Social Entrapment – Is the Law Failing Women Who Kill?
Rebecca Penfold has co-authored chapter 7 of ‘Justice Denied: Exploring Inequities in the Legal System’, with Clare Wade KC of 25 Bedford Row. The book was published by Routledge in August 2025.
The chapter is entitled “Social Entrapment – Is the Law Failing Women Who Kill?” and analyses the way in which the criminal law has developed since R v Duffy [1949] and R v Challen [2019]. Arguments are raised that the law has failed to keep pace with developments in societal understanding of domestic abuse. In particular, the psychiatric conditions with which many women defendants are diagnosed tend to be an output of the behaviour to which they have been subjected. Women defendants with a background of coercive control are rarely able to take proper advantage of the partial defences.
Failings in the law are set out as:
- a lack of proper understanding of what amounts to a loss of control in law, and the partial defence is too restrictive, and
- loss of control and diminished responsibility are defences which operate against a background of stereotype, misogyny, and negative perceptions of women who kill.
Examination is given to recent developments within the jurisdiction of New Zealand and suggestion is made that it is time for this area of law to modernise and for the harm caused (‘social entrapment’) to victims of controlling and coercive behaviour to be recognised as a true legal harm, such that the partial defences to murder are remodelled accordingly.
