Kathleen J. Ferraro

Policing Woman Battering

In the 1980s, many states and cities mandated police officers to arrest men who batter women in family disputes. This observational study of a large metropolitan police department shows that in spite of the presumptive arrest policy, officers made arrests in only 18 percent of assaults involving intimate partners. Case material illustrates how legal, ideological, practical, and political factors led police to ignore the presumptive arrest policy when responding to family disputes.

Mothering, Crime, And Incarceration

This article examines the relationships between mothering, crime, and incarceration through the narratives of thirty women incarcerated in a southwestern county jail. The responsibilities of child care, combined with the burdens of economic marginality and domestic violence, led some women to choose economic crimes or drug dealing as an alternative to hunger and homelessness. Other women, arrested for drug- or alcohol-related crimes, related their offenses to the psychological pain and despair resulting from loss of custody of their children. Many women were incarcerated for minor probation violations that often related to the conflict between work, child care, and probation requirements. For all women with children, mothering represented both the burdens of an unequal sexual division of labor and opportunities for resistance to marginalization and hopelessness.

Women's involvement in serious interpersonal violence

The relationship between gender and acts of serious interpersonal violence has generated much scholarly interest and debate. Research now encompasses work on individual-level predictors that include biological, psychological, and environmental factors. Other scholars have focused on the situational correlates of violence involving women and men in order to determine what factors are associated with the initiation and outcome of violent events. Still others have looked at the distribution of violence by gender across time and space. This article evaluates and synthesizes work within each of these levels of analysis in an effort to identify critical research domains and questions that may help us to further understand the longstanding and marked gender differences in the nature and extent of interpersonal violence.

Negotiating Trouble in a Battered Women's Shelter

The treatment of battered women is discussed by examining the micro- and macropolitical forces impinging on the operation of a battered womens shelter. Funding agencies, other social services, and interpretive frameworks of staff members formed the organizational context of the micropolitical context. The womens troubles were negotiated at three major stages—intake, processing, and return to the shelter—and the major micropolitical features of this negotiation were a therapeutic ideology, the need for social control, interpersonal conflicts, and personal feelings. Criteria for evaluating and controlling the troubles of women were established in light of self work, the primary objective of shelter residence. Professional expertise was the justification for imposing staffs definitions. Women who rejected the demands of staff were labeled failures and held responsible for the problems they encountered as battered women.

The Words Change, But the Melody Lingers

Acceptance of expert testimony on the battered woman syndrome in criminal and civil cases has established expectations about “real” battered women that reinforce conventional notions of femininity. Despite well-documented and publicized analyses of the status of the syndrome as no longer reflecting the range of knowledge relevant to battered women in legal settings, the expectations of helplessness promoted by the syndrome persist. In this article, specific cases are discussed in which the characteristics described in the syndrome are contrasted with the assertiveness, strength, and strategic decision making expressed by female defendants who had been battered. The negative consequences of the persistence of the battered woman syndrome in court are also described.

The divorce process

This is a study of the process of divorce. Unstructured interviews were conducted with divorced individuals by both the male and female authors. It was found that problems such as adultery, alcohol abuse, or financial difficulties were aspects of nearly all the broken marriages. However, these problems could not be viewed as thecauses for the divorce. Instead, problems were used as a basis for escalating a crisis in order to dissolve long-standing, deep emotional bonds. Specific problems became tools in the process of creating an unlivable situation culminating in divorce. The crisis created by the divorcing couple became a reality for their acquaintances. Divorcees used a variety of strategies in the struggle for allegiances following divorce. These strategies and the reactions of friends and relatives are discussed.

Ordinary violence : everyday assaults against women

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Battered Women's Justice: The Movement for Clemency and the Politics of Self-Defense

Imagine a state where the governor opens his home as a shelter for battered women, feminists hold appointed positions and respond to leftwing and feminist constituencies, the First Lady spends time talking with women in prison, and the Corrections Department allows inmates to speak with journalists. Imagine the governor grants mass clemency to 26 women incarcerated for killing abusive partners. Is this a fantasy from a feminist utopian novel? No, this was Ohio in the late 1980s, during the term of Richard Celeste. Patricia Gagne was inspired by these anomalous progressive gestures to chronicle and mine the Ohio battered womens clemency movement for strategies of social movement success. 468 Social Control and the Law

Gender Matters in Intimate Partner Violence

This chapter addresses the gender symmetry debate concerning intimate partner violence (IPV). I argue that: (1) gender matters at the individual psyche, micro-everyday, institutional, structural, and cultural levels of peoples’ lives; (2) gender symmetry arguments have been captured by individualistic and binary models of gender that conflate sex and gender, ignore theoretical analyses of both gender and violence and neglect the importance of intersectionality; and (3) symmetry arguments fail to incorporate sustained analyses of forms of IPV that are uniquely gendered. I include in this category rape and sexual coercion, reproductive control, and violence during pregnancy, as well as behaviors that are highly correlated with lethal outcomes, such as strangulation. I illustrate my argument about the importance of intersectionality with a brief case profile of a battered man. I also review narratives from women and men who have been subjected to coercive control and IPV and US national level data reflecting the ongoing significance of gender in people’s lives. I conclude with recommendations for research and policy that take seriously the gendered nature of intimate partner violence.

Invisible or Pathologized? Racial Statistics and Violence Against Women of Color

This article applies Tukufu Zuberis (2001) analysis of racial statistics to the issue of violence against women of color. Data from several national surveys are discussed in terms of the potential for drawing needed attention and resources to women of color and the simultaneous danger of reinforcing stereotypes of pathological communities. I argue for the importance of history and social context as well as qualitative narratives, particularly with regard to rates of violence against African American and American Indian women. Brief narratives from two women are offered to demonstrate the complexities of womens lives that are invisible in statistical data.