ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how women's behaviors are influenced by dynamic and dichotomous forces—historical circumstances and contemporary social conditions, events in public and private spheres, and conscious and unconscious processes. It offers the theoretical model of gender entrapment, which is based on understanding that some women are "lured into compromising acts". The African American battered women who are in jails for crimes that resulted from gender entrapment are among the most stigmatized group in contemporary society. While emotional effects of their stigmatized identities and consequences of their deviant behavior may represent mental health or rehabilitative concerns, the root causes of stigma they experience and its relationship to social variables raise important sociological questions. The African American battered women whose lives served as the empirical basis for development of this theoretical model represent not only the loss of comfort, productive potential, and opportunity for self-determination, but indeed the loss of life that results from combination of gender violence, social inequality, and crime.
