Next Time, She'll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It

Significant and depressing, this study by the author of Women Who Kill brings home as few others have the number of women who are battered and the virtually insuperable obstacles they face trying to combat abuse. We learn that more than a million American women are battered each year, most by husbands or boyfriends, who are also likely to hit children in the home as well. The police, according to Jones, are unsympathetic to battered women, whom they regard as partly, if not entirely, responsible for the attacks they suffer. In the most shocking sections of the book, Jones asserts that there is an entrenched misogyny in the legal system; she cites the sentence of a man who shot his wife in the head (where the bullet is still lodged) to three months while, later, she was sentenced to life because, after being threatened repeatedly, she hired a man to kill her husband. As Jones so succinctly puts it, ``battered women are battered once again by the law.'' She devotes a chapter to suggested remedies. First serial to Mirabella and Glamour. (Jan.)