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Of the nearly 12,000 women incarcerated in California's state prisons in 2007, the vast majority have survived physical, sexual, emotional, and economic abuse by an intimate partner before entering prison. A disproportionate number are women of color whose efforts to gain and maintain a sense of safety for themselves and their children were systematically blocked by the institutional racism and other forms of oppression that they had experienced throughout their lives. Free Battered Women (FBW) works to end the revictimization of incarcerated survivors of domestic violence as part of the movement for racial justice and the struggle to resist all forms of intimate partner violence against women and transgendered people. After many years, society finally has recognized the experiences of battered women in prison. The legislature in California and in many other states now acknowledge that something has to be done for battered women who were incarcerated before the present laws came into effect. The California Habeas Project has become a light in the darkness for wrongfully incarcerated women.

In this chapter, the author, a former battered woman, narrates her experience from the time she was released from prison on parole on October 24, 2005 after a few delays, to her finally coming home with her family, accompanied by a parole officer. It took months to get her Social Security card, California ID card, driver's license, savings account, and ATM card. If she had not come home to her family, she feels she would have been lost in this world. On her forty-seventh birthday, she spoke at Free Battered Women's “Our Voices Within” event. The author has always had tremendous family support and love, and she had the victims' son testifying on her behalf for her release and DNA testing that in the end proved she did not commit the murder and that she was only in prison for being involved in a robbery that she never would have been involved in had she had not been forced into it by her batterer.

The integral relationship between carceral violence and gender violence has led to the criminalization of thousands of survivors. The criminal prosecution of domestic violence survivors for being unable to prevent their batterers’ abuse of their children, also known as “failure to protect,” reflects this punitive trend. This chapter recommends a paradigm shift from a “mitigating factors” strategy that attempts to provide explanatory context for survivors’ “failure,” to a structural critique that exposes the ideological foundations of “failure to protect.” Considering two case studies, it examines how these prosecutions create a spatial continuity of violence between domestic space and court space, revealing how the violence of punitivity and confinement becomes violence that is co-threatened by batterers and court actors. It proposes Battering Court Syndrome (BCS) as a framework from which to theorize the criminalization of survivors, a political diagnosis of the institutionalization of domestic violence, and a possible legal defense strategy.

This chapter explores the ‘discovery’ of marital violence in the late twentieth-century. Previously subsumed in a culture of silence, marital violence became a matter of public and political interest in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist reformers launched publicity campaigns to increase awareness of the issue, established emergency refuges for battered women and their children, and demanded that the government draft new legislation to protect victims of violence. Of particular importance was the emergence of the feminist organisation Women’s Aid, which both provided abused women with a means of escaping their husbands’ violence and effectively demonstrated that marital violence was a social problem in Ireland. The new consciousness regarding marital violence ultimately led to improved legal protections for victims of family violence and increased options for women seeking to escape violent husbands.

This chapter argues that in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Woolf revises the Mother Nature archetype of the youthful, fertile woman to better fit her perceptions and experiences of aging. Through the novel's aging female characters—Clarissa Dalloway, Aunt Helena Parry, Lady Bruton, and the Battered Woman—Woolf privileges the experiences of aging women while also highlighting their socially and psychologically precarious position in a culture that devalues them. For Woolf, aging was a grave concern. Her diary entry from October 2, 1932 reads, “I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence, my optimism.” Despite the sardonic humor of her diary, there is perhaps some truth in Woolf's statement. One could understand her suicide as a rejection of aging.

This chapter examines how domestic violence advocates and activists conceptualize empowerment, and the implications for low-income survivors seeking protection orders in family courts. Findings from an empirical study of self-help programs assisting unrepresented survivors are analyzed in light of empowerment principles. The chapter shows that the multidimensional empowerment ideals of participants in the early battered women’s movement—which included the development of personal agency and political consciousness, ultimately resulting in political action—have been replaced in these self-help settings by a much narrower focus. Advocacy groups hope that information about legal remedies and procedures will empower applicants for protection orders. However, these programs provided incomplete information and are objectively disempowering. The chapter concludes that more research is needed about the impacts of self-help services on legal consciousness, and access to justice efforts would benefit from the insights of more multidimensional approaches.

This chapter considers the legal definition of domestic violence and how it was influenced by the work of psychologist Lenore Walker, who introduced the cycle of violence theory in her book, The Battered Woman. Walker identified three distinct phases in the abusive relationships of the women with whom she worked: a tension-building phase, the acute battering incident, and a contrite, remorseful “honeymoon” phase. The chapter first reviews social science definitions of domestic violence, with particular emphasis on the theory of coercive control, refined by sociologist Evan Stark, and sociologist Michael Johnson's typology of domestic violence. It then examines why the law has been slow to incorporate these new understandings of domestic violence and proposes a new definition, one that better reflects the lived experiences of battered women and goes beyond the traditional focus on physical abuse (assaults, threats, sexual abuse, and forcible restraint).

This chapter considers the legal definition of domestic violence and how it was influenced by the work of psychologist Lenore Walker, who introduced the cycle of violence theory in her book, The Battered Woman. Walker identified three distinct phases in the abusive relationships of the women with whom she worked: a tension-building phase, the acute battering incident, and a contrite, remorseful “honeymoon” phase. The chapter first reviews social science definitions of domestic violence, with particular emphasis on the theory of coercive control, refined by sociologist Evan Stark, and sociologist Michael Johnson's typology of domestic violence. It then examines why the law has been slow to incorporate these new understandings of domestic violence and proposes a new definition, one that better reflects the lived experiences of battered women and goes beyond the traditional focus on physical abuse (assaults, threats, sexual abuse, and forcible restraint).

This chapter provides an overview of the research on and community-based programmatic responses to battered women’s use of force in their intimate heterosexual relationships. The chapter highlights emerging issues in this area with the goal of developing a more fully informed response to the complexity introduced by criminalizing women’s responses to violence and abuse in their intimate relationships.

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.