Kill or Die: Female-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Homicide (IPH) as a Survival Strategy

• In Event: Essential Contexts: Privilege and Oppression in Crime and Justice

Abstract

This paper examines the criminalization of women’s survival strategies – specifically, female-perpetrated intimate partner homicide (IPH) – in African American and white women’s abusive relationships, and applies intersectionality theory to analyze the ways in which race, class, and gender shape those strategies as a response to domestic violence. Intersectionality theory claims that racism and sexism are interconnected and continually operate in tandem within women’s lives (Potter, 2015). It assesses the ways in which structural inequalities burden women, specifically women of color, and necessitate crimes such as IPH. I analyze intersectionality to help explain how some women who commit IPH do so in response to brutal and severe domestic violence that is life-threatening. This paper analyzes the processes that place female domestic violence victims under correctional control (Chesney-Lind, 1997). Gender role conformity and lack of access to resources that intersect with race and class factors amplify women’s entrapment within battering relationships, which contribute to the criminalization of their survival strategies through mandatory arrest policies and biased plea-bargaining and sentencing practices. This integrative analysis will emphasize the ways in which abusive men and gender, race, and class oppression “entrap” women into crimes of self-defense (Richie, 1996).

Author

• Shannon Harper, University of Illinois at Chicago