“To Kill or to Be Killed”: Narratives of Female Victims of Intimate Partner Violence, Condemned for the Murder of Their Partners

In or Out: Justice-Involved Women Characterization and Their Perceptions about Penal Sanctions

“…Indeed, improving the effectiveness of services requires some understanding of how they are experienced by penal "service users," and how they impact them. Although there is a considerable and very interesting group of qualitative research about women in the Portuguese criminal justice system that addresses how they perceive their sanction, they relate to specific problematics which are not our focus in this paper (e.g., Carvalho et al, 2021) which focus on how female offenders experience gender and perceive themselves as offenders in different stages of their lives; Cunha (2018) which focuses on how female offenders experience motherhood on prison; Ferreira et al (2018) which focus on perceptions of women victims of intimate partner homicide who committed homicide of their abusive partners, between others). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in Portugal focusing on understanding on who are the women sentenced to custodial and non-custodial sanctions, how similarly or differently they perceive their penalties and the others available in our system, and how aligned with the theoretical purposes of sentencing they are.…”