Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter One
Introduction Violence against women is a pervasive social problem of extraordinary proportions in the United States. For women, home is a place of greater danger than public places—more dangerous than the workplace , more dangerous than the highway, more dangerous than city streets. However much we would like to picture intimate relationships as a refuge from the violence that exists outside the walls of our homes, all too often the couple relationship itself is the foremost source of danger and threat to women. Men assault their former, estranged , or current wives, fiancées, and girlfriends at alarming rates with near impunity. In the United States, women are more likely to be attacked, injured, raped, or killed by a current or former male partner than by all other types of assailants combined (Browne 1992; Maguire and Pastore 1996; Violence Against Women Grants Office [VAWGO] 1997). Three out of four women who are raped and/or physically assaulted are victimized by current or former husbands , cohabiting partners or dates (Tjaden and Thoennes 1998). Male intimates inflict more injuries on women than auto accidents, muggings, and rape combined (Hart 1990a; Jones 1996; McLeer and Anwar 1989; Stark 1990). Women are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than by a total of all other categories of assailants (Moracco, Runyan, and Butts 1998). The most frequent form of family murder is a husband killing his wife (Pleck 1987) and the most common form of murder-suicide is perpetrated by a male with a history of abusing his female partner whose attempt to withdraw from him triggers his lethal violence (Murzak, Tardiff, and Hirsch 1992). Between 75 percent and 90 percent of all hostage takings are related to domestic violence (Hart 1990a). The identification of the abuse of wives and girlfriends as a social problem emerged in the 1970s as the women’s movement took shape and moved forward. Since then, the issue of violence between 3 intimate partners has been subject to increased scrutiny. Crosscultural research reveals that the abuse of women by intimate male partners occurs more often than any other type of family violence (Schuler 1996; Levinson 1989) and is the most common form of violence against women (Heise et al. 1994; UNICEF 2000). Research shows that woman battering crosses all socioeconomic strata; it crosses all racial, ethnic, religious, and age groups (Attorney General ’s Task Force on Family Violence 1984; Collins et al. 1999; Bachman and Saltzman 1995; Pagelow 1984). Due to the private nature of intimate violence, the actual rates of occurrence are unknown. Nevertheless, known rates in the United States suggest that it is pervasive. Minimally, between 1.8 and 4.8 million American women are abused in their homes each year (Diaz 1996; Hofford and Harrell 1993; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000); and Sherman (1992) observes, Up to 8 million times each year this nation’s police are confronted with a victim who has just been beaten by a spouse or lover. . . . Domestic assault is the single most frequent form of violence that police encounter, more common than all other forms of violence combined. (1) The 1994 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates that, in more than 90 percent of violent incidents, the victim was female ; women experience more than ten times as many violent episodes by an intimate as males (Buzawa and Buzawa 1996). At least 20 percent to 25 percent of adolescent girls have experienced physical or sexual violence from a dating partner, leaving them at high risk for substance abuse, eating disorders, risky sexual behavior , pregnancy, and suicidality (Silverman et al. 2001; James, West, and Deters 2000). The National Violence Against Women Survey estimates that 8 percent of adult American women will be stalked sometime during their lifetimes and they are significantly more likely than their male counterparts to be stalked by spouses or exspouses (VAWGO 1997). Women who experience a violent assault are more likely to require medical care if the attacker was an intimate rather than a stranger, injuries occurring almost twice as frequently when the offender is an intimate than when a stranger (Bachman 1994). Twenty-two percent to 35 percent of all emergency room visits by women are for injuries caused by domestic assault (Sherman 1992). In 1994, women accounted for 39 percent of hospital emergency department visits for violence-related injuries and 84 percent of the in4 Convicted Survivors dividuals treated for injuries inflicted by...