From Domestic Violence to Procedural Doubt: A Study of Social Actor Representation and Judicial Framing in a Selected Pakistani Legal Judgment

Abstract

This article analyses the construction of social actors in the judicial discourse in Muhammad Abbas v. The State and another (2017LHC3506), a criminal appeal in the Lahore High Court which came out of the death of Khadija Bibi. This case is not just a standard intimate partner violence case but a domestic/familial violence judgment, since its legal story is articulated through kinship, familial relations, witness evidence, inheritance, medical evidence, procedure, and doubt. This study analyses the representation of the victim, the appellant, the complainant, witnesses, medical actors, investigating actors, documentary evidence, and the court in the judgment using Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Theory. The findings reveal that Khadija Bibi is the victim of domestic violence; however, her identity is mainly produced and reproduced in the very restrictive relational, bodily, and evidentiary categories of deceased, wife, mother, sister, body, and medical record. In contrast, the appellant is slowly built up as a legal subject who has rights, and whose role is based on the benefit of doubt as something that is not yet evident. The findings also reveal that the judgment does not merely constitute a report on domestic/familial violence as social harm but re-codifies it as a legal problem of delay, contradiction, witness unreliability, the clash between ocular and medical evidence, and reasonable doubt. It does not set out to question the concept of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather to consider the discursive effects of a legal structure where evidentiary uncertainty is the only central reality, beyond which the gender and familial dimensions of violence are marginalized.

Keywords: Domestic Violence, Familial Violence, Judicial Discourse, Social Actor Representation, Legal Language, Pakistan Legal Discourse