UNREASONABLE WOMEN

Hearing from women who survived abuse.

In an era of gory but tidy true-crime stories, investigative journalist van der Leun has done something remarkable: She paints a devastating portrait of women “who have been imprisoned because they are abuse and assault survivors”—a phenomenon known as “criminalized survival.” Knowing anecdotally about the high rate of abuse victims in prison, but finding no hard statistics, van der Leun conducted her own research, sending questionnaires to 10,000 people in 60 women’s prisons. She received more than 1,000 responses. The book provides in-depth and often harrowing details about three of the respondents: Tanisha Williams of Saginaw, Michigan; Jema Heffernan of Knob Noster, Missouri; and TC Brooks of La Mesa, California. All three women’s stories live at the confluence of American sexism, racism, and poverty, but the overwhelming through-line tying them together is the “tacit approval” of male violence toward women in the United States. In all cases, the author says, the justice system failed to protect the women from abuse when they were children but efficiently punished them for surviving their abusers’ violence. Throughout the book, van der Leun makes clear that the women’s experiences are part of a universal story of how violence against women is perpetuated. That universality is perhaps what makes this an especially challenging book. If it is difficult to read such harrowing accounts of violence, it’s not because they are rare (they are not), but because they illustrate how the American legal system has yet to truly reckon with domestic violence and sexual abuse. Van der Leun writes, “One difficulty in believing survivors, and incarcerated survivors specifically, is that in believing them, we must acknowledge the ugliest truths of our legal system and therefore our society.”

A riveting, heartbreaking account of three women’s experiences with violence and a system that perpetuates abuse.