American Prisons Are Full of Women Who Were Only Trying to Survive Abuse New research behind a book on America's prison system finds that nearly one in three women convicted of murder or manslaughter had already survived domestic violence, yet the justice system rarely accounts for that abuse. A quiet but staggering statistic sits at the heart of America's prison system. Nearly one in three women incarcerated for murder or manslaughter say they had already survived domestic violence long before they were ever charged with a crime. Journalist Justine van der Leun uncovered that number while researching her book Unreasonable Women, and she believes the real figure is likely far higher than what her survey captured. Yet prosecutors, judges and prison systems across America rarely treat that history of abuse as central to how these women ended up behind bars in the first place. In a recent conversation, journalist Hope Reese asked van der Leun to walk through what she found, how domestic violence, childhood trauma, poverty and a legal system built around a male standard of reasonableness combine to push abused women into prison cells, sometimes for decades. The Research Behind Criminalized Survivors Van der Leun says her interest in this subject began with a report called The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline, published by an organization called the Human Rights Project for Girls. That report examined how girls, particularly Black girls, moving through the juvenile justice system had often been sexually abused, sometimes severely, before they were ever locked up. She was drawn to the idea that the state was punishing people a second time for something that had already happened to them without their consent. But reporting on children proved almost impossible. Getting permission was difficult, especially for children without parents willing or able to grant it, so she eventually abandoned that specific angle altogether. It was only later, when she encountered the phrase survived and punished, coined by a group of the same name, that her research found new direction. That search led her to a woman named Nikki, whose case became one of the threads she would follow for years. From there, van der Leun built out what she now describes, almost sheepishly, as a ridiculous undertaking: an attempt to count, in real numbers, how many criminalized survivors exist in the American prison system today, women whose crimes are inseparable from the abuse that preceded them. What The Numbers Actually Show Existing research already points to how widespread this pattern is. Studies of certain facilities have found that up to 94 percent of women in prison carry histories of domestic or sexual violence. Van der Leun says that anecdotally, in years of reporting, she struggled to find a single woman who had not experienced some form of abuse; it was, in her words, almost universal. Her own survey work found that 30 percent of respondents qualified as criminalized survivors, meaning women whose incarceration was tied to abuse they had suffered. But she is candid that this figure almost certainly understates the true scale of the problem, because she never primed her respondents with direct questions like are you a criminalized survivor or did you experience abuse or violence. Many of the women who fit the pattern likely never volunteered it unprompted. There is also a whole category of cases van der Leun says she simply cannot measure: women who were never charged at all. When a woman defends herself and a prosecutor chooses not to press charges, or when charges are filed but fail to stick, there is no conviction and therefore no public record for a researcher to examine. Whether a woman in that position is treated as a survivor or a suspect often comes down to the judgment of an individual district attorney, case by case, with little consistency across jurisdictions. Why Didn't She Leave Misses The Point One question follows these women and countless other survivors of abuse everywhere: why didn't she just leave? Van der Leun says it is a completely natural question for anyone who has not lived through actual domestic violence. People imagine that if a partner were raping them, strangling them, or humiliating them online, they would simply walk away. Anyone who has actually lived through it, she says, knows that leaving is rarely that simple. Her clearest answer is that the decision was never really the survivor's to make. It is the abuser who decides whether she is allowed to leave, not the other way around. Van der Leun says that in nearly every case she examined, the woman wanted to leave, but people being abused become intricately attuned to their abuser's triggers and to exactly what will happen if they try to go. It is not a free choice in any meaningful sense. Nikki told van der Leun, if he had thrown me on the ground and raped me the first date, I wouldn't have been with him. But abuse rarely starts that way; it builds gradually, in small increments that are each individually easy to explain away. Add children and a shared life into the mix, and disentangling becomes far harder, especially once an abuser has spent years convincing a partner that she is worth nothing at all. Gemma, another woman in the book, put it starkly: it does not matter how strong you think you are. If someone tells you day after day that you are a terrible mother, that you will lose your children, that you are worthless and that nobody else will ever want you, eventually you start to believe it. Abusers, van der Leun says, either isolate their victims deliberately or seek out people who are already isolated and attach themselves to that vulnerability. When children are involved, the calculations become even more fraught. Women in these situations wonder how they can remove a child safely, whether the abuser will come after the child, and whether the state itself might take the child away if the family situation looks unstable. Tanisha, a third woman in the book, wanted to leave her situation but knew she would become homeless if she did, so she stayed while trying to rebuild her life on her own terms. Van der Leun is blunt that this was not really a free choice either, since the alternative, sleeping in a car, was simply untenable. Tellingly, for all three women, the worst violence occurred exactly when someone had left, or was actively trying to leave; that moment of separation, she notes, is statistically the most dangerous point in an abusive relationship. Childhood Trauma That Echoes Into Adulthood Research cited in the conversation shows that 77 percent of children who experience abuse go on to face abuse again as adults. Van der Leun admits she has not fully untangled why this pattern repeats itself so consistently, though one expert told her that survivors' relationship with trust becomes profoundly altered by early trauma: some trust far too much, others cannot trust at all, and the internal compass that is supposed to guide healthy relationships ends up broken in either direction. Tanisha, she says, had been abused so often as a child that she almost took it as a given that a man would treat her that way; every relationship she ever had involved abuse in some form. She never had the chance to learn that she deserved anything different, because abuse was the only template life had ever given her. Nikki's childhood abuse, like that of the other women in the book, was never properly addressed by anyone around her. It was denied, minimized or simply swept under the rug, and van der Leun argues that unresolved trauma like that makes it extraordinarily difficult to build healthy adult relationships later, especially when there was never any real treatment for the original wound. Even people who do receive treatment often struggle with relationships afterward, she notes. People living on the margins of society frequently carry deep shame and a sense of worthlessness, and abusers, she says, are remarkably good at identifying exactly that vulnerability and inserting themselves into those lives. When Abuse Does Not Even Feel Like Abuse Gemma's story includes a moment where she was thrown against a glass coffee table so hard that it shattered beneath her, yet at the time she did not register the incident as abuse at all. She told van der Leun simply that that year was good. Gemma's account was that she first loved her partner and chose to be with him, and only later did he become abusive. The deeper van der Leun dug, the more she found evidence that he had effectively forced Gemma into the relationship and eventually the marriage itself, through strangulation, constant tracking and stalking. Because the alternative reality, that she had essentially been forced, raped and strangled into a relationship, was too painful to sit with, Gemma appears to have constructed a gentler version of events in her own mind, one where she was freely choosing him and loved him. Van der Leun believes Gemma wrote off incidents like the coffee table because she had to, simply to keep functioning and to keep her life moving forward. Why Self-Defense Was Never Built With Women In Mind Van der Leun titled her book Unreasonable Women for a specific reason. For a long stretch of American legal history, juries were instructed to judge whether a defendant had acted the way a hypothetical reasonable man would have acted in the same situation. Jurors were asked to place themselves in the defendant's position and decide whether a reasonable person, knowing everything the defendant knew and carrying the same fears, would have responded in the same way. There was, as van der Leun puts it, never really a reasonable woman built into that standard. The law eventually shifted toward a reasonable person standard instead, but the classic scenario the whole doctrine was built around still resembles two similarly sized men fighting outside a bar. What counts as reasonable for a woman living inside an abusive relationship, given everything she personally knows about her abuser's patterns and history, looks completely different from that bar fight, yet the law has rarely made room for that distinction. Self-defense law also carries a strict requirement of imminence: the threat has to be so immediate that force becomes necessary in that exact second, often assuming something close to hand-to-hand combat. But van der Leun points out that in a genuine hand-to-hand confrontation, women are usually at a serious physical disadvantage and often cannot successfully defend themselves at all. Imminence, in other words, looks completely different for women than it does for men, and that difference has rarely been considered, historically or legally, when courts weigh a woman's claim of self-defense. Tanisha's Case, A Textbook Story Of Criminalized Survival Tanisha's story, as van der Leun tells it, began with something as ordinary as a housing problem. Without stable housing of her own, she met a man at a club who had a room available, and rather than sleep in her car or impose indefinitely on friends, she moved in with him. He was not her boyfriend, only a roommate, but he soon began abusing her. Control came quickly. He took over not just her living situation but her finances as well, which made leaving far harder in practical terms. Faced with the choice between an abusive but stable roof and the car she had been sleeping in before, she decided to make the arrangement work rather than walk away. Everything changed the day he killed another man inside their shared apartment while Tanisha was present. She tried to run, but he put a gun to her head and a hand to her throat, telling her in no uncertain terms to fall in line and do as he said, or he would kill her as well. She complied, helping to wrap the body of the young man he had killed. For years afterward she ran, terrified in equal measure of him and of the police, before her conscience finally caught up with her. She came forward on her own to help solve what had become a cold case, hoping to give the victim's family the closure they deserved. Betrayed By The System She Trusted Van der Leun cites researcher Alisa Bierria, who has said Black women are used as pawns to demonstrate justice and then disposed of. Van der Leun says she saw exactly that dynamic play out in Tanisha's case. Prosecutors, she notes, are frequently focused on securing convictions, and survivors are often used toward that end as witnesses rather than treated as victims in their own right. Tanisha came forward believing, by her own account, that she had been promised immunity for her cooperation. She had a lawyer who failed her, and that immunity never materialized. According to van der Leun, prosecutors reasoned that for Tanisha's testimony to be credible to a jury, she could not appear to have received any deal in exchange for it. So they used her as a witness to secure their conviction and, in van der Leun's words, effectively threw her life away in the process. Can New Laws Actually Fix This System Some legislative reform already exists. New York's Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act gives judges discretion to reconsider sentences for defendants who can demonstrate that abuse was a significant contributing factor in their crime. Similar survivor justice laws have since passed in Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey and, more recently, Georgia. Crucially, these laws are retroactive, which means people already serving sentences can potentially have their cases reheard under the new standard. Van der Leun is careful not to overstate what these laws alone can accomplish. She calls the underlying problem systemic and generational, tracing back to the experiences of enslaved people long before any of the women in her book were born, and to ideas society still carries, often unconsciously, about entire communities. The narratives attached to these women, and the labels stamped onto them by the criminal legal system, by prisons, and even by media coverage, she argues, frequently have nothing to do with who these women actually are, the real context of their lives, or what genuinely happened to them. Some remarkable people, in her assessment, are currently serving murder convictions under exactly these circumstances. Reporting their stories over several years, she says, changed how she personally understands what it means to be a woman in America. She describes this pattern as baked into the country's culture and society at every level, something nearly everyone experiences to some degree, and, in her own words, all by design. What this means for you This story is not tied to a specific Indian city or state, but its lessons matter to survivors of abuse, their families, and anyone tracking how justice systems treat self-defense. • For survivors and their loved ones: the decision to leave an abusive relationship is often controlled by the abuser, not the survivor, which makes safety planning and legal support especially important. • For anyone following law and policy: reforms like survivor justice laws in several US states show growing momentum to rethink self-defense standards that were never designed with women's realities in mind. Questions & Answers 1. What percentage of women in Justine van der Leun's research turned out to be criminalized survivors? 30 percent of her survey respondents qualified, though she believes the true number is likely much higher since she never asked directly about abuse. 2. What does the term criminalized survivor mean? It describes women incarcerated for a crime that was tied to abuse they had already suffered. 3. Who is Justine van der Leun and what is her book about? She is a journalist who wrote Unreasonable Women, tracing three women's stories, Nikki, Gemma and Tanisha, to expose the link between domestic violence and incarceration. 4. What happened in Tanisha's case? An abusive man she lived with killed someone and forced her at gunpoint to help hide the body, and years later when she came forward to help solve the case, she never received the immunity she had been promised and was used only as a witness. 5. Why is it hard for abused women to prove self-defense? The law has long been built around a hypothetical reasonable man and a strict requirement of an immediate, hand-to-hand threat, which does not reflect the real situation of a woman trapped in domestic violence. 6. What is the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act? It is a New York law that lets judges reconsider sentences for defendants who can prove abuse was a significant factor in their crime, and it applies retroactively to women already serving time; similar laws exist in Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey and Georgia. 7. What share of women in some prisons have histories of domestic or sexual violence? Studies of certain facilities put the figure as high as 94 percent. 8. Are children who experience abuse more likely to face abuse as adults? Research cited shows 77 percent of children who experience abuse go on to face abuse again in adulthood. https://trendkia.com/en/health/america-ki-jelon-men-bnda-hain-vo-mahilaen-jo-sirpha-hinsa-se-bachana-chahati-thin-5316 TrendKia — Har trend, sabse pehle.