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Sheryl & her youngest son, 1981

Related Facts

Facts About Women Who Kill Their Abusers
 (As reported by the Michigan Battered Women's Clemency Project)

  • Currently, there are approximately 2,000 battered women in America who are serving prison time for defending their lives against their batterers.

  • As many as 90% of the women in prison today for killing men had been battered by those men.

  • Women charged with the death of a mate have the least extensive record of any people convicted.

  • The average prison sentence for men who kill their intimate partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their partners are sentenced, on average, to 15 years.  A pair of Maryland cases vividly illustrates this inequality in sentencing.  In one case, a judge in Baltimore County, Maryland sentenced Kenneth Peacock to 18 months for killing his unfaithful wife. The very next day, another judge in the same county sentenced Patricia Ann Hawkins to three years in prison for killing her abusive husband. Significantly, the prosecutor in the Peacock case requested a sentence twice as long as the one imposed, while the prosecutor in the Hawkins case requested one-third of the sentence imposed.

  • The first domestic violence shelter in the country opened in 1974.

  • Women who were sentenced in the late 70s or early 80s often had no evidence of the abusive nature of their relationship presented at trial or sentencing.

According to the May 1994 issue report of Women's Economic Agenda Project

  • Of the women convicted of violent crimes, the vast majority were convicted for defending themselves or their children from abuse. In California alone there are 600 women in prison for killing their abusers in self-defense. Average prison terms are twice as long for killing husbands as for killing wives. 
  • Ninety percent of women in prison are single mothers. They lose contact with their children, sometimes forever. There are 167,000 children in the U.S. whose mothers are incarcerated.
  • The average age of women in prison is 29, and 58% have not finished high school. 

  • Women prisoners spend on average 17 hours a day in their cells, with one hour outside for exercise. Compare to men prisoners, who spend, on average, 15 hours a day in their cells, with 1.5 hours outside.

According to the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison

  • Every fifteen seconds a woman in the U.S. is beaten.

  • One California state prison study found that 93% of women who had killed their mates had been battered by them.

  • There are hundreds of women in California state prisons for killing their abusers.

  •  Six million women are beaten by their husbands or boyfriends each year in the U.S.; 1500 of them die.

  • In the U.S., a woman is more likely to be assaulted, injured, raped, or killed by a male partner than any other type of assailant.

  • Battering is the number one cause of injury to women in the U.S.  Attacks by husbands on wives result in more injuries requiring medical treatment than rapes, muggings, and auto accidents combined.

  • Violence will occur at least once in two thirds of all marriages.

  • 30% of female homicide victims are killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

  • Eight million children are affected by domestic violence each year.

  • Domestic violence occurs among all races and socioeconomic groups.

 

 

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