According to an investigation by the University of Granada, based on police surveys, in crimes of gender violence in which the woman kills her abuser,if the accused considers herself attractive, she is attributed greater responsibility for the crime. To carry out the study, which is published in the journal TheEuropean Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context, two types of fictitious stories were written about a judicial process in which the protagonist was a woman accused of killing her husband and who had declared in her defense that she had suffered a long history of abuse and that, therefore, when she killed him, she acted in self defense. In one of the stories the description of the woman fit the abused stereotype and in the other it did not. The researchers asked the participants to adopt the role of jury and to answer a series of questions related to the credibility, responsibility and control of the situation generated by the woman described.
“In this way, we had half of the police officers who read a story in which the accused was a young, battered, physically deteriorated and fragile-looking woman, with children and financially dependent on her partner. And the other half read the story. story of a woman without children, financial advisor, married for 10 years and who during the judicial process appears well dressed, determined and calm in her interaction with the judge and the lawyers, “the authors explain in statements to the SINC agency. When assessing her criminality, the second group tended to consider the accused guilty, according to the authors, for “not fitting into the stereotype of a battered woman.”
