When Battered Women Kill

A compassionate look at 42 battered women who felt "locked in with danger and so desperate that they killed a man they loved"; scholarly and compelling.

Walker's chilling follow-up to her now-classic groundbreaker, The BAttered Woman, is a dramatic study of women who murder their abusive partners in self-defense--and what happens to them afterward. "Provocative . . . the book makes its point".--New York Times Book Review.

In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of "battered woman syndrome" was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the trials of eleven battered women, ten of whom killed their partners, in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Drawing extensively on trial transcripts and a rich expanse of interdisciplinary sources, the author looks at the evidence produced at trial and at how self-defence was argued. By illuminating these cases, this book uncovers the practical and legal dilemmas faced by battered women on trial for murder.

Based on case studies from the US, UK and Australia, this book looks at the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than actors in the crimes they commit.

In this latest edition of her groundbreaking book, Dr. Lenore Walker has provided a thorough update to her original findings in the field of domestic abuse. Each chapter has been expanded to include new research. The volume contains the latest on the impact of exposure to violence on children, marital rape, child abuse, personality characteristics of different types of batterers, new psychotherapy models for batterers and their victims, and more. Walker also speaks out on her involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial as a defense witness and how he does not fit the empirical data known for domestic violence. This volume should be required reading for all professionals in the field of domestic abuse. For Further Information, Please Click Here!

This study argues that the battering relationship is properly understood as a long-term homicidal process. The authors posit a social interaction perspective for understanding the forces that work toward maintaining the battering relationship and escalating it to a homicidal end.

Women’s rights advocates in the United States have long argued that violence against women denies women equality and citizenship, but it took a movement of feminist activists and lawyers, beginning in the late 1960s, to set about realizing this vision and transforming domestic violence from a private problem into a public harm. This important book examines the pathbreaking legal process that has brought the pervasiveness and severity of domestic violence to public attention and has led the United States Congress, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations to address the problem. Elizabeth Schneider has played a pioneering role in this process. From an insider’s perspective she explores how claims of rights for battered women have emerged from feminist activism, and she assesses the possibilities and limitations of feminist legal advocacy to improve battered women’s lives and transform law and culture. The book chronicles the struggle to incorporate feminist arguments into law, particularly in cases of battered women who kill their assailants and battered women who are mothers. With a broad perspective on feminist lawmaking as a vehicle of social change, Schneider examines subjects as wide-ranging as criminal prosecution of batterers, the civil rights remedy of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the O. J. Simpson trials, and a class on battered women and the law that she taught at Harvard Law School. Feminist lawmaking on woman abuse, Schneider argues, should reaffirm the historic vision of violence and gender equality that originally animated activist and legal work.