Compelled to Crime: Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women Book

Compelled to Crime documents the lives of battered, African American women incarcerated in a New York City correctional facility. Chronicling the lives of women from low-income communities who have been physically battered, sexually assaulted, emotionally abused and involved in illegal activity, the book illustrates the degree to which these women's devastated and deteriorating circumstances represents a socially constructed position--but one from which there is little escape.Borrowing the phrase "gender entrapment" from the legal notion of the term--which implies a circumstance whereby an individual is lured into a compromising act--author Beth Richie uses gender entrapment to describe the process whereby African American women who are vulnerable to men's violence in their intimate relationships are penalized for criminal behaviors they engage in when these behaviors are logical extensions of their racialized gender identities, their culturally mediated gender roles, and theRead More