LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Battered Women: Victims
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Some battered women are held prisoner in their own homes. Assailants use psychological terrorism and abuse to break down the victims' will to resist and bring them under control. A worthwhile model is the "Stockholm Syndrome", which describes how those who are taken hostage begin to identify with, become attached to, and take the side of their captors as survival reactions to life-threatening situations. Batterers employ knowledge gained in an intimate relationship to attack the woman's spirit, her sense of self worth and ... her ability to resist. Sexual abuse and domination are particularly degrading to the spirit and weaken the capacity to resist. Torture and murder of pets - particularly those special to the woman - is also not unusual.
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Women in the sex industry are often treated with prejudice by the judicial system. In Erie, Pennsylvania a judge sentenced a woman to 1 to 2 years in prison, even though he acknowledged that she was defending herself from an attack. A man sexually assaulted a topless dancer in a club, then followed her outside and down the street, where he attacked her again. She kicked him in the head, breaking his jaw.. The perpetrator portrayed himself as the victim of a crime. A jury found the woman guilty of assault and said she must pay the attacker's $13,000 medical bill.
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Most of the danger of injustice to battered women comes from application of the self-defense instruction. For example, the instruction says that a person must not kill to protect herself from minor injury. In determining the degree to which the injury the woman faced at the hands of her batterer was minor, a judge or jury may or may not know that abused women are exquisitely attuned to subtle actions, movements, and threats by a batterer. An action on the part of the deceased batterer which might seem minor to the judge may, because of the victim's prior conduct, alert the woman that there is much worse harm to come. Subtle actions which may not signify danger to an outsider may be known to a woman as a sign that she is in great danger. Some courts have recognized these unique perceptive abilities among survivors of battering.
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The depression, guilt, and low self–esteem observed in some battered women are often by–products of the ineffective, disempowering responses from the people to whom victims turn for help. [91] For such women, battered by the system, as well as their partners, it will be harder to escape again, [92] although many do. [93] They reasonably fear the unsympathetic and ignorant attitudes they know they will encounter. [94] Still worse, some women may internalize the demeaning attitudes of others. [95] When this happens, outsiders have played right into the batterer's hands. They have aided and abetted him in blaming the victim, in isolating her, and in impeding her escape.
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There are many reasons why battered women appear to be at elevated risk for retaliatory violence. Most other victims of violent crime are not in relationship with the defendant and are not living with (or did not formerly reside with) the defendant. Most have not previously suffered attacks or sustained injury at the hands of the defendant. Most have not been held hostage by the defendant or experienced his terroristic threats, targeted graphically at the victim or members of her family. Most other victim-witnesses are not economically dependent upon the defendant during the pendency of prosecution and, potentially, thereafter. Most will not be compelled into continuing contact with the defendant during the criminal process and after disposition because of shared parenthood.
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Even today... there remain systemic impediments to battered women seeking to flee their assailants. For example, in Michigan, a significant number of counties retain practices which commonly discourage prosecution, such as: requiring the victim to sign the complaint, requiring a "cooling off" period, requiring corroboration of the victim's account, and issuing peace bonds. 26 Police officers sometimes fail to prepare reports and collect evidence which would enable the prosecutor to charge and try the batterer without the survivor's participation as a witness. And prosecutors in many counties still routinely dismiss criminal cases at trial when the survivor does not appear, rather than trying those cases with other evidence.
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