Book Review: Convicted Survivors The Imprisonment Of Battered Women Who Kill

Convicted Survivor:

The Imprisonment of Battered Women who Kill

After reading the description of about half the books on the book review list, I found this one to be most intriguing. I've always wanted to learn more about the subject how women deal with battery in the home through a spouse or male partner. That is what this book does. It talks about women who have had to take the last step in escaping abusive relationships; killing the partner. I loved this book and found it very informative. It takes you into the lives of women who have had to resort to these measures and it goes through the process of the results of their actions, as well as correlations to the abuse and why these women had no other option than to do what they did. It's going to be very hard to fit everything from this book into a five page paper so I am going to give you a general summary and hit on the main points.

The first thing this book does is explains to us what types of abuse it is that leads women to take these measures. It says that there are many different labels on types of abuse within a family (or relationship) but no matter how many "neutral terms" you throw around, it is still true that the most common form of abuse, the abuse that happens more than any other form, is the abuse that women experience from their male partners. This is (in my opinion) the most important point in the entire book. It is the root of everything in the book as well as a root in much of what we learn in class.

The book tells us that the methods used today to give us our information on women who commit homicide towards their spouses or partners. When these types of crimes are reported the details as to why the woman committed homicide are simply left out. What this does is leaves us with a distorted image of how often this really happens and under what circumstances.

Another wonderful thing I love about this book is that it tells us what we as a society do to put these battered women in the position that they are in. We hear the stories of these women and learn about the women in themselves. We learn why studies show they were placed in that position as well as why they think they were placed in that position. The most interesting portion of the book is when the author shows us how the women write violence off as not being violent at all, with such excuses as "I wanted to keep the marriage together" or "he was mad" or even "I deserved it". Because a lot of women grow up in abusive situations similar to the one's they were in it is harder then to identify oneself as a battered woman. Many of the women interviewed in the prison stated that they didn't consider themselves battered women until it was too late to get help, some even went as far as saying that they didn't realize what they were until they went to prison and joined the CWAA.

The next thing the book talks about is the involvement of the police at the point where the women tried to get help. The statistics in this book are mind boggling and astounding when it comes to the action of the police in the event of spousal abuse. Some of the officers see so many accounts of spousal abuse that they right it off as routine and do not even report what they find. The