Fighting for Justice for Women who Kill Abusive Partners

  • Centre for Women’s Justice
     United Kingdom
  • Co-director Project Resist (former founding member and director of Southall Black Sisters), Member of Feminist Dissent
     United Kingdom

Abstract

This article examines the collaborative process involved in campaigning for and representing women appealing murder convictions, highlighting the power of positive collaboration between lawyers, campaigners, frontline experts and the women themselves. Pragna Patel and Harriet Wistrich, who first met while protesting in the early 1990s outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, have been pivotal figures in this movement. Patel has dedicated four decades to Southall Black Sisters, an organisation advocating for black and minority women. Wistrich co-founded Justice for Women and later specialised in representing women victim-survivors of male violence, challenging discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Their collaboration has led to significant precedent-setting murder appeals and reforms in domestic homicide law. This article reflects on their enduring involvement spanning three decades, detailing their efforts in individual cases and legislative reforms. Their approach focuses on obtaining detailed personal accounts from women and building legal strategies around them, aiming to challenge convictions through a feminist lens. Recently, their collaborative efforts prompted the United Kingdom government to commission the Law Commission to review defences in cases of homicide. This underscores their enduring impact in fighting for justice for women who kill their abusive partners and effecting legal change.

 

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, content in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Published: 2024-12-02
Pages:1 to 13
Section:Special Issue: Successful Strategies to Improve Access to Justice
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How to Cite
Wistrich, H. . and Patel, P. . (2024) “Fighting for Justice for Women who Kill Abusive Partners”, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 13(4), pp. 1-13. doi: 10.5204/ijcjsd.3699.

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Author Biographies

Centre for Women’s Justice
 United Kingdom

Harriet Wistrich is a solicitor practicing in England and Wales who worked many years in the renowned civil liberties firm, Birnberg Peirce and Partners. She is the winner of the Liberty Human Rights Lawyer of the Year award 2014, Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year 2018 for public law and Law Society Gazette personality of the year 2019.  She received an honorary doctorate of Laws from Kent university in 2022.  She has acted in many high profile cases around violence against women including on behalf of women who challenged the police and parole board in the John Worboys case, women deceived in relationships by undercover police officers and on behalf of women appealing murder convictions for killing abusive partners, most recently Sally Challen.  She is founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, a legal charity that aims to hold  the state to account in relation to violence against women and girls and challenge discrimination in the criminal justice system. She is also founder member of campaign group Justice for Women and a trustee of the charity, the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize.  Her first book ‘Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a system designed by Men’ was published by Transword publishers (a subsidiary of Penguin Random House) in 2024.

Co-director Project Resist (former founding member and director of Southall Black Sisters), Member of Feminist Dissent
 United Kingdom

Pragna Patel is the co-founder and co-director of Project Resist, an organisation campaigning on the rights of black and minority women and girls in the UK. She is the former director and founding member of the Southall Black Sisters (SBS), an advocacy and campaigning centre where she worked from 1982 to Jan 2022 with a break in 1993 when she left to train and practice as a solicitor.  Over those 40 years, she led SBS on some of its most important cases and campaigns on a range of issues from violence against women to hostile immigration laws and religious fundamentalism.  She was also a founding member of Women Against Fundamentalism and is currently a member of Feminist Dissent. In 2011, she was listed in The Guardian’s Top 100 women: activists and campaigners and is the recipient of many awards including the Bob Hepple Award for contributions to equality in 2015, an honorary doctorate in law from Keele University in 2019, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Criminal Justice Alliance in 2023. Pragna has written extensively on race, gender and religion.