Intimate Partner Femicide : Contesting the Legal Story

Domestic violence legislation is a key response to the entrenched social problem of intimate partner violence across the globe, yet little is known about the legal players who implement these laws in terms of their perceptions of intimate partner violence and femicide. Through in-depth, critical analysis of judicial transcripts, this book demonstrates that legal understandings of intimate partner femicide continue to be based upon outdated notions of 'couple conflict' and gender-neutral constructions of intimate partner violence. Contending that judicial understandings of ‘what happened’ must be re-aligned with feminist understandings of intimate partner violence and femicide, Intimate Partner Femicide: Contesting the Legal Story represents a call to uphold the rights of women to live free from male-perpetrated violence and femicide. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gendered violence, law, social justice and criminology.