Tuesday, November 10, 2026.
What women who kill their partners, men who report abuse, and the stories we tell about both reveal about how we recognize danger.
Imagine two people trying to explain what happened in their kitchens.
One is a woman who killed her partner.
She tells the jury she had fought back before. The other is a man telling a counselor that his wife hits him. He says he usually doesn’t fight back.
She was supposed to be more helpless. He was supposed to be less so.
These are different situations with different stakes.
The woman faces a judgment about a death.
The man is trying to get someone to take an ongoing danger seriously.
What they have in common is the possibility that the very behavior they need to explain will be treated as evidence against them.
The woman who fought back
In Deviant Behavior, Sally Crosland, Calli Tzani, and Maria Ioannou reviewed 24 studies published between 2003 and 2023 on women who kill intimate partners.
The literature included mock-jury experiments, media analyses, and studies of official records.
The designs were too different to pool into one estimate of how common stereotyping is or how much it changes actual verdicts.
Some of the underlying cases are decades old.
The paper appeared online in 2025 and was covered this week by Eric W. Dolan. (Read the review · Read the PsyPost coverage).
Brenda Russell and Linda Melillo gave undergraduates case summaries in which a woman killed her husband and claimed self-defense.
They changed two things independently.
One was how closely she fit a stereotype of a battered woman, down to whether she hid signs of abuse or openly blamed her husband.
The other was whether she had fought back before or tried to appease him.
The students could choose second-degree murder, manslaughter, or acquittal on grounds of self-defense.
About 25% acquitted the woman who departed from the stereotype and had fought back, compared with about 57% who acquitted the woman who fit the stereotype and had tried to appease him.
That contrast combines both changes.
It tells us how students judged the accounts they read.
Fighting back can look like proof of freedom to someone who has never had to fight for any (Russell & Melillo).
In a separate experiment, Cheryl Terrance and Kimberly Matheson showed 316 students a simulated trial in which a woman claimed self-defense after shooting her abusive husband.
Some saw expert testimony about battered woman syndrome, some saw it framed as PTSD, and some saw no expert. The researchers also varied how much social support the woman appeared to have in the versions with expert testimony.
Credibility and perceived mental stability shifted across conditions. Verdicts did not differ significantly. A juror can find a woman more believable and still doubt her judgment (Terrance & Matheson).
The review describes three familiar roles for a woman who kills. She can be “mad,” “bad,” or “sad.”
The language of battered woman syndrome could help a court hear about years of fear that would otherwise disappear behind the final act.
It could also make the history intelligible only by making the woman seem impaired. We grant her a past, then ask her to surrender some of her judgment in exchange (Crosland et al.).
There are women who kill in the course of defending themselves and women who use violence to punish or control.
There are also cases where prior abuse is real and the circumstances of the killing still demand hard questions.
Who threatened whom? What did earlier threats lead to? What was happening that day?
The history matters, and so do the facts of the death. A woman’s capacity to act belongs in both accounts.
Who gets believed before anybody dies?
I wrote Why Does My Wife Hit Me? in part because the title still sounds like the setup to a joke.
A qualitative review led by Alyson Huntley gives that unease some substance.
Across 12 studies, men described shame, fear of disbelief, and uncertainty about where to turn.
Some worried they would be treated as the aggressor if they disclosed the abuse.
The review gives us accounts of what can make asking for help costly. It offers no population estimate of how often services respond that way (Huntley et al.)
The experiment behind my earlier essay on coercive control asks a related question.
Julie-Ann Jordan and colleagues randomly assigned 1,872 U.S. adults to scenarios that varied the genders of the victim and perpetrator.
With the subtler forms of coercion, respondents more readily expected fear and physical harm when the victim was a woman and the perpetrator a man.
They also showed greater support for reporting and criminalizing the behavior when the victim was a woman. The effects in those subtler scenarios were small.
One distinction deserves more care than I gave it in that earlier piece.
The researchers found no significant effect for the sexual orientation of the couple in the scenario. They did find that LGBTQ+ respondents expressed less concern overall than heterosexual respondents. Those are two different findings (Jordan et al.)
A vignette study measures what folks make of a description.
A homicide study counts deaths.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that women and girls accounted for about two-thirds of intimate partner homicide victims worldwide in 2021. That imbalance belongs in prevention policy.
A person trying to tell you what happens in their kitchen still deserves to finish the story (UNODC, Global Study on Homicide 2023).
What Duluth could see
Feminist advocates forced public institutions to reckon with a kind of violence that had long been treated as private business.
They made it possible to ask what happened on all the other nights.
That question matters.
In a multisite case-control study of abused women, Jacquelyn Campbell and colleagues found that a partner’s access to a gun, prior threats with a weapon, and estrangement from a controlling partner were associated with elevated risk of intimate partner femicide.
Leaving can be a dangerous period precisely when an outsider expects the danger to be over (Campbell et al.).
The Duluth Model’s original Power and Control Wheel grew out of conversations with battered women.
It made intimidation, isolation, and other tactics visible as parts of a pattern.
Its developers explicitly say the wheel was designed to describe men’s abuse of women.
Yet their FAQ goes further.
It calls the societal impact of women’s violence against men “trivial” by comparison.
That’s where I part company with Duluth.
A tool designed around women’s testimony is doing exactly what it was built to do. But the “experts” who built it still made a sweeping judgment about suffering they had put outside its frame (Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs).
Huntley’s review documents men’s fear that they’ll be disbelieved or treated as the aggressor.
Jordan’s experiment shows how much the gender of a victim can matter when the coercion is harder to see.
Neither study tested the Duluth Model.
The objection is to carrying its population-level judgment into an individual assessment.
If a man tells you his wife controls his access to money and threatens him when he tries to leave, a chart about who usually does what has already done all it can for you. You have to find out what the threats are and what she has done to carry them out.
Some critics of feminism are happy to believe the same man as long as he has something to prove about women.
They seem less interested in whether he can get through the weekend. He gets an audience and still has to go home.
What happens after the session?
Couples therapists can make a version of the same error in the name of fairness. Here’s what therapeutic mediocrity looks like:
Each partner gets the same number of minutes. Each gets asked what they did to escalate the conflict. It looks evenhanded from the chair that gets to stay in the office.
I’d want to know what happens after the session.
Can both partners talk about what happened without paying for it later?
Who can leave an argument, use the car, see a friend, or spend money without permission?
If both used force, what was each doing when they used it?
Pushing past someone who is blocking the door and blocking the door in the first place can both disappear into the phrase they got physical.
Where there are signs of coercion or fear of retaliation, speak with each partner privately and assess safety before considering any joint work. Ongoing coercion or fear of retaliation makes joint sessions obviously unsafe.
A disclosure made in front of a controlling partner in therapy can become another thing to answer for at home (American Counseling Association practice brief · National Domestic Violence Hotline).
The woman in the courtroom is asked why she didn’t leave.
The man in the counselor’s office is asked why he didn’t stop her.
Both questions can be asked with an air of common sense.
I’d like to hear a question that takes a little more work to answer.:
What happened the last time you tried?
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., Block, C., Campbell, D., Curry, M. A., Gary, F., Glass, N., McFarlane, J., Sachs, C., Sharps, P., Ulrich, Y., Wilt, S. A., Manganello, J., Xu, X., Schollenberger, J., Frye, V., & Laughon, K. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089–1097. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.93.7.1089
Crosland, S., Tzani, C., & Ioannou, M. (2025). Female perpetrators of intimate partner homicide: Stereotyping and factors. A systematic review of twenty years of literature, 2003–2023. Deviant Behavior. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2025.2501618
Dolan, E. W. (2026, November 9). Women who kill their partners are often judged through “mad, bad or sad” stereotypes, review finds. PsyPost. https://www.psypost.org/women-who-kill-their-partners-are-often-judged-through-mad-bad-or-sad-stereotypes-review-finds/
Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs. (n.d.). Understanding the Power and Control Wheel. https://theduluthmodel.org/wheels/faqs-about-the-wheels/
Huntley, A. L., Potter, L., Williamson, E., Malpass, A., Szilassy, E., & Feder, G. (2019). Help-seeking by male victims of domestic violence and abuse (DVA): A systematic review and qualitative evidence synthesis. BMJ Open, 9(6), e021960. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-021960
Jordan, J.-A., Hurst, N., McCartan, C., McFadden, D., Shannon, C., Dyer, K. F. W., & Lagdon, S. (2025). Attitudes of U.S. adults towards coercive control as a function of victim and perpetrator gender and respondent sexual orientation. Sex Roles, 91, Article 72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-025-01616-z
Russell, B. L., & Melillo, L. S. (2006). Attitudes toward battered women who kill: Defendant typicality and judgments of culpability. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 33(2), 219–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854805284412
Terrance, C., & Matheson, K. (2003). Undermining reasonableness: Expert testimony in a case involving a battered woman who kills. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 27(1), 37–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-6402.t01-2-00005
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2023). Global study on homicide 2023. https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/2023/Global_study_on_homicide_2023_web.pdf
If you’re afraid of what might happen at home after speaking honestly, you can contact a domestic violence advocate from a device you can safely use. For relationship concerns you can both discuss safely, explore my services, contact me, or book a free intro call.