Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival

ISBN: 0063241595

Author: Justine van der Leun

"A tour de force of narrative reporting that examines how women are criminalized for actions they take to defend themselves or a loved one from violence, revealing a legal system that fails to protect them but never fails to punish them. Thirty percent of women serving time on murder and manslaughter charges in the U.S. are criminalized survivors: women who are arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. When journalist Justine van der Leun set out to examine the phenomenon of criminalized survivors, she was met with silence, indifference, and a profound absence of data on the hundreds of thousands of women who have been forced into impossible choices and found themselves on the receiving end of the full force of the law. In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun sets out to tell the stories of these women, weaving together her own extensive on-the-ground research with the narratives of three criminalized survivors to examine how and why women are punished in America. In the lives of Tanisha, Jema, and TC, we see how the system fails survivors long before it punishes them and how familial, societal, and state violence replicate when early trauma is unacknowledged and untreated. Deeply researched and compellingly told, Unreasonable Women is a passionate call to action - and a forensic denunciation of a broken system that would rather condemn a woman to life behind bars than face up to its own failings"-- Provided by publisher.