Why Do So Many Women Go to Prison After Surviving Domestic Violence?

Nearly one in three women in prison who were charged with murder or manslaughter report experiencing domestic violence, according to journalist Justine van der Leun’s survey of incarcerated women—but the true number is likely much higher. Yet America’s criminal justice system rarely recognizes abuse as a central part of women’s pathways to prison.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun follows three women whose experiences challenge familiar narratives about crime, punishment, and victimhood. Through years of dogged reporting, court records, and interviews, she traces how domestic violence, childhood trauma, poverty, and systemic failures shaped the choices these women made—and the harsh sentences many received.

I spoke with van der Leun over Zoom about criminalized survivors, the limits of self-defense law, and what it would take to create a more just system. Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: You set out to discover how many women in U.S. prisons fall in this category of “criminalized survivors.” What drove you to research this yourself?

Justine van der Leun: I was reading a report called The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline by an organization called The Human Rights Project for Girls, looking at the way that girls—in particular, Black girls—who were in the juvenile justice system had been sexually abused, often severely, before being incarcerated.

I was really interested in this idea of punishment, this further state punishment for this thing that had happened. But it was really hard to report on kids, to get permission—especially kids who don’t have parents. I abandoned that; I just didn’t know how to get in.

Then I learned about the idea of “survived and punished” from the group Survived and Punished. I ended up on Nikki’s case. And then I created this whole ridiculous project—in retrospect, what was I thinking?—to find how many criminalized survivors are there now.

HR: What did you learn? How many respondents reported experiencing abuse before entering the prison system?

JV: There’ve been studies that show that in certain facilities, up to 94% of women in prison have histories of domestic or sexual violence. And, anecdotally, I never really talked to somebody who didn’t—it’s almost everybody.

My research shows that 30% of respondents are criminalized survivors, and that’s probably like a vast undercount because I didn’t prime them. I didn’t ask specifically, “are you a criminalized survivor? Or “did you experience abuse or violence?”

One thing that I cannot know is how many women get off. How many times do prosecutors not charge? If you don’t get convicted, there’s no record of anything. So if a woman did, say, defend herself and they chose not to press charges—or try and they fail—then there’s really no way for me to find that person and then look at their characteristics and compare them. Everything is down to these individual DAs, for the most part.

HR: A recurring question, when it comes to these women and other victims of abuse, is “why didn’t she leave?” Can you address this?

JV: It’s a natural question that people who haven’t lived through this have. People think, “Well, if someone’s raping me, strangling me, putting me on Pornhub, or whatever, I would just go.”

Anyone who’s been through it knows that you can’t.

The simplest answer, looking at these situations, is that it’s not about if she decides to leave—it’s about if he lets her leave. So the decision is really not the survivor’s, the victim’s decision. It’s always the decision of the abuser.

We put the onus on her to leave, but in almost every single case that I’ve looked at, she wants to leave. But in domestic violence situations, the person being abused is so intricately aware of their abuser’s triggers and how they will react to everything. They know what will happen if they do. It’s not like you can make the free choice just to walk out.

Furthermore, as Nikki said to me once, “If he had thrown me on the ground and raped me the first date, I wouldn’t have been with him.” But the abuse is so gradual.

Also, when people have children and when people have lives together, it becomes so hard to disentangle yourself from these people—who’ve also convinced you that you’re worth nothing.

Gemma is one of the women in my book. She said it doesn’t matter how strong you are. It doesn’t matter what a badass you think you are. If somebody, day after day, isolates you and tells you that you’re a terrible mother, you’re going to lose your children, you’re worth nothing, nobody will want you—you start to believe it.

An abuser isolates you—or identifies someone who is already isolated—and gloms on to them. And when kids are involved, women wonder: How do I extract my child? Will he come for my child? Will the state come for my child? How do I remove my child from this life that they have with their dad?

Tanisha, she wanted to leave, but she would have been homeless if she did. So she stayed while trying to get her life together. And it’s not really a free choice, it’s like the other choices, like sleeping in your car, you know, are untenable.

For the other three women, everything that happened occurred when someone had left or was trying to leave. That’s the most dangerous time.

HR: Of children who have been abused, 77% face abuse in adulthood. Can you talk about how you observed this pattern in the women you wrote about?

JV: I haven’t been able to untangle it to the degree that I would like to. One expert said that the way they deal with trust is profoundly altered—they either trust too much or they don’t trust at all. The compass guiding them is a little broken.

Tanisha had been abused so much as a child, she almost took it as a given that a man would do this to her. She was abused in all of her relationships. I don’t know that she ever thought she was worth anything more, or knew that she was worth not getting abused—because that was her only experience in life.

Nikki’s childhood abuse—in all cases, actually—was never dealt with properly. So they couldn’t find healing. It was denied or like swept under the rug. And when you don’t heal from that, I don’t know how you can go forward and create healthy relationships when you have sexual trauma—stuff that you never got treatment for.

Even people who get treatment find it really hard to have healthy relationships later. So people who live on the margins have a lot of self-hate, shame, and worthlessness that they carry. Abusers are often really good at identifying that and coming into the lives of people like that, as well.

HR: And violence isn’t always registered by the person experiencing it. Gemma, for example, had been thrown against a glass coffee table that shattered—but she didn’t note it as abuse. Why do you think this happens?

JV: She told me, “That year was good.” Gemma would say that, first, she loved him and she got involved—and then he was abusive. The more I looked at it, the more I saw that he forced her into the relationship and the marriage—by strangulation and abuse, and by tracking her and stalking her. But because she felt that there was an inevitability to it, she may have tried to create, in her mind, a more pleasant reality in which she was choosing this and loved him.

Because the alternative was that she was being like forced and raped and strangled into a relationship. I think she wrote off a lot of things because she kind of had to, to live her life and to keep going. Including the coffee table incident. She had created a bit of an alternate reality.

HR: Beginning in the 1970s, lawyers defending or helping women with cases of criminalized survival advised them to plead insanity rather than self-defense. Why is self-defense so difficult to prove?

JV: I called the book Unreasonable Women because for a long time, the jury was tasked with deciding if a defendant acted as a hypothetical “reasonable man” would have acted. They were supposed to put themselves in the person’s shoes and answer, “Would a reasonable person have done the same, knowing the same things, having the same fears?”

There was never really a reasonable woman. Later it was turned to the “reasonable person standard.” So self-defense has typically been conceived of as the idea of like two men outside of a bar, equally sized, having a fight—would a reasonable man in that situation have reacted thusly?

A woman in a domestic violence situation—what is reasonable to her, knowing what she knows—is quite different.

Then there’s the issue of imminence in self-defense—the threat had to be so imminent that you had to react with force. It’s often required that it be in that exact second, in hand-to-hand combat. But if it were hand-to-hand combat, women would usually die. She won’t be able to defend herself. So imminence looks different for women—and that’s rarely considered historically and legally.

HR: How is Tanisha’s story a prime example of criminalized survival?

JV: Tanisha was dealing with not having housing. She ended up meeting a guy at a club, and he had a room, and she didn’t want to sleep in a car, and she didn’t want to impose on friends. She ended up going and moving in with him. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just a roommate. But he abused her.

Quickly, he took over her life. She wanted to leave, but he also took over her finances, so she couldn’t leave very easily. So she decided she didn’t want to sleep in the car, so she would make it work while she stayed.

He then killed a man in their shared apartment. She was there at the time. She ran out. He put a gun to her head. He put a hand to her throat. And he basically told her to get with the program and do as he said—or he would kill her, as well.

She did as he said. She helped wrap the body of this young man that he had killed. Then she ran for years. She was really scared of him. She was scared of the police. Finally, her conscience got to her. She came forward to help solve this cold case and help the police so that his family would have closure.

HR: She’d had faith that the system would protect her. What actually happened?

JV: Alisa Bierria says something like, “Black women are used as pawns to demonstrate justice and then disposed of.” I certainly saw that. If we consider justice convictions—which I think prosecutors often do—these women are often used to testify.

Tanisha came forward—but she was promised immunity, according to her. She had a bad lawyer, and she didn’t get it. They needed to build their case. They said, to make her believable to a jury, she couldn’t have gotten any deal. They used her as a witness so that they could win their conviction. And so they threw her life away.

HR: Efforts such as New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act address criminalized survival. What would it take to overhaul the system?

JV: Survivor justice laws provide openings for people who are in prison to get their cases heard. Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey—and, more recently, Georgia—have passed such laws. The laws allow for a person who can show that abuse was a significant contributing factor, for the judge to have discretion on sentencing. They’re also retroactive. So if you’re in prison, you can have a chance of getting your case heard again.

Those laws are really important, but I can’t sugarcoat it: It’s a systemic issue. It’s generational, it’s enslaved people who came before these women were born, and these ideas that people learned about these communities, what they’ve been through.

It’s clear that the narratives we’re told about people, and the labels that are put on them—by the criminal legal system, prisons, even media—have nothing to do with who they are, the real context of their lives, or what really happened.

Some really remarkable people are locked up on murder convictions. It’s changed how I understand being a woman in America. This is baked into our culture and society; it’s what we all experience on some level. This is all by design.