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O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E

Mad, Bad, or Reasonable? Newspaper Portrayals of the Battered Woman Who Kills

Marianne S. Noh • Matthew T. Lee •

Kathryn M. Feltey

Published online: 1 December 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract A heated debate about battered women who kill abusive male partners started in the 1970s. In this study, we tracked the public discourse on battered

women who kill by coding 250 newspaper articles published between 1978 and

2002. Using four typifying models, we found that leading explanations for why

battered women kill medicalized then criminalized their actions; they were mad

then bad. We also found that reporters used quotes from claims makers supporting

conventional or medical typifications of battered women to a much greater degree

than statements from alternative, feminist sources. In conclusion, simplified, sen-

sational and conventional understandings of crime causation drove the social con-

struction of ‘‘the battered woman who kills’’. She may be mad or bad, but rarely has

she been portrayed as reasonable. Suggestions for promoting feminist narrative in

the media are also provided.

Keywords Battered woman syndrome � Battered woman � Domestic violence � Media analysis � Gender and crime

M. S. Noh (&) Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

e-mail: [email protected]

M. T. Lee � K. M. Feltey Department of Sociology, University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

K. M. Feltey

e-mail: [email protected]

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Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130

DOI 10.1007/s12147-010-9093-9

A woman killing her husband is like killing the king, but a man killing his wife

is like killing any other person. (Sir William Blackstone 1786, as cited in [12])

Introduction

When extenuating factors are diffuse or difficult to understand, courts routinely hold

defendants legally responsible for acts of violence against another person.

Conversely, when such factors are straightforward and understandable, they are

more likely to absolve individuals of personal responsibility [19]. In cases involving

the battered woman who kills her abusive husband or boyfriend, defense attorneys

have presented the Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) clearly and convincingly

enough in some criminal trials that jurors have accepted BWS as supporting

evidence in the defense of temporary insanity and in some cases lawful self-defense

[17]. However, BWS as part of a legal defense strategy has been said to ultimately

excuse, rather than justify the offense [17, 19, 27, 56]. This is problematic for two

reasons. First, excusing the offense stigmatizes women who use the temporary

insanity defense. Second, it excludes women who are determined to have been

rational at the time of the act from using the BWS as a suitable part of their legal

defense. A recent variant of feminist discourse addresses this limitation, arguing that

the actions of women who kill their abuser are normative and even altruistic at times

[27, 64].

To date, public debates, including those within the legal system, deem the

feminist discourse of justification less convincing than the BWS discourse of

excuse. Feminist discourse frames women in ways that are inconsistent with

traditional female gender roles portraying women as passive, nonviolent, and

irrational [23, 35, 37, 55, 64]. In cases where the battered woman kills, traditional

feminine explanations include the woman being temporarily insane, such as having

hysteria or dementia, or being materialistic [3]. Moreover, the kinds of narrative

frameworks promoted by the mass media shape many of our beliefs and

assumptions. For example, the media arguably reproduces ‘‘toxic romance

narratives’’ [66, p. 259], which may convince women that victimization at the

hands of their intimate partners is a personal problem that they are responsible for

solving on their own [7]. Bakken and Farrington’s analysis of the battered woman

who kills in California, 1800–2000s, found that news media played a key role in the

constructed notions of the battered woman who kills; that is, why she kills and who

she is. They also found that the media’s role was significant in constructing

dominant notions due to its model of ‘‘commercial and sensational’’ news. A woman

who kills provides extant sensationalism. Such that although the rates of intimate

partner homicide by males have remained much higher than violent acts committed

by female partners [17], news media appears to paint a contradicting picture.

In this study, we examined U.S. and Canadian newspaper portrayals of the

battered woman who kills to explore how these news sources presented their stories,

and whether they made use of excuse, justification or alternative explanations.

Covering a 24-year period (1978–2002), we analyzed the explanations and

interpretations provided in newspaper stories about battered women who kill. We

Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130 111

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entered this investigation with one broad research question: How do the media

represent women who kill abusive husbands or boyfriends? More specifically, we

wanted to know whether news media promote or restrict particular discourses, such

as medicalized or feminist accounts.

Literature Review

The Social Construction of Media Typifications

According to the social constructionist perspective, the central issue in understanding

deviance is the process of how those in power create and define ‘‘deviants’’ and

‘‘deviant behavior’’, and how such definitions change (or remain the same) over time

[3, 16, 43, 59, 63]. According to this view, deviance is not a quality inherent in certain

individuals or acts, but rather a label applied by those who take ownership of the

definitional process [5, 29]. For example, the medical profession is a powerful group

that has promoted the perspective that deviant acts are rooted in mental or

psychological illness [16]. For the battered woman who kills, some members of the

medical profession have argued that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) explains

her behavior as resulting from a sustained pattern of abuse that impairs judgment.

It is important to note that offering explanatory narratives is most commonly part

of a transforming process that simplifies individuals into a ‘‘type’’ of person and

creates homogeneity rather than heterogeneity [34, p. 5]. In this case, an overriding

dominant narrative simplifies the diverse lived experiences of abused women. A

‘‘processing stereotype’’ increasingly subjects women who fit this image to a

specific kind of treatment by social service agencies and the criminal justice system

[35, p. 307]. Administrative processing, tied to cultural beliefs about the nature of

battered women, helps create expectations about battered women’s behaviors [54].

The failure of battered women to meet these expectations has led to the denial of

services at battered women’s shelters as well as the failure of PTSD-based legal

defense strategies [19, 34].

Best [8] found that secondary claims makers (e.g., experts and public officials)

are more likely to influence public understanding of social problems than primary

sources such as, in this case, the battered woman herself. Effective secondary

sources of claims making, which include newspaper reports, play an important role

in the extent to which the public will accept the claims as truth [9, 36]. News reports

commonly sensationalize stories and present the claims of groups and individuals in

positions of power. Reporters rely on quotes from ‘‘experts’’ to bolster the plotlines

of their stories: we found that battered women advocates, psychologists, lawyers

and politicians were common key informants. Because those with economic

resources, political power and the right timing are better able to promote their

claims, it is important to pay special attention to the groups of claims makers

newspaper reports most frequently cited, and the extent to which these groups

represented the interests of battered women.

Media stories can emphasize individual responsibility and motivation, focus on

systemic factors or offer a narrative based on some combination of both [3, 7, 13].

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For example, experts have portrayed the behavior of battered women as either a

function of external constraints (patriarchy and gender inequality) or of internal

constraints (PTSD and BWS), both of which can highlight structural constraints on

the lives of women [35]. Alternatively, in cases of the battered woman who kills,

media reports may have featured the claims of prosecutors, which contest efforts to

mitigate personal responsibility. Media narratives of the 1990s may ultimately have

formed collective representations of the battered woman that label her either as a

victim in dire need of social assistance [34, p. 46] or as personally responsible for

solving her private problem [7].

According to Loseke [34], the identity of the ‘‘battered woman’’ is socially

constructed and relies on the presence of violent male offenders and victimized

women ‘‘who do not create their own victimization’’ (p. 16). Through images of

helplessness, claims makers in the media have promoted a collective understanding

of the battered woman as a person whose identity is predominantly that of a victim,

a process known as ‘‘victimism’’ [35, p. 304]. Accordingly, the victim is non-

violent, but when violent such as when she has killed her abusive partner, it is

irrational, therefore, excusing and not justifying her action [19].

However, media typifications are multiple. The image of helplessness is not the

only typification present, despite its prevalence over the years. Berns [7] found that

women’s magazines, such as Glamour and Good Housekeeping, typically produce stories that at first glance portray empowered women, but actually define women as

responsible for their private troubles—and their successful escape. These accounts

ignore the behavior of abusive men, while highlighting the actions, mistakes and

decisions made by the women.

Given the multiple typifications of the battered woman, it is no surprise that the

social, political and psychological implications of an excused versus a justified

action also vary. In order to explain and capture various accounts of the battered

woman who kills presented by the news media, we used four primary typification

models. These models represent the dominant explanations of the battered woman

who kills used by those in positions of power such as medical professionals,

lawyers, judges and legal scholars [3, 7, 16, 22, 38]. These claims utilized or

challenged pre-established common understandings of both reasons for murder and

appropriate gendered behavior for women.

Four Typification Models of Abused Women Who Kill

Previous social science research indicates two general ‘‘lenses’’ through which to

view domestic violence: the violence against women perspective and the family violence perspective [38, p. 8]. These are ideal types in the Weberian sense, and, in practice, they may not be mutually exclusive for researchers who work to ‘‘bridge

the divide’’ [38, p. 8]. However, different constituents use these two lenses and

promote different core beliefs. On the one hand, feminists tend to use the violence

against women lens. In this view, domestic violence springs from fundamental

patriarchal relations between men and women, and nothing ‘‘short of a complete or

radical transformation of our entire social, moral and institutional order’’ will be

able to stop the epidemic levels of violence perpetrated by men against women (9).

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On the other hand, Mann [38] frames the family violence perspective as one

characterized by mutual dependency between men and women who have learned to

use violence to solve problems and express frustration. Therapists and some social

scientists are prominent supporters of this perspective, which acknowledges that

women also use violence against men, even though women are much more likely to

suffer the effects of serious violence. Therapy, rather than social transformation, is

the preferred social policy for helping both men and women break their cycle of

violence before passing it on to their children, or seriously harming each other.

Typifications, according to McKinney [41], are necessarily used to perceive the

world around us and are based on typologies and ideal types. In turn, typifications

are used in structuring self-concept, institutions and social structures. In this case,

typifications of the battered woman who kills are socially constructed by owners of

the definitional process, or claims makers, such as medical and legal experts, to

explicate social systems with a particular set of values, norms and roles. Our review

of existing scholarship suggests that there are four dominant typifications of the

battered woman who kills, some of which relate to either the violence against

women perspective or the family violence perspective (see Table 1). First, women

who kill suffer from a psychological illness and thus are excused from legal responsibility for their crime. Second, women who kill are criminals engaged in

callous premeditated murder and are guilty for their crime. Third, women who kill engage in justifiable and reasonable self-defending behavior and are acquitted of criminal charges. Fourth, women who kill suffer from a psychological illness and

are acquitted based on the reasonableness of their mental instability.

Table 1 Typifications of the battered woman who kills and the battered woman syndrome

Characteristics Typification model

Medical Conventional

rationality

Legal feminism

Feminist

jurisprudence

Early legal

feminism

Claims-makers/

proponents

Psychologists,

defense

attorneys

Prosecutors, victim’s

family, judges,

jurors

Politicians, women advocates, legal

scholars, defense attorneys

View of guilty

battered women

Not applicable Premeditated murder Not applicable

View of not-guilty

battered women

Suffering from

BWS

Not applicable No options to remove long-term threat—

acting in self-defense

BWS detrimental

to battered

women

BWS part of a

larger defense

strategy

Type of not-guilty

account

Excuse Not applicable Justification

Rationality Irrational Rational Rational

Level of

explanation Individual Individual Structural

Rhetoric Mad Bad Reasonable

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These models are larger social systems constructions, and not strictly legal

theory models with certain courtroom strategies and outcomes. However, their

typified defenses and outcomes are assumed to align with how the battered woman

who kills is explained. For example, BWS defense strategies may use expert

testimony to provide a justifiable legal defense, although numerous feminist legal

theorists argue that BWS defense only provides an excuse for killing in an

ideological sense. One may inquire why these are the dominant typifications, and

why there are not more or fewer in numbers [27]. As it will be discussed in the

conclusion section, news media typifications are formed with three factors under

the theory of narrative or typification—simplicity, sensationalism, and conven-

tionalism, in addition to ownership of definition construction. To our knowledge,

there are four models typifying the battered woman who kills determined by one

or a combination of the three factors. The following section describes these four

typifications in more detail.

Medical Model

The medical model is associated with the family violence lens, a highly conventional and thus simple to grasp model, which proposes that due to battered

women’s psychological instability at the time of murder their actions are

unreasonable with mental incapability [16, 17, 19]. Psychologists originally

developed this model to support the battered woman who kills as killing in a

mental state akin to that of PTSD, as described by Walker’s [62] early definition of

BWS. In this view, BWS is a psychological condition where events, which outsiders

would not perceive as life threatening, trigger one’s perceptions of dangerous

situations [2, 62]. Long-term and continual psychological or physical abuse can alter

the perceptions of triggers and may result in a ‘‘learned helplessness’’ that prevents a

woman from leaving a dangerous situation.

We believe the medical model provides a legal excuse rather than a justification because although the syndrome typifies the act as still being wrong,

the battered woman is blameless because of a mental illness similar to that of

PTSD. This typification offers a not guilty account as a form of the ‘‘abuse

excuse’’ and does not support a guilty verdict for the battered woman defendant

[45]. Expert witnesses, usually psychologists testifying on behalf of women who

kill, tend to promote this type of account. The medical model fits best with the

family violence perspective because of its therapeutic focus on the cause of the

abuse of women and its failure to address broad structural conditions identified by

the violence against women model. Stemming from the family violence

perspective, the medical model promotes the view that BWS arises out of

ongoing violence in the family, maintaining an individualistic explanation,

neglecting social structural and contextual factors in intimate partner homicide

where the battered woman kills [17]. It is also worthy to note that many U.S.

courtrooms no longer apply this model as BWS defense has become part of a

legal defense strategy to successfully attain verdicts of justifiable self-defense on

grounds of reasonable action [17].

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Conventional Rationality Model

The conventional rationality model explicates the battered woman who kills based on the traditional legal claim of self-defense, from an imminent mortal danger. The

model does not relate to either the violence against women or the family violence

perspectives. In using this model, a claims maker either ignores or discounts

arguments based on BWS. For example, BWS is discounted in this view by

explaining the syndrome label as a tool for ‘getting away with murder’. This model

typifies individuals who kill, and that were not in imminent mortal danger (in the

traditional-conventional sense), as criminal and thus rational [16]. For example,

under this model, battered women who kill are typified as cold-blooded murderers,

and as ‘‘money hungry opportunists’’ [3] out for life insurance money or just tired of

being married. The BWS defense is simply not relevant [17]. According to the

conventional rationality model for this particular study, women who kill outside the

narrow parameters of traditional self-defense doctrine are bad, responsible for and

guilty of, their crime.

Feminist Jurisprudence Model

The third model, the feminist jurisprudence model, focuses on social structural explanations for battered women who kill. Legal feminists, such as Cynthia

Gillespie [26], Elizabeth Schneider et al. [54], Leigh Goodmark [27], Cara

Cookson [17] and social scientists such as Donald A. Downs and Evan Gertsmann

[20] have argued that BWS narrowly characterizes the battered woman who kills.

This often results in medicalizing the woman such that she is mentally incapable

of rational reasonableness. Given prevailing structural- and individual-level

conditions, the feminist jurisprudence model uses the structural factors that

prevent women from safely or successfully leaving a violent relationship to

explain the battered woman who kills. With structural factors present, such as the

loss of social networks, the lack of financial resources, and at times the inability to

leave dependents, along with real agency-level concerns of greater retribution

from abusive partners, the battered woman who kills is often unable to ‘‘escape’’

domestic violence with reasonable safety. Articles that make significant reference

to the structural factors that inhibit the termination of violent relationships,

without making positive reference to the usefulness of BWS, narrate a feminist

jurisprudence explanation.

The feminist jurisprudence model fits squarely within the violence against

women perspective. Therefore, the model rejects the use of BWS as a viable legal

defense due to the stigmatizing effect and the inapplicability of BWS to women who

do not manifest symptoms of PTSD. Rather, the feminist jurisprudence model

explains the battered woman who kills as legally justified because she is a rational

individual who defended herself under reasonable life-threatening circumstances. In

addition, the battered woman who kills is not a static singular type person. Feminist

jurisprudent writers often emphasize simultaneously the individualized, contextu-

alized and subjective aspects to killing in self-defense [27, 47].

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Early Legal Feminism Model

The fourth typification model, we call early legal feminism, articulated a complex stance that draws on aspects of both the medical and the feminist jurisprudence

models. This model (formally recognized as BWS defense) is readily accepted

throughout U.S. courtrooms [17]. While the model supports the use of BWS in

legally defending the battered woman who kills, it argues that the act of killing an

abusive spouse is both rational and justified, and therefore, not excusable on the grounds of reasonable insanity [47]. Early legal feminists such as Walker [17, 53]

and advocate defense attorneys argue that any rational person in the same situation

as the battered woman who kills would reasonably experience BWS and ultimately

find the seemingly irrational and unreasonable act of killing necessary to defend

themselves and/or their children. Under this narrative, battered women exhibiting

mental instability are, in fact, reasonable and therefore justified. The battered woman who kills is a reasonable abused woman, and should be legally judged and

tried on abused woman standards, and more specifically, BWS standards. Articles

utilizing an early legal feminist explanation will initiate positive uses of BWS.

Claims makers of this model are aligned with the medical model proponents in

that they explain BWS as viable partial supporting evidence of self-defense [11, 18,

21, 30, 47–49]. However, we found early legal feminists to disagree with the view

that the battered woman who kills is irrational or unreasonable, which also aligns

these claims makers with the feminist jurisprudence model. This model seems to be

a hybrid of the family violence and violence against women perspectives. It explains

the battered woman who kills as reasonable and acting in justifiable self-defense.

Each of these four typifications promote distinct ideological positions on the

causes of domestic violence, the nature of women’s position in society, and the role

of rational choice in battered women’s decisions. They also offer different grounds

for the acquittal of female defendants in criminal trials. In order to establish the

relative use of these four different media frames in constructing the social problem

of the battered woman who kills, we employed a social constructionist approach to

track media discourse over time [1, 8, 9, 36, 63].

Methods

In this study, we tracked the discourse on the battered women who kill in major U.S.

and Canadian newspapers using a mixed methods approach. Our qualitative analysis

of typifications presented in media narratives involved the ‘‘search for underlying

meanings, patterns, and processes’’ [1, p. 290], which requires the researcher to

make evaluative judgments based on a holistic appraisal of an entire newspaper

article. This precludes the full delegation of coding to computerized content analysis

programs that only count words and phrases. The researcher must make qualitative

judgments about the overall meaning of the article, rather than simply counting the

number of times a particular word or phrase appears and using that as a basis for

determining meaning. We relied on the four pre-identified typifications discussed

above in our coding of media explanations for why the battered woman kills. One

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typification promotes excuse-based defenses (medical model), two offer justifica-

tions (feminist jurisprudence and early legal feminism), and one argues that battered

women are criminally responsible for their actions unless clear evidence supporting

the traditional self-defense doctrine exists (conventional rational). Our quantitative

analysis included univariate statistical analyses of study variables. All qualitative

analysis was conducted using the computer software CI-SAID and all quantitative

analysis was conducted with SPSS10.

Data on the typification of the battered woman who kills in newspaper articles

were obtained through two sources: the ‘‘popular’’ internet-based newspaper index

file of LexisNexis, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post paper indexes. We used the LexisNexis Academic online database (Nexis) allowing us to

gather articles from popular major newspapers in a single search. Utilizing a single

search engine facilitated the tracking of discourse [1, 33]. We decided to search

articles through Nexis as it contains most North American popular newspapers. In

September 2002, we first conducted key word searches in Nexis for articles that

included the terms ‘‘battered woman syndrome’’ and/or ‘‘battered woman’’

anywhere in the article (headlines, text, and photo captions). The articles retrieved

were those covering trials and appellate court cases (including clemency cases) on

murdered abusive husbands and spouses, and excluded fictional stories and

coverage of political changes related to domestic violence. We identified over 600

articles using these two search terms. After the exclusion of articles written in

foreign (non-US and non-Canadian) newspapers, articles that covered victims other

than the defendants’ abusive male spouse or boyfriend, and duplicate stories (wire

services), our dataset consisted of 212 articles published between 1981 and 2002.

In June 2004, we ran the same searches in Nexis for only The New York Times and The Washington Post, the two most popular major newspapers that year. We ran a second search in Nexis in an attempt to draw out more articles that may have been

missed in the first phase of data collection, using the additional subject words,

‘‘domestic violence,’’ ‘‘battered woman,’’ and ‘‘battered spouse.’’ This did not

provide any new articles. We then collected 38 additional articles (8 from The Washington Post and 33 from The New York Times) through paper index searches. These additional articles bolstered our understanding of the discourse around

women who killed their abusers by providing articles that do not include the

keywords ‘‘battered woman’’ and ‘‘battered woman syndrome’’ in our sample. The

complete dataset consisted of 250 articles published from 1978 to 2002.

Newspaper articles provide an important insight into the portrayal of groups of

people and into the public’s definitions and understandings of acts of deviance that

are not necessarily reflective of the criminal justice system’s theories of defendants

[8, 36, 52, 61]. Each article was analyzed and information on discourse was

extracted by qualitatively coding supportive and unsupportive statements within an

article for each typification (see Table 2). Used was an assessment of supportive and

unsupportive statements to code the entire article as representing one of the four

typifications based on the overall theme. The article frequently closed with a

restatement of the dominant theme, but even without this summary statement, the

emphasis of the article with respect to our four typifications was clear. For this

study, there was a principle coder. The principle coder and another researcher on the

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project utilized the same coding scheme on the same randomly selected articles and

coded independently. The two then compared and discussed coding decisions to

revise and finalize the coding scheme, which was then used to analyze the entire

sample by the principle coder.

Table 2 provides an illustration of how we coded each article and presents the

coding necessary for an article to represent a typification. 1

In addition to typification

variables, we coded for quotes by, and references to, claims makers. As Lowney and

Best [36] found, the most prevalent typifications depended on the dominant claims

makers at a particular time. For example, if a reporter did not interview feminist

legal scholars for a particular article because the reporter deemed the views of such

scholars as unconventional at the time of trial, the likelihood of a feminist

perspective being represented in the final article diminishes. Therefore, we recorded

who was being quoted and to what extent.

In a small number of cases, it was not immediately apparent how to code an

article. For example, we drew an inference about the typification when an article

only reported the conviction of a woman for killing her batterer and did not report

opinions, interviews or professional sources. We coded these articles as taking a

conventional rationality view since the reports did not provide statements of either

justification or excuse. More importantly, such articles gave the impression that a

conviction was appropriate by omitting alternative views and by not referring to any

claims makers. There were also articles that attempted to achieve balance by

presenting more than one stance. We categorized these articles as ‘‘uncodable’’,

which we operationalized as the achievement of objectivity, not typifying women

who kill in any specific manner, not heavily quoting a particular group of claims

makers, and not presenting a single view at greater length. 2

Table 2 Typification model coding scheme

Typification

model

Variable

Battered woman

medicalized

Battered woman

criminalized

Battered

woman

excused

Battered

woman

justified

BWS as legal

evidence

Medical Supportive Unsupportive Supportive Unsupportive Supportive

Conventional

rationality

Unsupportive Supportive Unsupportive Unsupportive Unsupportive

Feminist

jurisprudence

Unsupportive Unsupportive Unsupportive Supportive Unsupportive

Early legal

feminism

Unsupportive Unsupportive Unsupportive Supportive Supportive

1 Please contact the first author for statistical results on support variables.

2 Un-coded articles account for about 10% of the relevant articles. These 21 articles, while an interesting

counterpoint to the themed articles, were not included in the results and reported here. They were deemed

irrelevant to the discussion of typified views.

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Results

Media Patterns I: A Shift in Dominant Accounts

Figures 1 and 2 present one set of results of newspapers’ usage of typifications to

frame the issue of the battered woman who kills. Figure 1 illustrates the publication

trend in articles covering women who kill their abuser. Due to the low frequency,

thus lack of dominance, of both feminist jurisprudent and early legal feminist

articles in our sample, we grouped their frequencies together in Fig. 1. Most of the

articles (n = 86) were published between 1993 and 1997, and then the popularity of the story appears to drop into the 2000s. According to our analysis, the dominance

of the medical model in major newspaper articles occurred during the early half of

the 1990s. Figure 2 illustrates the shift from the medical model to the conventional

rationality model after 1994. 3

Our analysis indicates that a medicalized understanding of abused women who kill

was the most frequently used, with 98 articles coded as portraying a medical model (see

also Table 3). In other words, 38.7% of all articles in our sample portray the battered

woman who kills as irrational or insane and frame her behavior as the product of BWS,

PTSD or a related psychological pathology. For example, Ohio Governor Celeste was

quoted in a New York Times article as saying, ‘‘These women were entrapped emotionally and physically… they loved these men even though they beat and feared them. They were so emotionally entangled they were incapable of walking away’’ [65].

The second most frequent typification is the conventional rationality model, with

74 articles or 30.4% of our sample of articles. The model supports the notion of

BWS as ‘‘a license for retribution’’ [10], allowing women to be ‘‘getting away with

murder’’ [44], and that the battered woman ‘‘kills for vengeance’’ [15], not self-

defense. As mentioned, this typification portrays battered women who kill as

rational manipulative cold-blooded killers. This account rejects the medical model

and claims that such women are bad, not mad. Together, the medical and

conventional rationality typifications account for almost 70% of all articles in our

sample. Typifications based on the feminist jurisprudence (N = 55; 21.7%) and the early legal feminism (N = 23; 9.1%) models appear less frequently. Articles giving weight to statements such as ‘‘… although she was sane at the time of the killing and knew exactly what she was doing, she is free of any wrongdoing’’ [39] or ‘‘Many

women now in prison might not be there if they had been able to claim battered

woman’s syndrome’’ [51] accounted for less than one-third of the accounts.

Media Patterns II: Claims Makers Contribute to Article Accounts

Importantly, quotes by psychologists represent 56% of the total 185 quotes in our

sample. This is not surprising, as psychologists were well known claims makers of

3 We chose a 1990–1994 categorization based on some high profile media stories that took place those

years, such as Ohio Governor Richard Celeste’s highly publicized move to grant 25 battered women

clemency in 1990 and O. J. Simpson’s murder trial in 1994. These stories represent focusing events, which Kingdon [32] refers to as a crisis or disaster that calls attention to a previously unperceived

problem.

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the medical model. One psychologist was quoted describing a defendant during

testimony as ‘‘[having] received a dreadful upbringing and had not the opportunities

to develop a normal personality’’ [4]. Our findings also demonstrate that quotes

from psychologists account for much less space in the non-medical model articles.

For example, a psychologist was quoted only once among the 55 articles that

promoted the feminist jurisprudence model (see Table 3).

Table 3 also displays the frequency of claims maker quotes within each

typification model. Based on the ‘‘balance norm’’ [25, p. 8], the responsibility of

reporters to provide a balance in points of view when the topic at hand is

controversial and complex [24], quotes from various claims makers (e.g.,

prosecutors and defense attorneys) should appear at roughly the same frequency.

Instead, as Table 3 illustrates, we found important imbalances by typification

model. Of the 54 claims makers quoted in medicalized accounts, most frequently

quoted are defense attorneys (N = 16), accounting for 30% of the quotes. For example, a lawyer was quoted as saying, ‘‘But the person doing the perceiving in all

this [a reasonable belief that a danger was imminent] had long been thought to be a

healthy adult man, like the gunfighter walking over to the O. K. Corral’’ (emphasis added) [58]. These were followed closely by psychologists (N = 14; 26%). Then quoted to a lesser extent are defendants (N = 10; 19%) and women’s advocates

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

1990-1994 1995-1999

Year

Medical Conventional Rational

Fig. 2 Shift in dominant article frequencies by typification model (1990–1999)

Fig. 1 Article frequencies by typification model (1978–2002)

Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130 121

123

T a b

le 3

F re

q u e n c y

o f

c la

im s

m a k e rs

q u o te

d b y

a rt

ic le

T y p ifi

c a ti

o n

n (a

rt ic

le s)

C la

im s

m a k

e r

P sy

c h

o lo

g is

t A

tt o

rn e y

D e fe

n d

a n

t A

d v

o c a te

P ro

se c u to

r P

o li

ti c ia

n O

th e rs

A ll

M e d

ic a l

9 8

1 4

1 6

1 0

8 1

1 4

5 4

(2 6

% )

(3 0

) (1

9 )

(1 5

) (2

) (.

0 2

) (7

)

(5 6

% )

(3 6

) (3

0 )

(2 8

) (7

) (.

0 8

) (1

7 )

C o

n v

e n

ti o

n a l

ra ti

o n

a l

7 4

4 1

5 1

3 3

9 1

1 1

5 6

(7 )

(2 7

) (2

3 )

(5 )

(1 6

) (2

) (2

0 )

(1 6

) (3

4 )

(3 9

) (1

0 )

(6 0

) (8

) (4

6 )

F e m

in is

t ju

ri sp

ru d e n

c e

5 5

1 9

7 7

3 4

8 3

9

(3 )

(2 3

) (1

8 )

(1 8

) (8

) (1

0 )

(2 1

)

(4 )

(2 0

) (2

1 )

(2 4

) (2

0 )

(3 1

) (3

3 )

E a rl

y le

g a l

fe m

in is

m 2

3 6

4 3

1 1

2 7

1 3

4

(1 8

) (1

2 )

(9 )

(3 2

) (6

) (2

1 )

(3 )

(2 4

) (9

) (9

) (3

8 )

(1 3

) (5

4 )

(4 0

)

T o

ta l

2 5

0 2

5 4

4 3

3 2

9 1

5 1

3 2

4 1

8 5

122 Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130

123

(N = 8; 15%). One advocate was quoted in Newsday [60] as having said, ‘‘I find it [a maximum sentence for manslaughter] entirely consistent with a legal system that

is firmly based on the concept that men should have, and do have, the right to

control women.’’ Rarely quoted are politicians, prosecutors, and ‘‘others’’ (third

parties to the case, judges, police, jurors, and witnesses), who are much less likely to

make reliable and supporting claims of the medical model. Presuming that claims

makers of each group are available to offer statements for each story/article, the

selection of some types of claims makers, but not others, suggests that members of the media may rely on a particular ‘‘angle’’ or ‘‘frame’’ to construct their accounts

[61], rather than attempting to provide an objective or ‘‘balanced’’ report of

incidents when a battered woman kills.

Contrary to our expectations that articles use claims makers to support a

particular angle, prosecutors were not the most frequently quoted within the

conventional rationality model articles. In fact, prosecutors represented only 15

quotes in all 250 articles. Of these 15 citations, however, 60% appear in articles

advancing the conventional rationality typification, which however, we expected—

‘‘Whatever the past, it is no reason to kill someone… There is no justification for any of us to take another life because fate dealt us an unhappy existence’’ [4].

Quotes made by defense attorneys (n = 16; 26%) and defendants (n = 14; 23%) appeared most frequently in the articles promoting conventional rationality. After

reviewing the content of the 74 articles, we found that prosecutors’ statements were

not important to constructing conventional rationality models. For example, nearly

two-thirds of the articles (48 articles) reported that the woman had already been

convicted, which appeared to reduce the need to interview the prosecutor. In 13

articles, the women were charged, not convicted, and in the remaining 35 articles,

the women were found not guilty, engaged in an appellate case after having been

found guilty, or were receiving clemency. Of the 56 quotes in conventional

rationality articles, 11 were made by third parties to the case. That is judges, police,

jurors and witnesses (Other). We found that these quotes often contradicted the

defendant’s claims within the same articles and bolstered the portrayal of the

defendant as lying, devious, and manipulative by, for example, drawing on previous

criminal activities or violent acts on the victim by the defendant—in short, that she

is ‘‘bad’’ and deserving of punishment, rather than a victim of a mental illness, or a

rational actor who has engaged in justifiable self-defense.

Recall that medicalized accounts offer the ‘excuse’ that battered women who kill

deserve reduced or no punishment, because of a PTSD-like syndrome such as

‘‘learned helplessness’’ [50], while conventional rationality accounts portray such

women as scheming, manipulative killers deserving of a guilty verdict. Feminist

jurisprudence disagrees with both images. There were only 39 quotes in these 55

articles. None of the claims maker groups comprises a clear majority, although

defense attorneys (N = 9; 23%), ‘‘others’’ (N = 8; 21%), defendants (N = 7; 18%), and women’s advocates (N = 7; 18%) account for roughly the same proportion of quotes. Although uncommon, a defendant quotation in an article narrating the

feminist jurisprudence model went as follows, ‘‘I just want to tell them that I went to

all the right people and they turned me away. My intent was not to kill my husband.

Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130 123

123

My intent was to get help’’ [51].Quotes by politicians, psychologists and prosecutors

were less frequent.

Early legal feminist articles contained the fewest quotes. Unlike feminist

jurisprudence, early legal feminism makes use of BWS, but views the battered

woman who kills as justified in her actions based on reasonable self-defense rather

than using an excuse of irrational behavior based on insanity. Women’s advocates

(N = 11; 32%) and politicians (N = 7; 21%) comprise the two most frequently quoted groups. In fact, 54% of all politicians quoted appear in articles promoting an

early legal feminist model. Rarely quoted were legal actors, such as judges, defense

attorneys and prosecutors. These articles appeared to rely on the viewpoints of

individuals uninvolved in the incident or case at hand. It was more common to find

feminist jurisprudent and early legal feminist articles discussing the ethical issues

behind trying cases in general, rather than a specific case.

Discussion: The Medical and the Conventional Rationality Models Prevail

Although we are unable to determine whether shifts in media patterns were a cause

or consequence of social changes, the timing of such shifts seemed to parallel a

number of important events [3]. For example, the Ohio Clemency in 1990 and the

O.J. Simpson trial in 1994 are possible focusing events ([32], see footnote 3) that

coincide with the increase in medical model articles and then the dominance of

conventional rationality model articles. According to Gagne [23], Ohio Governor

Richard Celeste’s acceptance and implementation of expert testimony on BWS into

Ohio’s criminal justice system in August 1990 ignited a political reaction including

legislative changes in thirteen states (spanning over 8 years) and the Ohio Clemency

in December 1990. This action occurred in the aftermath of high profile cases, such

as the Hedda Nussbaum/Joel Steinberg trial of 1989, which drew widespread

attention to BWS and kindled an intense public debate [31]. Many legislative

changes at this time were based on the medical model, representing the value in

objective science and using qualified professional observation to assess the mental

state of the battered woman, and were reflected in the media cycle that promoted the

medical model typification.

In 1994, Lenore Walker—the psychologist who coined the term Battered Woman

Syndrome—agreed to testify on behalf of O. J. Simpson. Walker testified that

Nicole Brown did not fit the battered woman profile, and thus, was not a battered

woman. Shortly after this focusing event in the news media, the legitimacy of BWS

was publicly discredited by prosecutors, defendant advocates and legal feminists,

marking the diminished focus on policy change in response to the criminal justice

problem ([19], see also the effects of the Simpson trial on attitudes towards BWS

and expert testimony in [42]).

Focusing events are one part of media patterns that often coincide with swift

shifts in dominant typifications. Claims makers, however, are used in media

accounts to establish a frame or typified account. Through the medicalization of

deviance, claims makers have been found to make moral judgments in both the

‘‘technical language of the profession and [in] popular moral meanings’’

[35, p. 220]. BWS experts, for example, typify battered women as lacking control

124 Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130

123

over their lives and in need of counseling. Our findings support this research. While

the medicalized typification maintains a visible presence, there is also a competing

frame, expressed in the conventional rationality articles, that women are ‘getting

away with murder’, and sometimes by ‘using BWS’. These articles promote a

criminalization of battered women who kill their abusers.

The constructionist perspective has demonstrated that well-established typifica-

tions provide a foundation for building the credibility of an emerging perspective on

a social problem [32, 36]. Lowney and Best [36] refer to these typifications as

cultural resources. As a case in point, the medical model developed from the already-established battered woman’s movement, although the movement itself did

not support the medicalization of the battered woman who kills [27]. The medical

model explanation, rather than the battered woman’s movement explanation, moved

forward and dominated public understanding due to it being a cultural resource. The

notion of the battered woman as a victim was familiar and generally accepted in

both legal and public forums. Arguably, the classification of BWS as a subcategory

of a medical diagnosis, PTSD, also helped to bolster the credibility of the syndrome.

Nicolson [46] found that the legal system tends to portray battered women

defendants as either mad or bad (as we also found in newspapers). These traditional

discourses are imparted across various media types [14, 28]. To cite one example,

the idea that a woman would kill her husband for his life insurance is a common

sense explanation. In this context, ‘‘bad’’ women marry for money, and not for love.

Both the medical and the conventional rationality models reinforce traditional

perceptions of women, excluding the idea that women may kill in rational and

reasonable self-defense.

The favoring of certain typifications over others is evident in the greater

proportion of citations from claims makers who support the two dominant views

(see Table 3). For the most part, the popular press focuses on constructing the

battered woman discourse under the medical and conventional rationality models.

Ultimately, then, the popular press reinforces pre-established notions of women by

both medicalizing and criminalizing battered women who kill their abusers.

Medicalizing and criminalizing dominant typifications reflect individual-level explanations for women who kill their abusers. Ferraro [22], for example, discusses

the medical model as an ‘‘individual pathology model’’. In this model, the battered

woman is culpable (even if legally excused); the social system, which neglects to

educate the public about ‘‘terrorism in the family’’, is not at fault. The public

generally accepts individual-level models, because the traditional patriarchal

ideology of the social system has not been challenged [22], and because it

conforms to the accepted ‘‘common sense causality’’ [40] of murder.

The conventional rationality model also holds the woman responsible for her

actions. The public can easily grasp the long-standing tradition to focus on the

individual and to use something that is typified innately feminine to explain

something difficult to understand due to its typically unfeminine nature [57]. In

contrast, views held by legal feminists often challenge the status quo of gender

inequality. Moreover, their explanations tend to conflict with hegemonic ideals and

promote solutions that are difficult to implement in the existing social system.

Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130 125

123

Conclusion

The news portrayal of battered women who kill established this event as a serious

social problem, worthy of public attention and legal reform. We found that the

predominant social construction of battered women who kill was one of female

deviants; they were either mad or bad. Both the medical and conventional rationality

models held the battered woman culpable for her actions, while acquitting the social

system of any responsibility. The medical model sought to excuse the battered

woman who kills, thus mitigating her accountability, by focusing on her mental state

(rather than the history of abuse) to explain the nature of her actions leaving her

vulnerable to stigma and social control through the mental health system. The

conventional rationality model relied on traditional explanations of why one would

kill by reinforcing typified notions of women who kill as cold-blooded murderers.

Before discussing the possible implications of our findings, we must mention the

limitations to our results. First, our analysis focused on the majority of newspaper

articles that clearly expressed a dominant theme rather than the small group (10% of

articles) that evinced no clear theme. This presents a somewhat oversimplified

image of the articles and it is important to remember that at least some articles did

not fit neatly into our typologies. For this analysis, we focused on typified discourses

of the battered woman who kills and BWS as a typifying agent, which could

artificially homogenize our sample of newspaper articles. In addition, our research

question and thus our analysis did not investigate for the accuracy of news reporting

to actual rates of acquittals based on excused and justified imminent and non-

imminent self-defenses. This, however, would be an important contribution to the

understanding of the social constructions of the battered woman who kills within

news media. Finally, it may be that newspaper accounts of the battered woman who

kills may be constrained by the capacity and direction of case outcomes and the

theories used in the cases, which would mean that we are over-assuming the role of

the news media in socially constructing dominant typifications. Although we did not

gather a statistically representative sample of all newspaper articles covering

battered women who have killed from all major U.S. and Canadian newspapers, our

findings provide an example of how typified models of a particular gendered

phenomenon were used in popular newspapers. With these limitations in mind, we

highlight important findings regarding the dominant portrayals of battered women in

newspaper articles.

Our investigation reaffirms the constructionist view that claims of sensationalized

commonsense explanations shape depictions of crimes and criminals. These

depictions may have little to do with scientific knowledge, and more to do with

media concern over generating new angles on old stories in order to generate public

interest. This study also illustrates the co-ownership of definitions of social

problems and deviance by claims makers and newspapers. Although the claims of

all typification models were presented throughout the time period studied, the long

standing conventional rationality model was lastly the most prominent viewpoint in

newspaper reports. That finding, combined with the fact that the largest proportion

of articles promoted the medical model, suggests that successful claims makers are

those who present more sensationalized definitions without challenging traditional

126 Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130

123

notions of gender norms and roles. The dominant typifications of the battered

woman who kills as either a cold-blooded murderer or mentally ill not only make

for sensational news, they reinforce belittling ideal types and social attitudes

towards women and victims of domestic violence.

The two dominant typifications present more sensational stories than articles with

feminist jurisprudence and early legal feminism and they tend to avoid the complex

debate common in feminist circles over the reasonableness of self-defense. Similar

to previous investigations of the portrayal of domestic violence issues, such as by

Berns [7], the newspaper portrayals in this study focus on the actions of women and

narrowly construct a debate around how to define the actions of the battered woman

who kills. Focusing the reader’s attention on the question of why she did it marginalizes the structural and macro social issues surrounding gender inequality

and oppression. The medical and the conventional rationality models utilize societal

metanarratives, which provides easy understandings. To quote Berns, ‘‘as long as

these magazines continue to locate the victims’ experiences within a discourse that

silences the role of the abuser and of society, individuals will continue to not ask,

‘‘Why does he hit her?’’ or ‘‘Why does he get away with hitting her?’’ [6, p. 106]. Ultimately, a focus on claims promoted by the Feminist Jurisprudence Model

might be more beneficial to battered women and more appropriate given existing

social conditions, but this is not the current trend in media reports. This and previous

studies find that portrayals of battered women who kill continue to re-enforce

traditional views of women as either cold-blooded or irrational. Our findings suggest

that the feminist explanations require repackaging in ways that enact the three

factors influencing dominance in the media—simplicity, sensationalism and

conventionality—or thus, the typical portrayal of an abused woman who kills will

likely remain not one of reasonable self-defense, but rather the story of a woman

who is either mad or bad.

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Author Biographies

Marianne S. Noh received her doctorate in Sociology from the University of Akron in 2008. Since then, she has conducted research in HIV/AIDS and immigrant health at the Ontario HIV Treatment Network

and has taught as a Senior Lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Victoria. She is

co-editor of Korean Immigrants in Canada, expected to be released in October 2011. Currently, she is

researching the intersection of race and gender in the social construction of domestic violence.

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Matthew T. Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Conflict Management Fellow at the University of Akron. He is the co-author of A Sociological Study of the Great

Commandment in Pentecostalism: The Practice of Godly Love as Benevolent Service (2009, Edwin

Mellen Press) and the author of Crime on the Border: Immigration and Homicide in Urban Communities

(2003, LFB Scholarly). His work has appeared in journals such as Criminology, Social Problems, Social

Psychology Quarterly, and Sociological Quarterly. He is Vice-President of the Institute for Research on

Unlimited Love and his current research interests include altruism/love, immigration and crime, and

organizational deviance.

Kathryn M. Feltey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Conflict Management Fellow at the University of Akron. She is the gender section editor of the journal, Sociology Compass and

co-editor of a special issue of NWSA Journal, New Orleans: A Special Issue on Gender, the Meaning of

Place, and the Politics of Displacement (Fall 2008). Her current research interests include family poverty,

community responses to food insecurity, and 19th century pioneer families.

130 Gend. Issues (2010) 27:110–130

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