R v Middendorp

In Western jurisdictions, the partial defence of provocation has provoked legal and social controversies. Criminologists, legal and feminist scholars contend that the intersection of the legal conditions for the defence and socially gendered roles systematically disadvantages battered women while privileging men who argue a ‘loss of control’ in intimate partner homicides. As Howe notes, the ‘[d]evastating feminist critiques of the age-old concession to “passion” in the form of homicidal fury unleashed on women by furious men are now legion.’ Nonetheless, the mobilisation of gendered assumptions in intimate partner homicides continues to be a critical area of gendered injustice. There have been many law reform campaigns seeking meaningful change in judgments and case outcomes in Australia and internationally. R v Middendorp is a 2010 case resulting from one law reform effort in Victoria, which introduced a new category of homicide with the explicit goal of better responding to lethal violence in the context of family violence. The Middendorp case exposes the ongoing difficulties of achieving gendered justice through law reform.