ABSTRACT
One of the earliest targets of protest for the battered-women’s movements in Britain and the United States was the unresponsiveness of the criminal justice system (CJS), especially the police. In the early 1970s, activists discovered what battered women had long known, that the CJS failed to protect the victim or to act against the offender. Police did not usually arrest men for assaulting their wives or cohabitees, rarely offered assistance to women and sometimes denigrated them for seeking protection within the law. Judges, prosecutors and other criminal justice personnel also failed to deal with the violence in a meaningful manner. Attempts by women in England, Wales and the United States to file complaints against their husbands in lower courts were usually deflected by prosecutors who did not see such complaints as worthy of criminal justice sanction (this option was not available to women in Scotland). The end result was that women were denied assistance and their legal claims were rejected.
