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Battered Women
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Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill and How Society Responds is a disturbing book based on true stories and trials of women who have been brutally beaten and abused, verbally, sexually, physically, and emotionally. This book is written by Lenore E. Walker. She is a psychologist who has testified as an expert witness in the trials in the book where women have murdered their abusive husbands or boyfriends. The book exposes the extent of domestic abuse, and how society and the system respond to the actions caused by this abuse. The book is divided into three sections which all combined contain fifteen chapters. The first section of the book is called “Cheating Their Destinies”. This section explains how the battering cycle can begin and explains that many of these terrified women kill their abusers to avoid being killed themselves. It explains how helpless these abused women can become to avoid being beaten or killed. They give into these men until they cannot take the abuse anymore, and out of fear or self-defense kill their men. This is all illustrated in the second chapter, which is titled “Joyce Hawthorne’s Story”. This was a story about a woman named Joyce and her husband, Aubrey, who abused her as well as her five children. Joyce often felt she had to “walk on eggshells” and never knew what Aubrey was going to do next. Nothing she ever did seemed to please him. Sometimes Aubrey beat Joyce so bad she needed medical attention. Joyce was too ashamed to go to the doctor and show people what he had done to her. She felt incapable of leaving him. One night she sensed a feeling that this was going to be the night he was going to kill her. She loaded a handgun and put it on her nightstand out of fear. Later on Aubrey woke up and demanded sex from her. She refused, and Aubrey reached for a gun, and then Joyce’s mind went blank.
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