By Alice Hao, winner of the 2025 Criminal Justice Section’s student essay contest.
Introduction
Sometimes, poems are not merely stories, but reflections of the realities that are expressed through metaphors, myths, and confessions. Focusing on three of Sylvia Plath’s most poignant works – “Daddy,” “The Jailer,” and “Lady Lazarus” – this project analyzes how each poem’s articulations and expressions of domestic violence can be interpreted as legal testimony.
This project will establish a basis of thinking from law and literature, outline the creative research method, and work to bridge the gap between legal and poetic language. By examining how Plath’s confessional poems could be read as legal testimony to domestic violence, I argue that poetic language can articulate traumatic experiences that might otherwise be diminished or overlooked in conventional legal discourse. To complement this analysis, I have created a poetic Victim Impact Statement by physically deconstructing and reassembling fragments of Plath’s poetry into a new form, engaging with both literary interpretation and creative practice.
Poetry and the Law
In the field of law and literature, the study of poetry has long been neglected.1 There is a misunderstanding that poetic or creative language is at odds with legal language. Poems, then, are an under-utilized yet critical supplement to legal discourse. It provides a space where expression of personal truth can exist outside the rigid structures of legal testimony. In this context, confessional poetry—such as the work of Sylvia Plath—can act as a form of testimony that captures the nuance, contradiction, and fragmentation of victim experience.
Sylvia Plath, the Poet
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer whose work is renowned for its emotional intensity, psychological depth, and confessional style. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath was a gifted student and writer from an early age. The death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was only eight years old, had a profound and lasting impact on her life and writing. This early trauma combined with her struggles with mental illness, complex relationships, and experiences as a woman in mid-twentieth-century society would come to shape much of her poetic voice and inspiration.
Plath attended Smith College on a scholarship and later studied at Cambridge University, where she met and married fellow poet Ted Hughes. Their marriage was both creatively productive and personally tumultuous. The breakdown of this relationship, coupled with Plath’s ongoing battle with depression, significantly influenced her later works. She died by suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty, shortly after completing the manuscript for her most famous collection, Ariel.
As a writer, Plath was deeply influenced by literary modernism and the confessional poets of her time. Her work combines formal poetic skill with deeply personal subject matter – exploring themes such as identity, femininity, death, trauma, and rebirth. Her writing commonly centres around feminist discourse that “testify to the bitter resentment felt by the women unable to free themselves from oppressive and oppressing roles.”2
As a poet, Sylvia Plath is best known for her works of “confessional poetry.” This genre, which gained prominence in the 1950’s and 1960’s, is characterized by the intimate exploration of personal trauma, mental illness, relationships, and identity.3 Plath’s poems – described by poet and critic Al Alvarez as “the longest suicide note ever written” – frequently draw from her own experiences, including her struggles with depression, her complex relationship with her father, and the dissolution of her marriage.4 In her poetry, she often fused myth, history, and the domestic into surreal and often disturbing portraits of her domestic life. Her work pushes the boundaries of poetic form and subject, especially in her later poems, where she embraces a raw, unfiltered voice that resists both societal and literary conventions.
Genderedness of Domestic Violence
Domestic violence disproportionately affects women and girls.5 In Canada, women and girls are twice as likely to experience family violence and four times as likely to experience intimate partner violence compared to men and boys.6 In 2023, women and girls made up 68% of victims of family violence and 78% of victims of intimate partner violence. These statistics underscore the gendered nature of domestic violence, reflecting broader systems of inequality and control that continue to shape women’s experiences in both private and public spheres.
The law is also not kind to victims of domestic violence. The legal system has historically failed to competently support and administer justice in cases of abuse for women, and despite increased public awareness today, domestic violence continues to be significantly underreported. Victims often remain silent due to fear, shame, economic dependence, or a lack of faith in institutional responses.7 For victims of intimate partner violence specifically, the decision not to report is also shaped by the belief that abuse is a private or personal matter, or the perception that the incident is not important enough to report or warrant legal intervention.8 These internalized narratives are reinforced by a justice system that frequently minimizes harm and demands impossible standards of evidence, credibility, and emotional composure from survivors.
When women do come forward, the legal process can be alienating and retraumatizing. In cases of domestic and sexual violence, they are often subject to additional burdens of performance. A woman’s ability to be believed in court is not just about the facts she presents but about how she presents them – how closely her account conforms to the legal system’s expectations of what a “real” victim looks and sounds like.
As Craig suggests, the legal system is built by rituals – rituals of procedure, proof, and language.9 These rituals that govern legal processes in regards to “[w]ho speaks and with what authority, who is believed, what evidence is introduced, and how it is presented.”10 A complainant’s capacity to share in the “production of meaning” about what happened to her is contingent on her conformity to these expectations.11 This requirement to “play a part” within the trial’s narrative structure disproportionately excludes those who express emotional intensity or fail to narrate their trauma in conventional, linear ways.
Moreover, the law itself prioritizes physical over psychological harm. Most criminal statutes, civil protection orders, and tort laws focus heavily on visible injuries and acts of physical aggression, rather than emotional abuse or threats of psychological harm and coercion.12 This legal framing of prioritizing physical violence translates into judicial assumptions about what counts as harm. Judges – many of whom are men, and statistically, non-survivors – often struggle to recognize the insidious effects of emotional abuse, resulting in what Epstein and Goodman call an “epistemic asymmetry” between survivors and their legal audience.13
This disconnect is further exacerbated by the way trauma symptoms are interpreted in court. Survivors of domestic violence often display signs of PTSD, including hysteria, dissociation, anger, or paranoia – all of which can be misread as signs of instability or dishonesty.14 As a result, the very symptoms that affirm the truth of a victim’s experience may be used to discredit her testimony. This dynamic places survivors in a cruel double bind, where the expression of trauma undermines the credibility of the trauma itself.15
Victim Impact Statements
A Victim Impact Statement is “a written statement that describes the physical or emotional harm, property damage, or economic loss that the victim of an offence has suffered.”16 This statement is considered by the court during sentencing and provides victims of domestic violence an opportunity to express the impact of the crime in their own words. In Canada, victims are required to complete their impact statements using a standardized form used across all provinces and territories.17 In the statement, they may outline the emotional, physical, and economic effects of the crime, as well as any concerns they have for their own safety or the safety of loved ones.18 In 2015, the Criminal Code amendment allowed for more flexible ways of expression, so victims may also choose to include personal expressions, such as a drawing, poem, or letter, to convey how the offence has impacted them.19
The Victim Impact Statement serves both expressive and instrumental functions. Expressively, it functions as a medium for the victim “to communicate a message, whether to the court, the public, or the offender, about the harm that was caused.”20 Instrumentally, the statement supplies the judge with information that informs the court of the severity of harm caused by the offence and may directly influence sentencing.21
Methodology
The creative component of this research project involves the reassembly and reconstruction of Sylvia Plath’s poetry into the form of a Victim Impact Statement. My intention was to treat Plath’s poetry as a form of testimonial evidence and to reframe her lyrical voice within a legal format recognized by the courts today.
To do this, I utilized words and phrases from three of Plath’s poems – “Daddy,”22 “The Jailer,”23 and “Lady Lazarus”24 – each of which presents a different facet of gendered violence and psychological trauma present in her home life. I chose these works specifically for their visceral portrayals of domestic victimhood in parental, spousal, and societal contexts.
Physically, creating the victim impact statement itself was a tactile and deliberately analogue process. I printed out the poems, physically cut them into fragments, and reassembled them using paper and glue – creating a literal collage of Plath’s words. I then scanned the final composition, preserving the raw, fragmented texture of the piece. This hands-on method was a conscious choice to mirror the fractured nature of trauma narratives and the painstaking act of reclaiming voice from the ruins of memory. By avoiding digital tools in the construction stage, I aimed to create a more organic, intimate storytelling experience that reflects the irregular and difficult process to recounting traumatic experiences in one’s life.
Mentally, the experience was both arduous and exhausting. As I revisited Plath’s verses again and again to make sense of her implicit realities, I was no longer just a reader, but an interpreter trying to piece together a truth from shards. The labour of cutting, rearranging, and pasting gave me insight into the perspective of someone with a burden of remembering, of testifying, of making sense out of memories constructed by pain. By engaging with Plath’s poetry in this way, I experienced first-hand how testimony in context of domestic violence is never simple.
This creative collage honours Plath’s original language and stories while shifting its register into that of legal testimony. By reformatting her words into the form of a victim impact statement, I sought to emphasize the testimonial power already present in her poetry, specifically her verses function not only as personal expression but as evidence. The final product is a balance between literature and legal discourse, inviting the reader to consider how poetry can serve as both a creative medium and judicial form of truth-telling. In this way, the creative component becomes a hybrid artifact: part confession, part record, part protest – rooted in Plath’s own words and lived experiences, but reframed to challenge the rituals and structures of justice that so often silence or overlook the poetic voices of women.
Plath’s 3 Poetic Testimonies
I. Daddy
“Daddy” is one of Plath’s most famous works. Written in 1962 and published posthumously in Ariel (1965), the poem was most likely inspired by the death of her father.25 In the poem, the female speaker confronts the haunting legacy of her father’s death and the emotional tyranny that has shaped her identity. The poem is delivered in a confessional mode, blending personal grief with accusatory rage as the speaker likens her father to a Nazi and herself to a victim of genocide.26
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time —
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You —
These lines draw from fascist imagery to frame the speaker’s father figure as a symbol of control and domination. In the context of domestic violence, these images resonate with the psychological terror victims often experience behind closed doors – where the abuser’s control is not just physical, but emotional and symbolic.
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
Here, the act of revival is rendered as a form of violation. The speaker’s body is “pulled” and “stuck together” by external forces, showing her desperation to reunite with her father and a dependency on the tumultuous relationship. This verses show glimpses of a victim’s internal conflict: she would have much rather be dead than to be saved against her wishes. There is an overwhelming desire to escape the emotional tyranny imposed by her abuser, yet a simultaneous need to return to him, even through death. It reflects the often painful and contradictory feelings of a domestic abuse victim, where the desire for escape from the abuser coexists with an attachment to them.
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two —
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
What makes “Daddy” a deeply confessional poem is the divulgence into Plath’s own psyche and emotion surrounding her complex relationship with her deceased father.27 The speaker’s frank, often brutal, admission of her feelings towards her father – both love and hate – reveals the traumatic legacy left by his death. Despite the suffering he caused, she feels an insistent dependency on him, revealing the complexities of victimhood in abusive relationships. This emotional confusion is central to the experience of trauma, where feelings of love and hatred coexist in a manner that defies the simple explanation that the law tends to seek out.
II. The Jailer
Another poem by Sylvia Plath that explores themes of dehumanization, psychological trauma, and power dynamics in abusive relationships is “The Jailer.” Much like “Daddy”, “The Jailer” was written in 1962 and employs confessional language, revealing the emotional and psychological effects of intimate partner violence, which many believe is inspired by Plath’s own marriage to Ted Hughes. Throughout the poem, the speaker is trapped in a cycle of abuse and control, vividly recalling the physical and mental violence inflicted upon her by her partner, the “jailer”.
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position
With the same trees and headstones.
Is that all he can come up with,
The rattler of keys?
I have been drugged and raped.
Seven hours knocked out of my right mind
Into a black sack
Where I relax, foetus or cat,
Lever of his wet dreams.
Here, the poem moves from psychological feelings of confinement to explicit violence. The speaker not only names the harm she suffered but dehumanizes herself to a “foetus”, “cat”, and “lever of his wet dreams.” She is subject to sexual and ideological dominance by both the “jailer” and patriarchal society, and she is unable to escape.28
Something is gone.
My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin
Drops me from a terrible altitude.
Carapace smashed,
I spread to the beaks of birds.
O little gimlets —
What holes this papery day is already full of!
He his been burning me with cigarettes,
Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.
I am myself. That is not enough.
The speaker again explicitly recalls acts of harm inflicted on her. She names the projection of fetishized fantasies onto her body, and further dehumanizing her. Plath commonly touches on themes of sexuality as “a tool of oppression, [where] the body becomes one of the main objects of control and violence.”29
The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.
My ribs show. What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,
I dream of someone else entirely.
And he, for this subversion,
Hurts me, he
With his armor of fakery,
His high cold masks of amnesia.
How did I get here?
Indeterminate criminal,
I die with variety —
Hung, starved, burned, hooked.
“The Jailer” tells the story of domestic violence involving an intimate partner. Its alternating references to acts of explicit abuse and psychological effects reveal the layered and ongoing trauma experienced by the speaker. Physical violence, such as being drugged, raped, and burned, is intertwined with emotional manipulation and dehumanization. Through this interplay, the poem captures the full scope of intimate partner violence that is not limited to the body, but extends into one’s emotions and sense of self.
III. Lady Lazarus
In “Lady Lazarus”, Plath criticizes the objectification and commodification of female suffering within a male-dominated society. The poem not only recounts her experiences of suicide and survival but indicts the systems and institutions – medical, societal, and patriarchal – that render women’s pain both invisible and consumable.30 The title being inspired by the biblical Lazarus who was resurrected by Jesus Christ, Plath focuses on themes of death and rebirth.31 Similar to “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” includes allusions to Holocaust imagery to analogize oppression of the female body and psyche.32
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it —
Here, the speaker likens her suicide attempts to a decade tradition and displays her desire of death.33 Although not named as autobiographical, the repeated references to her suicide attempts in her poems gives the reader insight into Plath’s emotional instability as a result of her turbulent domestic life.
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify? —
The speaker identifies herself with Jewish victims of the Holocaust “to convey the depth of her pain and to reflect her state as a marginalized outcast” and to portray “sense of loss, disintegration, and fragmentation.”34 The ambivalent listing of her body parts signify the disconnect of her mental self from her physical self as a result of internalizing society’s objectification.
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot —
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
Here, the metaphor of the striptease underscores the exploitation of victims’ suffering – not just by individuals, but by institutions like the court system. The language satirizes the public’s fascination with female trauma by comparing it to a “strip tease.”
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
The speaker reflects on her experiences with death. The first encounter was during her childhood and accidental. In contrast, her later attempt was intentional and even performative, embodying a complex relationship with self-destruction as both suffering and control.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart —
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
In these lines, the speaker transforms into both the victim and performer, forced to participate in her own exploitation for the “peanut-crunching crowd”. She is “valuable,” but only insofar as her body can be objectified and her suffering can be consumed. Plath is likely critiquing the apathetic and transactional nature of social and legal norms that women need to tolerate.
Ash, ash —
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there —
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Here, the speaker connects her domesticity to a system of oppression.35 The symbols of her father, husband, and the patriarchal society are the actors who “confined her creativity and turn her into a mere ‘cake of soap/ A wedding ring,/[and] a gold filling’, a reference to her state as a fragmented poet, woman, and housewife.”36
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
This poem acts less like a direct legal testimony, but rather commentary on the experience with institutions that embed systems claiming dominion over the female body and psyche. It can be read as Plath’s response to “an era of dehumanization and violence that requires of the poet an extraordinary openness to suffering.”37 She criticizes the institutions that treat female suffering as spectacle rather than genuine human experience.
Discussion
I. Poetic Language as Legal Language
Though poetry and legal language may appear to operate in fundamentally different realms – one governed by emotion, the other by logic – they both rely on acts of imagination, meaning-making, and narrative power.38 The law is not simply a neutral arbiter of truth, but a rhetorical and interpretive practice that constructs reality through language. Similarly, poetry – especially in its confessional form – narrates, interprets, and gives shape to personal truth.
Poetry, like the law, has a structure. It arranges language in deliberate forms, using rhythm, repetition, and symbolism to communicate meaning. Mezey suggests that judicial opinion operates under a similar “structural tension” as a poem, as “it is made up of an attempt to reconcile a number of opposing forces: the particular and the general, the personal and the representative, order and disorder.”39 But where the law tends to prioritize objectivity and clarity, poetry makes room for subjectivity and emotion. It embraces the fragmented and affective qualities of human experience. This makes it so that poetic language has the capacity to “hold” trauma in a way that legal language cannot.
Both poetry and the law utilize metaphors to communicate and produce meaning. For judicial opinions, judges must “must talk of life in terms of law, convert everyday events and disputes into legal matter,” just like how poets translate personal experiences into verses and prose.40 Both of these processes involve the imagination, creating a potential bridge between poetic expression and legal testimony.
II. Poetic Voice as Feminine Legal Voice
The poetic voice, particularly within the confessional genre, has historically served as a space for women to express emotion through language. In patriarchal societies, there is a tendency to view emotionality as incompatible with rationality.41 Poetry has always been associated with the private, the emotional, and the introspective—qualities that have traditionally been feminized and, by extension, devalued within male-dominated institutions like the legal system. Because women’s voices have historically been excluded from legal discourse in cases involving domestic violence, there is a lack of understanding of how gender shapes the experience of harm and how that harm is remembered, processed, and expressed.42
Poetry is a medium that could assist victims of domestic violence in the conveyance of difficult messages. As domestic violence is a gendered issue, the gendered experience should be taken into account when considering remedies. Randall states that since “assaulted women are not a homogeneous group, and their reasons for their responses to the criminal justice system vary,” the law should allow more flexibility in how victim experiences are communicated and understood.43 This need for adaptability supports the inclusion of alternative forms of narrative – such as confessional poetry – as legitimate means of expressing harm.44 By embracing forms that reflect the emotional and psychological complexities of trauma, the justice system can better accommodate the diverse ways women experience and articulate violence.
III. Confessional Poetry as Victim Impact Statement
Finally, the inclusion of creative forms in Victim Impact Statements, such as poems, marks a subtle but important recognition of the limitations of legal language. Anae suggests that poetry as Victim Impact Statement is “a kind of distinctive second language.”45 It is capable of embodying “emotion discourse”, a term “used to define highly flexible narrative accounts and descriptions in which emotions are evoked.”46 This emotional and personal dimension offers courts insight into the victim’s reality that standard testimony alone might miss because the reader not only engages with the facts of violence but with the affect.
Poetry also has a tendency to “be” and “do” instead of “telling”, which serves “as a structure for the reader to ‘be’ and ‘do’ analogously, [and] can be understood as its capability for ‘realization’ as opposed to ‘representation.’”47 A reader is invited to participate in the understanding, imagining, and feeling of a poet’s experience through the process of inhabiting the poetic form.48
For my project’s Victim Impact Statement, I aimed to convey Plath’s experiences using her own poetic voice and vocabulary.
To express emotional impact, I employed metaphors similar to those Plath uses in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” to illustrate feelings of power imbalance in her relationships. Rather than directly stating the victim’s emotions, the statement implies them through their physical manifestations. This “emotional information” provided through poetry “invites the reader to engage in the creative process and to become a ‘witness.’”49
For physical impact, I drew from "The Jailer," which contains Plath’s most explicit descriptions of physical violence. Many of the original phrases were kept intact to preserve Plath’s voice and narration of events as it better preserves her perception of lived experiences. I supplemented these with descriptions of the victim’s physical state and self-reflection.
Regarding economic impact, I chose to highlight Plath’s attachment to her career as a writer, which is intricately tied to her identity and sense of self-worth. There is a persistent tension between her literary aspirations and the domestic constraints placed upon her by her relationships and societal expectations. Rather than listing material losses, I conveyed the significance of her art by comparing it to valuable elements like “gold” and “pearls”.
For the fear of security statement, I synthesized themes from all three poems to create a concise message centred around the victim-abuser relationship progression: from fear, to anger, to reclamation of emotion and identity.
Conclusion
Sylvia Plath’s poetry challenges the boundaries between personal expression and public testimony, offering a model for how confessional poetry can serve as a legitimate mode of narrative to further truth-seeking in the law. By examining Plath’s work as a form of poetic victim impact statement, it bridges the gap between storytelling and testifying. Ultimately, this project argues that poetic language – especially in the form of confessional poetry – can be a valid and powerful form of victim testimony in cases of domestic violence where traditional legal language falls silent.
Bibliography
Legislation
Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, 722.
Secondary Materials
Abdullah Mohammad, Ghada, “Violence in Sylvia Plath’s Poems Lady Lazarus and Daddy” (2019) 7:28 IJLA 497–510, online.
Anae, Nicole, “The ‘punches behind the punch’: Poetry as Victim Impact Statement” acquire.cqu.edu.au (2017) 38 Illumination through narrative: using writing to explore hidden life experience 1–12, online.
Balbi, Alita Fonseca, “Gender and Sexuality in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath” (2011) 17:2 Em Tese 179–198, online.
Christ, Birte & Stefanie Mueller, “Towards a Legal Poetics” JSTOR (2017) 62:2 Amerikastudien/American Studies 149–168, online.
Craig, Elaine, “The inhospitable court” (2016) 66:2 UTLJ 197–243, online.
Epstein, Deborah & Lisa A Goodman, “Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences” JSTOR (2019) 167:2 U Pa L Rev 399–461, online.
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Manikis, Marie, “Victim impact statements at sentencing: Towards a clearer understanding of their aims” (2015) 65:2 UTLJ 85–123, online.
Mezey, Naomi, “The (Still) Unexplored Possibilities of a Poetics of Law” (2024) 35:2 Yale JL & Human 321–335, online.
Plath, Sylvia, “Daddy” in Frieda Hughes, ed, “Ariel: The Restored Edition” (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004).
Plath, “Lady Lazarus” in Frieda Hughes, ed, “Ariel: The Restored Edition” (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004).
Plath, “The Jailer” in Frieda Hughes, ed, “Ariel: The Restored Edition” (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004).
Randall, Melanie, “Domestic Violence and the Construction of “Ideal Victims”: Assaulted Women’s “Image Problems” in Law” (2004) 23:1 St Louis U Pub L Rev 107–154, online.
Yasmin, Samina, Nusrat Sultana & Sundas Aslam, “Portrayal of Patriarchy in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry” cssrjournal.com (2024) 2:4 CSSRJ 236–246, online.
Department of Justice Canada, “Victim Impact Statement”, online: justice.gc.ca.
Department of Justice Canada, “Victims of Crime Research Digest No. 15” (22 April 2022), online (justice.gc.ca).
Government of Canada, “Fact sheet: Intimate partner violence” (2 May 2024), online: Canada.ca.
Reinsel, Paige, “Letting It All Out: Sylvia Plath And Confessional Poetry’, online: Scribophile.
Statistics Canada, “Trends in police-reported family violence and intimate partner violence in Canada, 2023” (24 October 2024), online: statcan.gc.ca.