The women’s rate of incarceration in the United States has grown twice as fast as that of men in recent decades. Research has established that many incarcerated women have histories of abuse throughout their lives, including intimate partner violence (IPV), and that this abuse may contribute to their criminalization. Gender-based violence results in an array of negative physical and mental health consequences, with intimate partner homicide (IPH) as the most severe outcome.

For women who are arrested, convicted, and sentenced for actions like homicide arising out of their own victimization, the law generally fails to account for domestic and intimate partner violence even when this abuse is supposed to be considered as a mitigating factor. Unfortunately, little scholarship has examined the linkage between gender-based violence and women’s experiences as defendants ensnared in a broad and powerful criminal legal system.

The overarching purpose of our project was to understand how people experiencing gender-based violence are criminalized for actions they took to survive abuse. While IPV exists for people of all genders, we focused on women given their disproportionate rates of severe and lethal intimate partner abuse. We also centered our study on people convicted of the most serious of offenses and serving the longest sentences—murder and manslaughter.

Specific objectives were to:

1. Quantify the prevalence of IPV and the potential lethality of the abuse;
2. Describe the nature of the relationship between the survivor-defendant and the decedent as it relates to the circumstances of the offense; and
3. Identify the extent to which the criminal legal system accounts for IPV.