Women Who Kill Their Abusive Spouses
In the last several decades, criminologists and social scientists have begun to pay a greater attention to cases of battered women who kill their abusive spouses. Many of these women who kill their husbands claim they do it to defend themselves. Nevertheless they are often convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to imprisonment. Until recently, battered women were viewed by the public as either "mad" or "bad" (Noh, Lee, & Feltey, 2010) who should be punished as murderers. But lately scholars have begun to argue that killing an abusive spouse must be justified in extreme cases and codified in the law (Ewing, 1990). This paper is of the opinion that women who kill their abusive spouses should have the right to defend themselves in the court before any verdict is issued.
According to legal systems of most civilized nations, self-defense is justified when one is under an imminent danger of physical harm or bodily injury and that the use of lethal force can prevent the abuse from happening. It is natural then to argue that women who are severely beaten, tortured, psychologically abused,...
They might have used force to stop their spouses from inflicting more damage to them. To understand the gravity of the situation with battered women, it is important to look at some of the abuses they endure. According to Ewing (1990), depending on situations, battered women who kill their spouses have been "kicked, strangled, burned, scalded, shot, and stabbed" and have been attacked with guns, razors, and even automobiles. Many of them have suffered "cuts, bruises, lacerations, broken noses, broken bones," and many have been "sexually abused by their batterers: forced to have sexual intercourse, sexually abused with a variety of objects, and compelled to engage in group sex, bestiality, bondage, and other sadomasochistic sexual acts. Many of these women have been raped in front of their children" (pp. 581-2). The persons who go through these experiences must have the right to defend themselves before the jury.
Those who argue that women who kill their abusive spouses must be punished as murderers also have valid points. For…
