A compassionate look at 42 battered women who felt "locked in with danger and so desperate that they killed a man they loved"; scholarly and compelling.

Walker's chilling follow-up to her now-classic groundbreaker, The BAttered Woman, is a dramatic study of women who murder their abusive partners in self-defense--and what happens to them afterward. "Provocative . . . the book makes its point".--New York Times Book Review.

In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of "battered woman syndrome" was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the trials of eleven battered women, ten of whom killed their partners, in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Drawing extensively on trial transcripts and a rich expanse of interdisciplinary sources, the author looks at the evidence produced at trial and at how self-defence was argued. By illuminating these cases, this book uncovers the practical and legal dilemmas faced by battered women on trial for murder.

In this latest edition of her groundbreaking book, Dr. Lenore Walker has provided a thorough update to her original findings in the field of domestic abuse. Each chapter has been expanded to include new research. The volume contains the latest on the impact of exposure to violence on children, marital rape, child abuse, personality characteristics of different types of batterers, new psychotherapy models for batterers and their victims, and more. Walker also speaks out on her involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial as a defense witness and how he does not fit the empirical data known for domestic violence. This volume should be required reading for all professionals in the field of domestic abuse. For Further Information, Please Click Here!

This study argues that the battering relationship is properly understood as a long-term homicidal process. The authors posit a social interaction perspective for understanding the forces that work toward maintaining the battering relationship and escalating it to a homicidal end.

The few studies that exist on battered women who have killed focus on what psychologists, attorneys, and academics have to say about their conduct. To date, there has been no study of how the women perceive themselves and their actions, and how they feel about the labels that have been applied to them. The voices of women who have killed their abusers must be brought into this debate. The life stories of these women can inform the theory used to describe them, illuminating disjunctions between the battered woman syndrome and their own explanations for their actions.