Next Time, She'll Be Dead
Battering and How to Stop It
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“Whether you’re an individual woman looking for help or a reader looking for the truth about the thousands of women who are battered by the men they live with, Next Time, She’ll Be Dead is the one book you should read.” —Gloria Steinem
At least 1 in 4 women will be abused during her lifetime—that is 25% of our mothers, daughters, sisters, partners, and friends. Thousands will be killed. As author Ann Jones observes, despite its devastation battering is regarded not as a serious crime, but instead as an inevitable “problem” blandly labeled “domestic violence.” Stories of household assaults and murders are all over the news, but the blame is usually pinned on the woman who is said to have either provoked the attack or failed to “leave.” In this groundbreaking book, Jones points instead to the many factors in society that promote, trivialize, and perpetuate brutality against women: from popular psychology, academic “expertise,” mass media, and pop culture, to the criminal justice system and the law itself.
Delving deep into the history, legality, and personal politics of male violence against wives and girlfriends, Next Time, She’ll Be Dead fearlessly reframes the issue. This critically acclaimed masterwork offers productive ways of thinking and speaking about battering and explains what must be done to stop it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Significant and depressing, this study by the author of Women Who Kill brings home as few others have the number of women who are battered and the virtually insuperable obstacles they face trying to combat abuse. We learn that more than a million American women are battered each year, most by husbands or boyfriends, who are also likely to hit children in the home as well. The police, according to Jones, are unsympathetic to battered women, whom they regard as partly, if not entirely, responsible for the attacks they suffer. In the most shocking sections of the book, Jones asserts that there is an entrenched misogyny in the legal system; she cites the sentence of a man who shot his wife in the head (where the bullet is still lodged) to three months while, later, she was sentenced to life because, after being threatened repeatedly, she hired a man to kill her husband. As Jones so succinctly puts it, ``battered women are battered once again by the law.'' She devotes a chapter to suggested remedies. First serial to Mirabella and Glamour.
