When Survival Becomes a Crime: Women Who Kill Abusive Partners and the Law
Updated: Sep 11
Domestic abuse is not always visible, and it is not always physical. ONS figures for year ending March 2025 estimate that 3.8 million people aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales. Young people aged 16 to 19 had the highest reported prevalence, and abuse was more commonly reported from a partner or ex-partner than from a family member. In Yorkshire and the Humber, police-recorded domestic abuse-related crime rates were the highest by region.
People aged 16+ experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales in the last year.
Of people aged 16 to 19 experienced domestic abuse — the highest age-rate.
Of people aged 16+ experienced domestic abuse by a partner or ex-partner, compared with 2.7% by a family member.
Until the 1970s, domestic violence was largely treated as a private matter, something that happened behind closed doors and was nobody else's business. The women's movement of that decade broke the silence. It opened refuges, named abuse for what it was, and raised a question the law is still struggling to answer: what happens when a woman who has been abused for years finally fights back?
Fifty years on, the scale of the problem is still stark. Around one in four women in England and Wales has experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16, and over the three years to March 2024, 178 women were killed by a male partner or ex-partner, which works out at more than one woman a week.
For some women, surviving means escaping. For others, it means fighting back. When that happens, the justice system does not always see a victim. Too often, it sees a murderer.
Why "just leave" is not that simple
Living with domestic abuse means living with fear. Physical injuries are only part of it. Abuse is also psychological: the constant watching, the walking on eggshells, and the sense of being trapped with no safe way out.
Some women cannot leave. They want to, but the abuser has made it close to impossible. He may control the money, sabotage her job or take her wages. He may have spent years gaslighting her until she doubts her own judgement. She may also know, rightly, that leaving is one of the most dangerous moments of all, because that is when many abusers become most violent.
Even for women who do get out, leaving is not a single act. It is closer to a full-time job. There are family and criminal court hearings and court bundles to prepare. There are debts and creditors to deal with and new bank accounts to open. There is a new home to find, which means either hostels or calls to the council and flat viewings. There are Jobcentre appointments, benefit claims and child maintenance to sort out. There are medical appointments and counselling to attend, new ID to apply for, and children to move to new schools and settle into new childcare. All of this lands on someone carrying years of trauma. It is harder still for women facing language barriers, poverty or poor mental health after long-term coercive control.
Without the right support, survivors are left isolated, financially unstable and at real risk of returning to the abuser. That is why some women stay. And for a small number, the only way out they can see is to fight back.
Coercive control: the abuse you cannot always see
In England and Wales, coercive or controlling behaviour only became a criminal offence at the end of 2015. Scotland and Northern Ireland have since introduced their own laws. Before then, if there were no visible injuries, there was often no case to answer.
Coercive control is about power over every part of someone's life. It can mean controlling her money, where she goes and even what she wears. It usually means slowly cutting her off from friends, family and anyone who might help. Over time it wears away her sense of self until she feels trapped, worthless and afraid. Survivors often describe it as living in a cage where the door is technically open, but walking through it feels impossible.
Fear that does not leave
The fear does not always end when the relationship does. Many survivors live with hypervigilance. They are constantly on edge and scanning for danger, and an ordinary noise, habit or change in routine can feel like a threat.
"I always knew I'd be hit when he locked the doors. Now, if anyone shuts a door in my house, I feel sick. I've taken every door off downstairs—because I can't stand the sound of them shutting."
Hypervigilance can look like avoiding closed doors or small spaces, jumping at loud noises or sudden movements, or having flashbacks set off by a smell or a phrase. It can mean struggling to sleep even in your own home. It can mean keeping everything rigidly in order as a way of feeling in control, avoiding people and places from the past, or constantly apologising and explaining yourself. These are not weaknesses. They are survival instincts shaped by years of fear. Healing often means changing your space and your habits just to feel safe again.
The shame that is not yours to carry
Survivors are often left frightened and also ashamed: of how they look, how they behave and how other people see them.
"I wasn't just scared—I was embarrassed. I looked rough, sleep-deprived, bruised. And I could feel people judging me. My own sister told me to pull myself together. But I was holding myself together in every way I knew how."
Sometimes even family members turn away, unable or unwilling to understand. But the shame belongs to the abuser, not the survivor. Getting through something designed to break you takes a kind of strength most people will never have to find.
What is Battered Woman Syndrome?
The term comes from the American psychologist Lenore Walker, whose book The Battered Woman was published in 1979. It describes how long-term abuse changes the way a person thinks, feels and reacts. Some women dissociate during attacks and feel disconnected from what is happening. Some develop what Walker called learned helplessness, the belief that nothing they do will ever let them escape. Some, after years of terror, come to believe that the only way to survive is to use force themselves.
Walker described the syndrome as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is not a standalone diagnosis in either of the main psychiatric manuals, so in UK courts expert evidence is usually given in terms of PTSD, complex PTSD or depression. That matters, because at trial the question is not whether a woman was abused. It is whether the law has room for what the abuse did to her.
How the law treats women who kill abusive partners
In England and Wales, a woman in this position has three main legal routes, and they work very differently.
The first is self-defence, which leads to a full acquittal if it succeeds. The jury considers two questions: did she believe, or might she have believed, that force was needed to protect herself, and was the force she used reasonable in the circumstances as she believed them to be? Once self-defence is raised, it is for the prosecution to disprove it, not for the woman to prove it. There is no strict rule that the threat must be immediate. But the further the killing is from an attack, the harder it is to persuade a jury that force was necessary. That is the central problem for women who kill when the abuser is asleep or has turned away, even though the danger they live with has not ended. Campaigners have pushed for the "householder defence", which allows disproportionate force against intruders at home, to be extended to women who kill their abusers.
The second is loss of control, introduced by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 to replace the old defence of provocation. Provocation required a "sudden and temporary" loss of self-control, which fitted a man lashing out in anger far better than a woman reacting after years of fear. The new defence no longer requires the loss of control to be sudden, and it allows fear of serious violence to count as a trigger. It also states that sexual infidelity on its own cannot be relied on. If it succeeds, murder is reduced to manslaughter.
The third is diminished responsibility, also reformed in 2009. The defence must show, on the balance of probabilities, that the woman had a recognised medical condition that substantially impaired her ability to understand what she was doing, form a rational judgement or exercise self-control, and that this helps explain the killing. This is where evidence of trauma most often comes in. It also reduces murder to manslaughter, so even when it succeeds a woman can still face prison.
Real women, real cases
Sara Thornton killed her violent husband in 1989 and was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in 1990. Her first appeal failed. After years of campaigning, the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial, and in 1996 she was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and released, having already served her sentence.
Kiranjit Ahluwalia endured around ten years of violence from her husband before setting fire to him in 1989. She was convicted of murder, but in 1992 the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction on fresh psychiatric evidence. At her retrial she pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and walked free, having already served more than three years. Her case and Sara Thornton's became central to the argument that the old provocation defence failed abused women.
Sally Challen killed her husband Richard in 2010 after decades of controlling behaviour and was convicted of murder in 2011. In 2019 the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction on fresh evidence, including evidence about coercive control. The prosecution then accepted her plea to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and she was released. Her case became a landmark for recognising coercive control in the courts.
Emma-Jayne Magson stabbed her partner James Knight in Leicester in 2016 and was convicted of murder. That conviction was quashed on fresh psychiatric evidence and a retrial ordered, but in 2021 a jury convicted her of murder again by a 10 to 2 majority. Her appeal was dismissed in 2022, and she is serving life with a minimum term of 17 years. Her case is also contested. She said Knight had her by the throat when she stabbed him, and campaigners supported her. However, the sentencing judge found that she had been responsible for most of the physical violence in the relationship, and the Court of Appeal ruled that finding was open to him. Cases like hers show how hard these trials are to call, and how much depends on whose account a jury believes.
The double standard
Critics have long argued that the courts judge men and women who kill differently. Men who killed in jealousy or rage were often described as having "lost control", while women who killed out of fear were described as calculating. The 2009 reforms tried to correct this, but the 2023 Wade Review suggested that women defendants are less successful with these defences than men. Women with previous convictions, drug or alcohol problems, or who do not fit the picture of a passive, blameless victim face a steeper climb still. Society still struggles to accept that a woman can be both a victim and an offender. gov
What other countries do
In 1990, Canada's Supreme Court accepted expert evidence on Battered Woman Syndrome in self-defence cases in R v Lavallée, helping juries understand why a woman might believe she was in danger even when she was not under attack at that moment. Several US states allow similar expert evidence. In Australia, Victoria's law now recognises that where family violence is involved, a person may believe force is necessary even when the harm is not immediate. Queensland has a partial defence for people who kill to preserve themselves in an abusive domestic relationship.
What needs to change
Progress has been made, but it is not enough. Following Clare Wade KC's review of sentencing in domestic homicides, the Law Commission began looking at the defences available to abuse victims who kill, and that work now sits inside a wider review of homicide law requested by the Ministry of Justice in December 2024.
Kulturalism wants that review to deliver three things. The law on self-defence and the partial defences must properly reflect coercive control and long-term abuse, including the reality that the danger does not stop when the abuser falls asleep. Police must be trained to recognise abuse earlier and to offer real protection. And refuges, legal aid and trauma support must be easier to reach, so that fewer women ever reach the point where fighting back feels like the only option. Survivors should not have to fight for justice after fighting for their lives.
Finding hope and breaking the cycle
It is easy to feel hopeless reading about these cases, but change is happening. More survivors are speaking out. Charities and grassroots campaigns such as Justice for Women are pushing for reform, and public understanding of coercive control has grown enormously. The goal is not only to help women who have already killed their abusers. It is to make sure no woman ever has to choose between staying in a violent home and risking prison to survive.
Why we work with men too
Preventing domestic abuse is not only about supporting survivors. It also means tackling harmful behaviour before it escalates, and that means talking to men early, honestly and directly. Through our HE Voice initiative, we show young men what prison is really like: not a badge of honour, but a life of restriction, surveillance and psychological strain. We make clear that abusive behaviour can lead to arrest, prosecution and prison, especially where there are threats, coercion or violence. And we make clear that change starts with taking responsibility and understanding the damage violence does, both to the people on the receiving end and to the men who inflict it.
We are not just warning young men. We are showing them a way forward, because men need to be part of this conversation as active participants in preventing abuse, not as bystanders.
You are not alone
SHE Voice exists to remind you that your story matters, your safety matters and your healing is valid. Every step counts, even if today that step is just getting through the day.
Explore our resources or get in touch through our SHE Voice page. If you are in immediate danger, call 999. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is free and open 24 hours a day on 0808 2000 247.
References
McColgan, A. (1993). In defence of battered women who kill. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 13(4), 508–529. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/13.4.508
Smith, A. (2005). The "Monster" in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators. Suffolk University Law Review, 38(2), 367–394. Available at https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/219/
R v Magson [2022] EWCA Crim 1064. Read the judgment at https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/R-v-Magson-202102271-Final.pdf
Office for National Statistics (2025). Domestic abuse victim characteristics, England and Wales: year ending March 2025.
Law Commission. Defences for victims of domestic abuse who kill their abusers, now part of the Homicide Law review. https://lawcom.gov.uk/project/defences-for-victims-of-domestic-abuse-who-kill-their-abusers
Coroners and Justice Act 2009, Part 2. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/part/2
Emma Jayne Magson - Read the appeal here R v Magson Appeal - 2021
McColgan, A. (1993). In defence of battered women who kill. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 13(4), 508-529. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/13.4.508