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The number of women globally who commit violent crimes is very small – in 2021 they were responsible for just 10% of homicides. Indeed, women are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators. But when women do kill, in many cases the victim is a male partner or family member and there is a history of domestic abuse.
Data and research suggests the majority of women on death row around the world have been sentenced to death for the crime of murder, and that most of these were committed in the context of gender-based violence. Women kill to save themselves – only to face abuse and death again.
Prof Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor of law and faculty director at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, has worked on or researched about 70 cases of women on death row for murder, mostly in the US, Malawi and Tanzania. Every one involved a background of abuse.
“There is not a case out there that has no mitigation,” she says. “There is always something. You look back at the worst cases – and I know some bad cases, having done death penalty work – and there is always a reason and a story that allows you to understand why this happened.”
Hossein Raeesi, an Iranian human rights lawyer, has represented 15 women on death row in Iran, most of whom were convicted of murdering their husbands. Each one had a history of abuse, and some were also victims of forced or child marriage.
Zarbibi (not her real name) was 16 years old and four months pregnant when she murdered her husband by trying to decapitate him with a kitchen knife. “The next morning, even though I was at the police station, I felt happy that he didn’t live in the world any more,” Zarbibi wrote in journals before she was released. “Free from him now for the first time, I felt as light as a balloon that could just fly away.”
Zarbibi described the horror of being forced into marriage with a man who beat and raped her. “I was only 13 years old and had been married to someone much older, at the height of his masculine power; free to treat his wife however he chose without any regard for me.”
Of the 15 cases Raeesi worked on, four of the women were executed, some for a crime they committed as a minor. The others were released, not because the judges hearing their cases understood domestic violence and the impact it can have on women, but because of a clause in Islamic law that states if a member of the victim’s family offers forgiveness, execution can be avoided.
Increasingly, research shows that women who kill their abusers are let down by criminal justice systems and are not getting fair trials. They are faced with lawyers who are not equipped to deal with survivors of abuse; justice systems that are patriarchal, rigid and old-fashioned; and a lack of understanding of how coercive control or domestic violence work and the resulting mental health impact.
A study by Penal Reform International found that with few exceptions criminal justice systems are failing women by ignoring their trauma and the realities and dynamics of domestic violence. In most countries there is no separate basis in law for a history of abuse to be considered, and generally women must rely on existing legal defences, which tend to be ill-adapted to women who have experienced prolonged abuse.
“Women who kill in the context of abuse are not getting fair trials,” says Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor and the chief executive of the Centre for Women’s Justice, which this year released a report that found in England and Wales the law, and the way it is applied, creates barriers to achieving a just outcome for women who have killed their abusers. “There are lots of issues around trauma, dissociation, lack of memory, that cause women to be disbelieved. Women who are violent are likely to be more severely judged because of prejudice, sexism and misogyny, because women are stepping out of line in terms of what they should be doing.” The situation is “pretty dire” for women in the criminal justice system, she adds.
However, there are signs that some jurisdictions have been taking domestic violence into consideration. In 2011, Sally Challen was convicted in the UK of murdering her husband with a hammer after enduring three decades of abuse. Wistrich and others worked on Challen’s case and she was freed in 2019 after pleading guilty to manslaughter. It was a landmark ruling and the first time a UK court had considered a “coercive control” defence, accepting it as a form of domestic abuse.
Lavern Longsworth, who killed her husband after enduring years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, was released from prison in Belize in 2014 after being sentenced to life three years earlier. Lawyers argued she was experiencing symptoms of battered woman syndrome, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, at the time of the crime and set a new legal precedent for courts in Belize to accept the condition as a defence.
In 2021, in Kenya, a judge found that Truphena Aswani acted in self-defence when she killed her husband after years of violent abuse. Aswani was sentenced to one day in prison – the day of her sentencing – to end when the court adjourned.
Winfred Syombua and Shirly Amayo, fellows at Reprieve, a legal action NGO, are involved with the Kenya Resentencing Project which aims to assist the 5,000 men and women sentenced to the country’s mandatory death penalty. Syombua and Amayo’s caseload includes women who have been convicted of murder, almost all of whom have a background of abuse.
“The intention is to show judges how suffering gender-based violence can either impair one’s judgment or can trigger the commission of an offence,” says Syombua. “Sometimes we are able to link gender-based violence to women suffering mental health issues which impair their judgment and [mean] they’re able to commit an offence such as murder.”
Progress is painfully slow around the world. Many women do not know they should include a background of abuse as a mitigating factor at court. Meanwhile, there is a lack of data and research about the link between women who kill and gender-based violence.
In research published this year, law graduate Annalie Buscarino wrote that an international response is needed to recognise and fight gender stereotypes when it comes to the harsh sentencing of women who kill abusive partners. She proposes a UN resolution that encourages states to consider a history of abuse as a mitigating factor in sentencing, modifying self-defence laws and admitting gender-sensitive evidence.
“Women in prison have been ignored for ever,” says Babcock, who wrote a global overview of women facing the death penalty in 2018. “There are a lot of reasons for that. The most generous is the small numbers but I think it goes deeper than that. I think that women in prison are a forgotten population.”
She adds, “The causal links between experiences of gender-based violence and acts of violence are completely underexplored and part of that is because gender-based violence is normalised to a degree that is still shocking.”
