the discourse of protective order interviews, where women apply for court injunctions to keep abusers away. In these encounters, two different versions of violence, each influenced by a range of ethnolinguistic, intertextual and cultural factors, are always produced. This ethnography of Latina women narrating violence suggests that before victims even get to trial, their testimony involves much more than merely telling the truth. This book provides a unique look at pre-trial testimony as a collaborative and dynamic social and cultural act.

Gregory M. Matoesian, University of Illinois, Chicago, in Spanish in Context 5(2), 2008:
This is the first major, comprehensive work dealing with discursive constructions of violence in the protective order application interview: a study of intertextual, interinstitutional, and interdiscursive narration and variation between Latina immigrant victims in the United States and the legal gatekeepers/advocates (along with translators in some cases) who interview them. This isn't your ordinary sociolinguiistic or discourse analysis of interview talk but a richly detailed ethnography of linguistic interaction, culture and power in the criminal justice system.[...]Trinch demonstrates in vivid detail what happens when the oral story is decontextualized and recontextualized in the form of the written report, recognizing of course that legal translation will always to some extent distort lay litigant experience (making it difficult if not impossible to personalize an impersonal system). I cannot think of a socio-, or anthrolinguistic work that matches the depth and scope of Trinch's analysis in terms of incorporating both domination and the legal system into a fine grained analysis of communicative detail.[...] Latina's Narratives is not only a work of immense interest for sociolinguists and discourse analysts but also, even more importantly, for the legal and criminal professionals handling cases of domestic abuse.