The Criminal Law Defences Available to Battered Women Who Kill Their Abusers. A Psycho-legal Analysis

Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Sociology - Law, Delinquency, Abnormal Behavior, University of Newcastle, course: LLB Law, language: English, abstract: This paper will focus on explaining why trying to categorize "Battered Woman Syndrome Cases" under one defense is not only simplistic, but naive and unjustified. The defenses available to battered women who kill should be specific to the circumstances of the case, as violence which occurs in an intimate and private sphere cannot be adequately understood unless it is analyzed in its specific context. There is a clear difference between women who kill their abusers as a result of their psychological state, and those who do so by exercising their lawful right to self-defense. For this reason, it will concentrate on the distinctions between battered women who suffer from BWS and kill their abusers in non-confrontational situations, and battered women who do not suffer from BWS and kill in confrontational situations.