are Compelled to Crime

In this paper I will be describing the results of a study conducted to link culturally constructed gender–identity development to violence against women in intimate relationships and to women’s participation in crime. The social process that constitutes this link offers a new perspective on violence in the lives of African American women, a new theoretical explanation of battered women’s criminality, and a new social paradigm that I am calling gender entrapment. I undertook the research for this project in the midst of a number of academic and social trends that captured both my intellectual and political attention. I was exhilarated by the new scholarship on the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and class that was beginning to influence the social sciences. In particular, I was interested in feminist epistemological approaches to research on African American women and the Black family. These approaches suggest that to produce accurate knowledge about an understudied, marginalized group, an “interested ” standpoint must be assumed (Collins, 1990; Harding, 1987). Second, I was interested in evaluating the movement to end violence against women in which I had been a participant observer for the past ten years. In my view, this grassroots–feminist movement has had limited success in creating the necessary social changes to end violence against women, partly because it has failed to address the needs of those whose lives are most marginalized (Dobash, l992). While the literature suggests that there is little difference between the rates of violence per se in differen