Backfire: lessons learned when the criminal justice system fails help-seeking battered women

Abstract

In this analysis I use data from interviews with 22 battered women in two states to explore their criminal justice help-seeking experiences. First, I examine participants’ overwhelmingly negative experiences with three criminal justice help-seeking strategies: calling the police, pursuing prosecution of their abusers, and obtaining protection orders. Next, I contextualize these negative experiences by identifying two sources of conflict between help-seeking battered women and the criminal justice system: perception incompatibility and goal incompatibility. Here I also use the narrative data to evaluate women’s sense that use of the criminal justice system ‘backfired’ on them, and identify the consequences of this backfire for disrupting women's help-seeking pathways. I also present, as a counterpoint, women's uniformly positive experiences with two non-criminal justice resources: shelter and support groups services. Finally, I use these findings to identify specific lessons that can be learned to improve the overall criminal justice response to help-seeking battered women.