Abstract
In Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons From the Transcripts, Elizabeth Sheehy recounts the cases of 11 women who were battered by their male partners in Canada. Of these 11 women, 10 killed their partners in self-defense and the other woman’s partner took his own life but not before attempting to kill the woman and her children. From the beginning of the first chapter to the end of the book, the reader becomes emotionally connected to the stories of these women and their struggles.
In each of the stories, Sheehy includes information from the trial transcripts. In some of the cases, the controversial question of why a battered woman does not leave her abusive partner is addressed. This question is often asked by people who do not fully understand the gravity of the situation that battered women face. By providing details from the trial transcripts that pertain to this question, Sheehy is able to shed some light on a few of the reasons why women in these types of situations cannot just simply walk away. In the case of Bonnie Mooney, the only case in the book where the male partner took his own life, she was repeatedly asked by the prosecutor why she did not leave her partner even though “she had left him more than five months prior to his final attack” (p. 59). Kimberly Kondejewski remained in the life-threatening situation of residing with her batterer in order to protect her children from their father. By addressing this question in her book, Sheehy attempts to put an end to the admonishing of women for not leaving their partners and helps to dispel the myth that women can easily leave their partners if battering is occurring.
In addition to dispelling the myth that women should be able to just leave their batterers, Sheehy exposes the added discrimination that Aboriginal women in Canada who kill their partners in self-defense face. Sheehy examined cases of self-defense in both Aboriginal women who killed their white, male partners and those who killed their Aboriginal male partners. In these two chapters, Sheehy correctly notes how negative stereotypes of Aborigines may generate less sympathetic feelings toward these women. Aboriginal women in Canada face numerous systematic inequalities in addition to double discrimination because they are both female and an ethnic minority.
The only weakness of this book is that the theory of Battered Women’s Syndrome is not explained in depth until the end of Chapter 1. By not including a detailed description earlier in the book, the reader is left without a clear understanding of the syndrome through crucial points of the book. A logical place to include a description of Battered Women’s Syndrome would have been in the “Defining My Terms” section in the Introduction, so that the reader could be introduced to this term early in the book.
Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons From the Transcripts would be a useful addition to any social work, law, women’s issues, or gender studies seminar course. Students can use this book to help them understand the complexities surrounding cases in which women kill their male partners in self-defense. While this book only discusses trials that occurred in Canada, students around the world can still gain information from this book. This book is also suited for those in the general public who wish to gain a fuller understanding of the hardships faced by women in abusive relationships.