There is a quiet but devastating contradiction at the heart of many legal systems.

The expectation that people, especially women, should endure violence without resistance, and the punishment that often follows when they do not.

This contradiction is what has come to be known as criminalized survival, a reality in which acts of self-defense or protection are reframed as crimes, and those who survive violence are prosecuted as perpetrators.

Journalist Justine van der Leun brought critical attention to this through her research project Unreasonable Women, documenting patterns that are as disturbing as they are widespread. As she writes:

“In the U.S., many women serving 20 years, 30 years, and even life without parole on murder charges were actually protecting themselves or a loved one against an abuser or against sexual assault. This is called ‘criminalized survival’ and it is widespread in our women’s prisons.”

This is not a fringe anomaly.

It is a structural pattern that reveals how systems interpret violence—not by context or lived reality, but by rigid frameworks that often fail to account for coercion, terror, and ongoing abuse. When a woman defends herself in a moment of life-threatening danger, the law frequently isolates that moment from the pattern that preceded it. The years of violence, the credible fear, the absence of protection—these are minimized, or worse, dismissed.

What remains is a single act, stripped of context, judged in a vacuum.

In a world where gender-based violence against women and children is normalized, this dynamic becomes even more stark. Survivors are often disbelieved, their abusers rarely held fully accountable, and the threshold for intervention remains dangerously high. Many women seek help repeatedly—from law enforcement, from courts, from social systems—only to be ignored or inadequately protected. When the system fails to act, survival sometimes requires action. And yet, when that action involves force, the same system that failed to protect them may then punish them.

This is not justice.

It is a failure of imagination and empathy embedded within legal structures.

The reality is further shaped by race. Black women are convicted at significantly higher rates than white women in cases involving self-defense or defense of others…often cited at roughly three times the rate. This disparity reflects not only gender bias, but racial bias layered on top of it. Stereotypes around aggression, credibility, and worthiness of protection influence how cases are investigated, prosecuted, and judged. The result is a system where some lives are more easily framed as criminal, and others more readily seen as deserving of defense.

To understand criminalized survival, we must confront a deeper truth: legal systems do not exist outside of culture.

They reflect the values, fears, and hierarchies of the societies that create them. In patriarchal contexts, where male violence is often minimized and women’s autonomy is constrained, the law can become an extension of those same power dynamics.

Protection is not evenly distributed.

Credibility is not evenly granted.

And survival itself can become suspect.

There is also a moral discomfort embedded here. Society is often more comfortable with the idea of a “perfect victim”—someone passive, compliant, and non-resistant—than with a survivor who fights back. Resistance disrupts the narrative. It challenges the expectation of submission. And in doing so, it exposes the inadequacy of systems that demand endurance but fail to ensure safety.

Criminalized survival forces a critical question: what are people supposed to do when protection is unavailable? When institutions fail, when danger is immediate, when the choice is not between violence and peace, but between violence and survival…what then?

If the answer is that they must not defend themselves, then we are not talking about justice. We are talking about control.

This must change. And for real, lasting change to take root, it is not enough to reform policies at the surface while leaving the underlying structure intact. The foundation itself—the patriarchal paradigm of dominance, hierarchy, and “power over”—must be dismantled. As long as systems are built on control rather than care, on authority rather than relationship, they will continue to reproduce harm, no matter how many adjustments are made around the edges.

What is required is a shift toward a fundamentally different organizing principle: a “power with” model, often associated with matriarchal or relational frameworks. This is not about reversing domination or replacing one hierarchy with another. It is about re-centering values that prioritize protection of the vulnerable, accountability within relationship, and the wellbeing of the community as a whole. In such a framework, safety is not conditional, credibility is not selectively granted, and survival is not criminalized.

A system rooted in “power with” would ask different questions. Not simply, “Was force used?” but rather, “What conditions made that force necessary?” Not, “Who broke the law?” but “Who was failed by it?” It would recognize patterns of coercive control, validate lived realities of danger, and respond with context, nuance, and humanity.

Legal reform is essential—expanded definitions of self-defense, trauma-informed courts, and mechanisms to review unjust convictions—but without a deeper cultural shift, those reforms will remain limited. The normalization of gender-based violence is not separate from criminalized survival; it is the soil from which it grows.

Change the soil, and the outcomes begin to change.

This is a collective responsibility. It requires rethinking not only laws, but values. Not only systems, but the beliefs that sustain them.

Criminalized survival is not just a legal issue. It is a reflection of whose lives are protected, whose fear is believed, and whose actions are understood as necessary.

Until those answers shift—collectively, culturally, and structurally—justice will remain uneven, and survival itself will continue to be treated as a crime.

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