Psychological self-defense: A proposed justification for battered women who kill.

Abstract

A small but increasingly visible number of battered women eventually kill their batterers. While most of these women plead self-defense, they are generally convicted of murder or manslaughter because their homicidal acts rarely fit the narrow legal definition of self-defense. This article (a) explains who battered women are and why they kill; (b) suggests that many, perhaps most, battered women who kill their batterers do so in “psychological self-defense”; and (c) argues that current self-defense law should be expanded to justify such killings.

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