Neither Angels nor Demons: Women, Crime, and Victimization

by Kathleen J. Ferraro

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.

"Victim" and "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 to domestic violence), Ferraro uses their stories to illuminate complex interactions with violent partners, their children, and the legal system. She shows that these women are neither stereotypical angels nor demons, but rather human beings whose complicated lives belie the abstract categorizations of researchers, legal advocates, and the criminal justice system.

Ferraro begins with a general discussion of blurred boundaries and the complexity of experience, and moves from there to discuss women's interactions with the criminal processing system. In the course of her study, she reexamines, and finds wanting, many standard ways of evaluating women's violent behavior, including "mutual combat," "battered woman syndrome," and "cycle of violence." She argues that a more complex, nuanced understanding of intimate partner violence and how it contributes to women's offending will contribute to public policy less focused on control and accountability of individuals than on developing social conditions that promote everyone's safety and well-being and foster a sense of hope.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2006

Reviews

[Shea Ivy]

First off, definitely not something you would call a "pleasure read" by any means. I actually read this for a class on domestic violence, and Ferraro examines the issue of domestic violence and its varying levels of correlation with criminal offending. The major focus of this book is on women who end up killing their abusive partners, but Ferraro also examines women who end up committing crimes in concert with their abusive partners. She argues that contextually, domestic violence is often ignored by the legal system when these women are prosecuted, which is entirely flawed because domestic violence provides the contextual information necessary to determine women's so-called state of mind and culpability in the eyes of the law.

By no means does Ferraro attempt to excuse women who commit crimes (either against or in concert with their abusive partners), but she does make a valid distinction between trying to turn domestic violence into a mere excuse for battered women's behavior and a valuable context for examining their state of mind and degree of criminal accountability...which is something *every* criminal defendent is entitled to. The fact that battered women are often not afforded this right is something Ferraro traces back to a largely patriarchal society, which creates the definitions we use in our criminal justice system today. After all, some of you would be surprised to know that the NYS criminal code defines "rape" exclusively as penetration of the penis and vagina...meaning that any other object is not technically considered rape. This also means that same-sex rape cannot technically happen in the NYS criminal code. These "other" areas are covered under the rest of the code dealing with sexual assault, but even the textual distinction in the code's definition of rape reveals the biases inherent in how our legal system views violence against women.

My one criticism of Ferraro's work is that she spends so much time reviewing the life histories of each of the 45 women she interviewed that much of her theoretical argument was bogged down in all of these details. While I don't believe this is necessarily a bad thing as each story gives the reader an accurate description of what life for battered women is like, I do think much of her theoretical argumentation was underdeveloped and she assumes that the reader already knows the theory that she's basing her conclusions on.