Rachel Zimmer Schneider, Battered Women Doing Time: Injustice in the Criminal Justice System

Authors

Cortney A. Franklin, Sam Houston State University

Abstract

"Advocacy and scholarly attention directed toward the plight of battered women began in the mid-1970s (del Martin, 1975). Since that time, a host of research has been conducted on the incidence and prevalence of domestic violence, the dynamics of battering relationships (LaViolette and Barnette, 2014), the predictors of why men batter, and the risk of increasing harm for survivors who are courageous enough to leave domestically violent relationships. As Lenore Walker (1977) so insightfully recognized in her early work using a sample of sheltered women who had escaped a domestically violent partner, these relationships are characterized by specific stages and psychological symptoms that manifest as an inability to see a way out, illustrated by the battered woman’s syndrome (BWS). Several seminal works have been published on BWS (Walker, 2009), including research on battered women who kill their abusers (Ewing, 1987) and the often disappointing legal response that seems to protect a male-centered justification for self-defense in instances of lethal harm (Gillespie, 1989)."

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Recommended Citation

Franklin, Cortney A. (2015) "Rachel Zimmer Schneider, Battered Women Doing Time: Injustice in the Criminal Justice System," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol3/iss1/6