Content note: This post discusses domestic abuse, sexual violence, homicide and imprisonment.
Lisa Ellwood was convicted in March 2024 of murdering her husband Ryan with a single stab wound and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 16 years [18]. He died at their home in Wakefield on 29 August 2023, and her 16-year-old daughter had been in the house at the time. Lisa said she had been drinking heavily and had no recollection of the incident. Because of this, the judge ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence for self-defence. I’m not sure of the logic of this, but still, that’s what happened.
Lisa had led a difficult life, with diagnoses of depression and complex PTSD from both historical abuse, including rape as a teenager, and serious abuse in her relationship with Ryan. Ryan had assaulted her repeatedly, including pushing her down the stairs, punching her and strangling her. Research shows that women who have been strangled are seven times more likely to go on to be killed or nearly killed by their abuser [30].
Lisa didn’t report him to the police because she was absolutely terrified that social services would take her daughter. Anyone that’s been on the receiving end of coercive control or domestic abuse, or been in contact with the social services system, will be able to relate to this. The judge ruled that an expert psychologist, who works with abuse survivors, couldn’t give evidence on whether her condition, in that context, substantially reduced her responsibility. I’ll never understand how a court can decide that without hearing it.
Her lawyers appealed on that ground and her appeal was heard at the Court of Appeal on 26 June 2026. As I write this, there has been no decision announced. I’m not saying that it’s right for anyone to go around stabbing anyone, but look at this example: a single stab wound, a woman with a history of being strangled and abused throughout her whole life, trying to survive in a house with her abuser and her child, and then getting a judge that wouldn’t allow a jury to hear from the one expert who could explain it all to them. The system and the patriarchy have truly let this woman, and many others, down.
The Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) are currently supporting Lisa and about 30 others, all of whom are serving life for murder after killing the man they say abused them [16]. This post talks about how women like her end up in prison, what the government was told to do about it, and why what it actually chose to do is going to make it worse.
A good friend of mine sent me a link to a post on Instagram that she thought I might be interested in, and she was absolutely right. There was no message with the link, she just fired it off to me, and as soon as I clicked on it I knew why. This is absolutely one of my areas of interest and something that I immediately knew I had to shout about on my blog. It can sometimes be disheartening to read the mostly male comments which try to dismiss the facts and figures that the various progressive accounts put out, including mine, however stats don’t lie, and these ones really backed up the fact that male violence against women and girls is a national emergency, as the National Police Chiefs’ Council put it in 2024 [1].
So what was it? Well, Justine van der Leun (@jvanderleun) calls it “criminalised survival”. You might have heard the term before, but if not, the short version is that women are being sent to prison for surviving the men who were trying to kill them. Van der Leun’s investigation, and subsequent book, is a massive piece of work and really shows how bad the problem is. Yet again women are the ones paying the heavy price for male violence. The stark comparisons that van der Leun put on her posts made me wonder how anyone can possibly think this is right. She spent seven years looking at this and is an expert in her field.
Just to make sure we’re clear on some definitions. In the USA, a jail is run by the local county and generally holds people who are waiting for a trial or serving shorter sentences. A prison is run by the state or federal government and holds the people who are serving the longer sentences. Here in the UK we tend to use the two terms interchangeably, so just a heads up.
In 2022 Van der Leun wrote to 10,000 women in prisons in the US, out of around 190,600 women and girls held in prisons and jails across the country [29], and received more than a thousand replies, which she went on to hand code and analyse individually [2]. She found that at least 30% of the women serving time for murder or manslaughter are what’s known as “criminalised survivors”, so they were arrested, prosecuted and then imprisoned for protecting themselves or a loved one, like a child or a relative, from physical or sexual violence [2]. Over the seven years of reporting she did, she told three women’s stories in her book: Tanisha from Michigan, Jema in Missouri and TC from California [2]. What she found was a system that punishes women for surviving the attacks and the violence, whilst at the same time giving more leniency to the men who commit these types of crimes [3]. She also found that more than 70% of the women in American jails and prisons had been on the receiving end of intimate partner violence before they were incarcerated [4]. And when she looked at the average pre-incarceration income of these women she found they were at the very lower end of the scale, at just US$18,000 a year [3]. 80% of the women in US jails and 60% of the women in prisons are mothers [3]. Those are big numbers, and one that I can only ponder on. Is the Mumma Bear instinct kicking in if there is a threat to her kids? I know only too well that I would do anything to protect my children, and if anyone, whether it be a stranger, a relative or a partner, threatened my kids, all hell would break loose. So I can empathise there.
The book, “Violence, imprisonment and extraordinary survival”, covers three stories of women who have lived through this experience. In the introduction, Nikki Addimando, a woman convicted of murdering the boyfriend who had abused her for years, sums up every woman in the book in one sentence, spoken at her own sentencing: “afraid to stay, afraid to leave, afraid that nobody would believe me” [5].
Van der Leun posted on Instagram several cases side by side to clearly show the comparisons [6]. Alishia Mackey received 20 years under “failure to protect” laws, blamed for abuse she didn’t commit, whereas her husband, who actually did the abuse, received 15, according to van der Leun’s post. Please, somebody, help this make sense. Chrystul Kizer got 11 years for killing, at 17, the man who raped and trafficked her, and van der Leun set that beside Christopher Belter, who raped four girls and received a sentence purely of probation. Pieper Lewis received a sentence of 20 years at 15 years old, whereas a school bus driver who raped a 14-year-old girl received probation. TC Brooks was punished with 25 years to life, against just eight months for Michael Wysolovski, who kept a 16-year-old in a dog cage for more than a year. And Jema Hefferan, who had left her husband and had a protective order against him, got 10 years for shooting him when he broke into her house and held a gun to her head. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. I know these are American cases, but I think they show the institutional misogyny well.
In the UK, the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) undertook a four-year study which covered a ten-year period and found that 108 men were killed by female partners, and 840 women were killed by male partners or ex-partners [15]. Not that you would believe that kind of statistic from the bias in the media coverage. It seems a woman killing her partner is far more newsworthy than the opposite. What a sad state of affairs we are in as a society when we take it for granted that men kill women. Digging deeper, they found that in 77% of the 92 cases they studied there was evidence of previous abuse by him [15]. I actually double checked that number when I first read it, shockingly more than three quarters. Women were acquitted entirely in only 7% of these cases [15], which shows how entirely misunderstood abuse is within the system. He abuses her enough, she kills him when in fear of her life, and then the system punishes her and her children.
Several of the thirty women the CWJ is supporting were sentenced after defending themselves with a single stab wound. They have received murder convictions and life sentences, and the CWJ argues that the abuse they suffered was not properly considered at trial [16].
Another case that showed how the system could get it wrong and then correct itself, was Sally Challen’s. Sally killed her husband Richard in August 2010 after decades of what the Court of Appeal heard was bullying, belittling and control of her money and her friendships. She was convicted of murder in 2011 and given life with a minimum of 22 years, later reduced to 18. In February 2019 the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction on fresh psychiatric evidence and evidence of coercive control, and ordered a retrial. The prosecution then accepted a plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and in June 2019 she was sentenced to nine years and four months and walked free, having already served nearly a decade [17]. Cases like this show how much coercive control is systemic, still desperately misunderstood by people, police, courts and the judges, and the juries they direct.
A common objection to this data is that on average women get shorter sentences and that is partly true. A study from the University of Michigan found that men got 63% longer sentences when compared with women for the same offence and with a similar criminal record. They also found that women were twice as likely to avoid prison if they were convicted of a crime [7]. The data for England and Wales shows that women were 22% of everyone who was prosecuted in 2023, so approximately one in five [8]. In 2021, looking at just the more serious offences, men got put into immediate custody at twice the rate of women, 17 in 100 for women and 34 in 100 for men [8]. The average prison sentence for women was also shorter than for men, in 2023 it was 12.2 months for women and 21.8 for men [8]. And when looking at other sentences women were more likely to walk away with just a fine or a conditional discharge.
However, the averages don’t take the crime into account, so the details need to be looked at properly. Overall about two-thirds of women who are sent to prison are there for non-violent offences [28]. By comparison, violent offences against the person made up 24% of men’s admissions and 21% of women’s, so fairly similar numbers [9]. So although the system is lenient to her on average, she is actually penalised a lot more heavily when her crime involves a man.
3,350 women make up 4% of the total prison population in England and Wales, with at least 57% of them reporting domestic violence as adults and 53% of them saying they’d experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child, which was just about double what the men reported [10]. Charities estimate that the real number is actually higher [11]. The percentage of women prisoners who had reported they’d committed offences to support someone else’s drug use was also over double that of men (48% v 22%) [12]. And the majority of crimes that result in a woman being sent to prison are non-violent: theft, fraud and drugs. In fact the percentage of women stealing from shops was also more than double that of men for the more serious prosecutions (27% v 12%) [8].
The statistics also show that women’s mental health suffers more in prison too. In 2024, 28% of all self-harm incidents were by women, even though they only made up 4% of the prison population [13]. And it’s estimated that there are approximately 17,000 children affected by their mother being locked away each year. It’s the women and children paying the price, now and in the future, for the failure in the system.
TV licensing convictions are a very interesting example of how our system can work. The number of women being prosecuted for evasion has held steady at circa 75% (74% in 2023 [8], 76% in 2020 [22]). In 2020 that was 40,000 women. It was so prevalent that in 2019 it was 30% of all convictions of women, against only 4% of convictions of men [8]. I found that truly staggering. There are several possible reasons for the disparity. TV Licensing’s own 2017 report said the reasons could include households without any adult men, women being more likely to be at home during the day to answer the door, and women being more likely to talk with the enquiry officer when they call [22]. Nobody was sent to prison for it in 2020 or 2021, because you can only be jailed for wilfully refusing to pay the fine [22]. But at the end of the day this was the single most common conviction of a woman in this country in 2019, and by the sounds of it, it’s primarily for who answered the door.
Since 2020, around 100 women have been investigated by police on suspicion of illegal abortion [23, 25]. Six of those women were taken to court, one of them was sent to prison, and alarmingly many of the investigations were into women who had miscarried [23]. We only have to look across the pond to the States to see where this may well be headed. Back in the UK in 2023 a mother of three was sentenced to 28 months in prison, reduced on appeal to 14 months suspended, under an 1861 law. She told the clinic she was seven weeks pregnant, and took abortion pills at home when she was actually between 32 and 34 weeks, a long way past the legal limit [39]. In June 2025 MPs voted 379 to 137 to take women out of that law, and it came into force on 29 April 2026 [23]. Interestingly, no Reform MP voted for it, and four of them voted against it [23]. The women who have already been convicted under it are supposed to get pardons, and Parliament has passed that too, but it isn’t in force, because the government hasn’t signed the paperwork that would make it happen [23]. I was pretty shocked to hear that police guidance was updated in 2025 to tell officers to consider seizing a woman’s phone to examine her search history, messages and period or fertility tracking apps when investigating a pregnancy loss [24].
The government could’ve done something to change all of this but they haven’t. It’s not like they weren’t aware of the issues because they’ve been officially told three times in 20 years by their own experts and that’s what makes me so angry. When you really look into the details, it shows clearly that they don’t want to make things better for women.
Way back in 2007 Baroness Jean Corston published a report for the Home Office after doing a review of women that were in the criminal justice system. She found exactly what you would expect. She called it an institutional misunderstanding of what matters to women in prison, and a shocking level of unmet need. Off the back of this she called for a radical, woman-centred approach. She recommended community alternatives for most women, which would mean women’s centres as opposed to prison cells. She advocated for the big women’s prisons to be closed and replaced with smaller local units, so that women weren’t having to stay miles away from their children. The Labour government at the time accepted 40 of her 43 recommendations [26].
The women’s centres duly got built and were a clear success from the start. However, the 40 centres across England and Wales have been severely underfunded and under threat ever since. Nine years later, Corston herself said that she was “extremely worried that they would close” [27]. Her main recommendation, that large prisons should be closed and replaced with smaller local units, was rejected the following summer, for reasons they described as “neither feasible nor desirable” [26], which does make you wonder why they bothered to even have the review if they weren’t going to take the recommendations of it.
Perhaps they never had any intention of doing so? Sometimes I feel like it’s just lip service to quieten people down, make it look like they’re doing the right thing, and in the end to delay things until they’re forgotten about. I think these bigwigs in power need to wake up to the fact that a lot of women today are not going to just forget about it. We are not going to quieten down and simply wither away. We are here to hold them to account. In 2013 the Justice Committee did a review of the progress and found that not much had been made at all [27]. There are still 12 women’s prisons in England and none in Wales, as there were before the review, and women are held on average 63 miles from home, meaning that staying in touch with family and children is no better [27]. Because there aren’t any women’s prisons in Wales, Welsh women have to travel even further, an average of 101 miles from home [27].
In 2018 the government published its Female Offender Strategy, a plan to send fewer women to prison [35]. The aim was to have shorter sentences for the non-violent majority, and the money that was saved from doing that was to be put into women’s centres and more support in the community instead. The government admitted in writing that prison is the wrong answer for most women, and it seemed to be a move in the right direction.
Two and a half years later in January 2021 the Ministry of Justice published a Concordat on women in, or at risk of contact with, the criminal justice system. For a moment things seemed to be looking up. A Concordat is a voluntary agreement between various government departments and public agencies. It helps set shared standards at national and local levels, but it isn’t legally binding and relies on trust and commitments. I’m not sure if that means it’s even worth the paper it’s written on, but anyway... It was a promise that government departments and local services agreed on, to help keep women out of the criminal justice system, which was the aim of the 2018 Female Offender Strategy. Being nothing more than an agreement, it didn’t come with any funding or any plans, which again makes me wonder what the point of it was.
On the exact same day, back in 2021 when the Concordat was agreed, the Ministry of Justice also announced that 500 new prison places for women would be created [14, 32]. This makes absolutely zero sense to me because it was the very same Ministry of Justice who were planning on sending fewer women to prison… So either it was sheer incompetence or it was planned that way, and I can’t decide which is worse.
In April 2022, MPs found that only £9.5 million had gone on community services and £200 million had been promised for those 500 prison places. That was more than 20 times more investment into prisons than into the community, and it came without any targets or measures to analyse whether any of it had been successful or not. The plan on what and how this money was supposed to be spent finally came in January 2023, four and a half years after the strategy it was meant to deliver [33].
What a complete and utter farce. The whole idea behind the strategies, review and consultations was supposed to be less prison time, and yet here they were making more spaces for women prisoners and less investment in preventing them from being there in the first place.
What makes this even more jaw dropping is that there’s been a change in the law since 22 March 2026. Any prison sentence of 12 months or less will now normally be suspended rather than served [37]. This follows the direction of the 2018 strategy which encourages fewer women to go to prison for short sentences, and interestingly the average prison sentence for a woman in 2023 was 12.2 months [8]. So surely that means we would need fewer women’s prison places, not 500 more. I’d really like to know what the thinking behind this is, because with these average prison sentences, there really should be very few women in prison.
The third expert is probably the most important to Lisa Ellwood and the thirty women the CWJ are supporting. It felt a bit like things were moving marginally, albeit slowly, in 2021 when the government appointed Clare Wade KC to look at sentencing in domestic homicide cases. She is the barrister who represented Sally Challen on her appeal. After a thorough review she reported back in March 2023, recommending that a history of coercive control should be considered both ways: against an abuser who kills, as an aggravating factor, and in favour of a victim who kills, as a mitigating factor. She also recommended two new aggravating factors: killing at the end of a relationship, and “overkill”, which is her word for the type of violence that goes way beyond what it actually takes to kill someone, like excessive stab wounds instead of one [19].
Clare Wade KC published her review on the 17th March 2023 [19]. Across the period 2018 to 2020, she recorded 120 domestic killings, 83% of which were carried out by men and 89 of them categorised as murders (as opposed to manslaughter) [19]. When she looked into the murders she found coercive control by the killer in 51% of the cases, “overkill” in 60% and strangulation in nearly a third. Every single strangulation was a man killing a woman, rather than the other way round and all but one of the “overkill” cases were done by a man [19, 40].
Anyone convicted of murder always receives a life sentence. However the judge gets to determine what the minimum number of years served is before parole can be considered. They’re guided by the law which gives them a starting number and then they can add on years for things that make it worse or take off years for things that make it “less bad”. For a partner that’s killed using a knife at home the starting sentence is 15 years. For a partner killed with a weapon that was brought to the scene, the starting sentence is 25 years. How can one dead person’s murder be worth 10 more years in prison than another’s?
Men who were convicted of murdering a partner and who were sentenced from the 15-year starting point averaged a minimum of 19 years. Women sentenced from the same 15-year point averaged 14.6 years. So yes, on paper men get longer, and that isn’t me saying they should just because they’re men. I can only speculate as to why, but the stats tell us that overkill happened in 60% of the murders, and bar one, was done by men [19, 40]. Overkill is one of the things a judge adds years for, and if a murder involved it, it should be punished more than one that didn’t. So it may well be that men get longer because judges are adding on time for the things that made those murders worse, and that is how it should work.
It’s hard to tell, as the numbers for the women were much smaller (only 8 of 89), as they simply don’t kill as many partners as the men do. And Wade warned that these numbers should be read with caution because of that.
One fact that leapt out to me from Wade’s review was that every woman who had killed a male partner had used a weapon [19]. She said that “women are rarely (if at all) able to kill men without the use of a weapon”, and I can understand that because physically men are on average a lot bigger and stronger. This means that in order for a woman to defend herself and eliminate the risk she would need to use a weapon, otherwise she would be overpowered. However, under the eyes of the law, using a weapon such as a knife increases the severity of the punishment, which penalises women, as men could kill more easily with their hands. This is exactly why Wade recommended that the 25 year weapon rule shouldn’t apply to domestic murders at all for both men and women alike and that it should stay at 15 years [19]. On the same day as Wade released her report, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Dame Nicole Jacobs, also emphasised that Wade’s recommendations were a package and that the starting point shouldn’t go to 25 years until the wider work on understanding abuse and coercive control was in place [21]. The government rejected Wade’s recommendation. I can only guess that Wade and Jacobs didn’t give the government the answers they wanted to hear, because they subsequently went on to initiate another consultation which ran from November 2023 to March 2024, but was never answered. And in June 2026 they announced their own decision that every partner killing would be raised to 25 years, ergo completely ignoring Wade’s advice.
In a murder trial the accused can use one of three defences. The first is self-defence and if the jury accepts that was the case, then a woman goes free. The question the jury ask themselves is whether the force she used was reasonable. When juries don’t understand abuse and see a woman using a weapon such as a knife, they’re not always convinced it was self-defence.
The second defence is loss of control and there has been a positive change in the definition of this since the Coroners and Justice Act was brought in in 2009. The first change, partly with abused women in mind, was that fear of serious violence was added as a trigger. The second change was that loss of control no longer had to be sudden, which again had women in mind because women may often wait until their abuser is asleep or drunk and so previously would not have been classed as loss of control. The jury in these cases still has to decide whether she actually lost self-control, or whether she acted on a decision.
The third and final defence is diminished responsibility, which is defined as an abnormality of mental functioning and this has to be from a recognised medical condition. But if courts don’t understand abuse and coercive control or aren’t allowed to listen to expert witnesses, then this defence is difficult.
Wade reported that all three defences were problematic for women who killed a coercively controlling partner, and Lisa Ellwood’s case shows this. The judge wouldn’t let the jury hear from the expert. Surely if a jury is to decide, they need to be able to make an informed decision, and they can’t do that without understanding how being abused can diminish her responsibility. If judges don’t understand coercive control, what chance do juries have? Lisa’s appeal took place on 26 June 2026 and no decision is public yet [18].
Both loss of control and diminished responsibility defences result in a murder conviction being changed to manslaughter which in turn means there is no automatic life sentence, so they’re extremely important in any case.
In her report, Wade said that fixing or amending the defences was too big a job for a sentencing review and she recommended that there be a full public consultation on all the defences to murder [19]. The government partly accepted this, but they asked the Law Commission to look only at defences for domestic abuse victims who kill their abusers, not all the defences for everyone. And also it got downgraded to a review rather than a public consultation [20]. The terms of the review were agreed in November 2023 [20], but then in January 2025 it was merged into a full review of the whole of homicide law, and became a much bigger job, with a much longer timescale. The consultation is scheduled for summer 2027, the final report some time in 2028 (not specified) and then of course the government can decide whether they actually want to do anything with the information, and going on past form there is no guarantee they will, or that they’ll go with what the recommendation suggests [20]. So Wade was appointed in 2021, reported that the defences needed proper attention in 2023, but we won’t see a report on it until at least 2028.
It’s a complex matter, and the government has made some changes from the various reviews. In July 2023 they accepted Wade’s new aggravating and mitigating factors and the coercive control ones became law in February 2024 [38]. This is welcome and real progress. Strangulation as an aggravating factor was turned down in 2023, but was finally included in October 2025, along with killing at the end of a relationship. Again, welcome, but took its time. In December 2024 the new government handed the whole question of murder sentencing over to the Law Commission saying it was “not a quick one”.
The campaign “Killed Women” was founded in November 2022 by Julie Devey, Carole Gould and Elaine Newborough, whose daughters Poppy, Ellie and Megan were murdered by their partners. They met the Justice Secretary in April 2026 to fight for longer sentences for perpetrators who kill inside the home [20, 34]. And I can understand why. They must’ve felt very disappointed that the men who murdered their daughters received a lower starting sentence.
As a result, in June 2026, the government agreed and the Ministry of Justice announced that people who kill a partner or an ex-partner at home may face a higher starting point for their sentencing, up from 15 years to 25 [36]. It hasn’t been turned into a law yet. The announcement says the change is “subject to consultation with the Sentencing Council” and “will be introduced as soon as possible” [36]. It seems strange for the government to announce these changes when it hasn’t had the report back from the Law Commission, who it had asked for a review 18 months earlier. The CWJ was also quick to point this out [16]. The announcement said that victims who kill their abusers would be exempt from the higher starting point, keeping the 15-year one [16, 36]. Although the announcement sounds good in principle, the problem is that domestic abuse and, more specifically coercive control, is still not understood or properly recognised in criminal proceedings. So now the same 25 years starting point also applies to a woman who kills her abuser in the kitchen, unless the court understands and recognises the abuse, and that is exactly what the courts keep failing to do.
And the review of the defences, the thing that would make courts understand it, isn’t due until 2028 at the earliest. The CWJ said the same, and warned that many such women, convicted of murder because their abuse wasn’t recognised, would be doubly punished, as they would now receive even longer sentences [16]. On top of that, the plan splits out different types of femicide and excludes killings by men who knew the victim but weren’t in a relationship with her, which is a bizarre standpoint. What if it was a stalker, or a man she’d turned down? Clearly the announcement hasn’t been properly thought through, and Harriet Wistrich, the chief executive of the CWJ, said it will have serious unintended consequences “which will create more problems than it solves” [16].
So the government commissioned the expert who freed Sally Challen. Both she and Dame Nicole Jacobs said people need to understand the abuse first. That’s not happening quickly enough. The review of the defences is years away. Sadly, even though the Commissioner said don’t do this on its own, they did it anyway, which will only harm more women.
How many women have to die in order to make this urgent? The National Police Chiefs’ Council talk about the national emergency that is male violence against women and girls, experts advise the government, but these continue to be meaningless words. Reviews take years upon years upon years, and get watered down, not adopted or spread out and re-reviewed. And in the meantime women and girls are still being killed every week or having to defend themselves from abuse.
All of this is worse for women. If we look at the next woman who’s in Lisa Ellwood’s position, she’ll receive a starting sentence of 25 years rather than 15. Because the announcement says that only a woman who kills her abuser keeps the lower starting sentence. And the courts are not recognising the abuse. Lisa’s court didn’t even let the jury hear about it. It’s madness.
The leniency seems to go most to the women who fit the expected patriarchal mould, however it very quickly evaporates for the ones that don’t: the woman who fights, the woman that drinks, or the woman that struggles to be a good mother, the one that doesn’t show emotion or cry in court. Women and victims are just trying to survive and won’t always behave in a way that people think they should.
The government’s response was bodged at best, and the one thing Corston said mattered the most was, in their words, not feasible. And they wonder why we’re angry.
I know the families of the victims who are fighting to change the starting sentences are doing it from a good place, and I feel that the government tried to listen to them. However, due to a severe lack of understanding of exactly how domestic violence and violence against women and girls operates, the solution they put forward was entirely inappropriate. In order for things to change, the conditions need to change, the leadership needs to change, and there needs to be an entire overhaul of the system, to understand these situations from a woman’s point of view. Whilst those in power and in charge are predominantly men, or women fighting against the patriarchal systems that those men keep in place, there is no easy answer.
Women in prison are predominantly non-violent and have mostly been abused before they got there. The children of these women will be forever affected by their incarceration, and the men who induced the crimes seem to get off more lightly. If we’re really serious about looking after women and girls and preventing violence against them, the prison system is something we all need to take a good look at. Sadly, a lot of commenters use incarcerated women as an example of why women, and feminism, are bad. However you only need to scratch a little below the surface to see that this is a result of the system, the patriarchy, the misogyny and the lack of understanding about domestic abuse.
I remember reading about Sally Challen in an interview that her son David had done with the media. He was campaigning for her release and it broke my heart. I just couldn’t believe the injustice, and I was so angry at the system for not understanding coercive control. As a woman, we live every day of our lives constantly on high alert, feeling unheard and unprotected. As a kid, I really used to believe that the police, government and laws were all there to help us and protect us. As I grew up, I realised pretty quickly that as women we’re not listened to and not taken as seriously as men, and that abuse, in public or in private, is a given at some point in life or the life of someone we know, and that the police won’t always help. The system struggles in complex situations like these. This case really shows up the failings in the laws and government, and in us as a society.
The prison system is clearly on its knees and it needs reforming. All of it. We need better outcomes for everyone, including men. Women would do a lot better, let’s face it, they can’t really do a lot worse than the current status quo, as would men, if they were housed in smaller, local units, with access to rehabilitation, education, therapy and support, and, when they’re on probation, access to housing, jobs and so on.
Most women in prison are not a danger to society. Society is more of a danger to them.
The Receipts // (Sources)
[1] National Police Chiefs’ Council, Violence Against Women and Girls: National Policing Statement, July 2024.
[2] Justine van der Leun, Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival, Ecco, 1 June 2026.
[3] Justine van der Leun, Instagram, @jvanderleun, 4 and 9 September 2026.
[4] Justine van der Leun, Ms. Magazine, author page.
[5] BookPage, review of Unreasonable Women, June 2026.
[6] Justine van der Leun, Instagram, @jvanderleun, 18 September 2026.
[7] Sonja B. Starr, Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases, University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper No. 12-018, 29 August 2012.
[8] Ministry of Justice, Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2023, 30 January 2025; 2021 edition, November 2022; 2019 edition, 26 November 2020.
[9] Ministry of Justice, Offender Management Statistics Quarterly: January to March 2026, 30 July 2026; Ministry of Justice, Justice in Numbers.
[10] Prison Reform Trust, There’s a reason we’re in trouble: Domestic abuse as a driver to women’s offending, December 2017.
[11] Centre for Women’s Justice, Clumsy drafting of the Sentencing Bill may increase the number of women sent to prison, November 2025.
[12] Prison Reform Trust, submission to the National Commission into women facing domestic and/or sexual violence and multiple disadvantage.
[13] Prison Reform Trust, Women in prison; Prison Reform Trust, Resetting the approach to women’s imprisonment: a case for change, July 2026.
[14] Prison Reform Trust, Resetting the approach to women’s imprisonment, April 2025; House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system, 28 April 2022.
[15] Centre for Women’s Justice, Women Who Kill: how the state criminalises women we might otherwise be burying, 2021.
[16] Centre for Women’s Justice, Government announcement to increase minimum sentencing for domestic murders is ill thought out and will have unintended consequences particularly for victims who kill their abuser, 30 June 2026.
[17] R v Challen [2019] EWCA Crim 916, 28 February 2019; Crown Prosecution Service, CPS accepts Sally Challen’s manslaughter plea, 7 June 2019.
[18] Centre for Women’s Justice, Support Lisa Ellwood’s appeal, 22 May 2026; The Justice Gap, Court of Appeal to hear case of woman who murdered abusive husband, 25 June 2026; Justice for Women, Appeal hearing: Lisa Ellwood, 26 June 2026.
[19] Clare Wade KC, Domestic Homicide Sentencing Review, Ministry of Justice, 17 March 2023; Ministry of Justice, Domestic Homicide Sentencing Review: Government Response, CP 872, 20 July 2023.
[20] Killed Women, killedwomen.org, June 2026; Law Commission, Defences for victims of domestic abuse who kill their abusers, project page; Law Commission, Review of the Law of Homicide, terms of reference, January 2025; Lord Ponsonby, written ministerial statement HLWS283, 6 December 2024; Olliers Solicitors, Law Commission’s Review of the Law of Homicide, 20 November 2025.
[21] Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Clare Wade KC’s raft of recommendations must be taken together, 17 March 2023.
[22] Full Fact, Do a disproportionate number of women end up in prison for failing to pay TV licences?, 4 August 2022.
[23] Crime and Policing Act 2026, sections 241 and 242; House of Commons Library, Changes to the law on abortion in England and Wales, CBP-10970, 3 August 2026; Humanists UK, Decriminalisation of abortion and historic pardons for women become law, 29 April 2026.
[24] National Police Chiefs’ Council, Practice Advice on Child Death Investigation, February 2025, as reported by the Observer, Period app firms express shock at police checks of women’s data, 18 May 2025; Humanists UK, Police access to period apps highlights need to decriminalise abortion, 4 June 2025.
[25] House of Lords, Hansard, Crime and Policing Bill, 18 March 2026.
[26] Baroness Jean Corston, A Review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System, Home Office, March 2007; Ministry of Justice, Delivering the Government Response to the Corston Report: A Progress Report, December 2008; Maria Eagle MP, written ministerial statement, 24 June 2008.
[27] House of Commons Justice Committee, Women offenders: after the Corston Report, 2013; Howard League, Ten years after The Corston Report, 2016; Prisoners’ Advice Service, Our work with women in prison, October 2025; Prison Reform Trust, Resetting the approach to women’s imprisonment, April 2025; Robert Jones, Imprisonment in Wales: A Factfile, Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University, June 2018.
[28] Prison Reform Trust, Resetting the approach to women’s imprisonment, April 2025.
[29] Prison Policy Initiative, Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, 5 March 2024.
[30] Nancy Glass, Kathryn Laughon, Jacquelyn Campbell, Carolyn Rebecca Block, Ginger Hanson, Phyllis W. Sharps and Ellen Taliaferro, Non-fatal strangulation is an important risk factor for homicide of women, Journal of Emergency Medicine, October 2008.
[31] Not used.
[32] Ministry of Justice, Concordat on women in or at risk of contact with the criminal justice system, 22 January 2021; Russell Webster, The Concordat on women in the justice system, January 2021.
[33] Ministry of Justice, Female Offender Strategy Delivery Plan 2022 to 2025, 31 January 2023; Women in Prison, response, 31 January 2023.
[34] ITV News, Mothers of women killed by their partners welcome sentencing changes, 30 June 2026.
[35] Ministry of Justice, Female Offender Strategy, 27 June 2018.
[36] Ministry of Justice, Justice for victims as domestic killers to face longer behind bars, 29 June 2026.
[37] Sentencing Act 2026, section 1.
[38] The Sentencing Act 2020 (Amendment of Schedule 21) Regulations 2024, SI 2024/137; The Sentencing Act 2020 (Amendment of Schedule 21) Regulations 2025, SI 2025/1071.
[39] R v Foster [2023] EWCA Crim 1196, 18 October 2023.
[40] Lord Bellamy, written ministerial statement HLWS634, 20 March 2023; Lord Ponsonby, written ministerial statement HLWS283, 6 December 2024.
Sources correct as at 18 October 2026.
