The Second Trial

By Rosemarie Boll
Second Story Press

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a scourge that affects families in every country and at every social class. Between twenty-five and fifty percent of women worldwide will be a victim of IPV at some point in her life, and forty to seventy percent of female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner. These statistics are shocking, but what is too often left out of the discussion about IPV is the way violence can affect so many lives. When those in pop culture or the media explore themes relating to IPV, the conversation is limited to finding safety for the survivor, usually a woman, and to utilizing the traditional legal system to prosecute and punish the offender, usually a man. In The Second Trial, Rosemarie Boll moves beyond the dichotomy of perpetrator vs. victim and focuses on the too often invisible children who are harmed by IPV. Through the experiences of an adolescent boy, the book tells the story of a Canadian family coming to grips with extreme violence.

Boll introduces us to Danny, a thirteen-year-old boy who witnesses a family court hearing after his father seriously and continually abused his mother. The book tracks the boy through the court proceedings and then through life in a protection program designed to prevent his father from causing further serious harm to his mother. Viewing complicated legal issues around IPV through the eyes of a child highlights the disconnect between the formality of the legal system and the complex, sometimes contradictory emotions involved in family violence. Outsiders are used to seeing an evil offender and an innocent victim. But what does a child do when this “evil offender” is also a father? The Second Trial addresses these complicated questions of family and safety within an abusive household. Boll captures how a child can love and idolize a parent, even an abusive one.

By delving into tricky questions that surround IPV, Boll raises questions about how clunky traditional legal systems deal with complex issues in family law. She shines a light on non-court based innovations to keep families safe and introduces readers to New Identities for Victims of Abuse (NIVA), which was started by the Alberta government in 1997 to provide additional protection to victims of family violence. IPV is a serious and complicated problem that demands creative solutions. The confines of the courtroom should not be the limits of our solutions to IPV.

The Second Trial provides readers a glimpse into a child’s relationship with family violence, revealing an often forgotten voice in narratives about the subject. By contrasting traditional court-based solutions with the NIVA program, Boll makes us question the bounds of the traditional legal system. She leads readers to demand alternative avenues to justice and creative routes to safety for victims.

Review by Andrea Gittleman

The Hanging of Susanna Cox: The True Story of Pennsylvania’s Most Notorious Infanticide & the Legend That’s Kept It Alive

By Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest, and Corinne Earnest
Stackpole Books

The story of Susanna Cox, as detailed in Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest, and Corinne Earnest’s The Hanging of Susanna Cox, nearly perfectly follows the trajectory of the seduction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century: a naive girl is lured from her family, “seduced” (often, in actuality, raped), left by her lover (or rapist), and left to die alone. Seduction novels were simultaneously didactic, propagandistic, prurient, and hugely popular. What differentiates the story of Susanna Cox from the seduction novel is that Cox was a real woman, indentured at the age of fourteen and hung in Pennsylvania for infanticide in 1809 when she was in her early twenties.

The authors tease out the details of Cox’s short life, trial, and execution against the backdrop of the changes to the United States, forensics, the justice system, and the public’s perception of crime. This is all intriguing, albeit concerning, information. The evidence of Cox’s guilt was sparse, her trial exceptionally brief, and the details provided by the authors about her public execution horrific. At Cox’s brief trial, women connected to the case do not testify, nor does the father of Cox’s son, who is not so much as named in public records. Regardless of her guilt or innocence, in many ways Cox’s life was tragic, and the book is particularly sad to read in that her case was likely in no way unique, particularly amongst “invisible” indentured women.

What I found most interesting about the book was the emergence of Cox’s “notorious” status and the visibility that came to her after her death. The authors note, “At the very time Susanna’s life came to an end, her story came alive through the words of printers.” Perhaps because her story was so similar to the type of seduction tale told in countless novels and stories at the time, broadsides and poems about the case were printed simultaneous to her trial and execution, and were widely sold. The story endured. The book opens with the authors’ visit to the Kutztown Folk Festival in 2008—199 years after Cox’s execution—at which one exhibit is the repeated hanging of an effigy of Cox. Although this hanging of Cox’s effigy culminates with a quote from one of the poems about Cox (“Her exit–infamy!”), what is intriguing is that the poems about her are factual, didactic, and moralistic, but also somewhat sympathetic.

Although there are many unanswered questions about the life of Susanna Cox, the authors have assembled an impressive array of facts. As someone who had never heard of Susanna Cox or her execution before reading the book and who has never visited the area in which the story is famous, the book occasionally delved into too much local and geographical detail for me; however, The Hanging of Susanna Cox was still a book that I read with interest and speed, eager to learn more about the story. Beyond just the case of Susanna Cox, which is engaging but frustrating for the impossibility of decisive answers, the book is also a portrayal of a justice system and population in a state of significant change.

Review by Erin Schowalter