Description
She is a victim of intimate partner violence, a woman who has been harmed. She is a criminal offender, a woman who has harmed others. Superficially, it seems she is two separate women. Victimand offender are binary categories used within law, social science, and public discourse to describe social experiences with a moral dimension. Such terms draw upon cultural narratives of good and bad people and have influenced scholarship, public policy, and activism. The duality of good and bad women, separated into mutually exclusive extremes of angels and demons, has helped segregate thinking about, and responses to, each group. In this groundbreaking study, Kathleen J. Ferraro exposes the limits of such thinking by exploring the link between victimization and offending from the perspective of the women charged with the crimes. Interviewing forty-five women charged with criminal offenses (more than half of whom killed their abusers; the others participated in a range of violent crimes related t
