Author Elizabeth Flock Tells Stories of Women Who Used Violence to Fight Abuse

William Brangham:

In Alabama, Brittany Smith shot a man who she said had just raped and nearly killed her and was choking her brother. In India, Angoori Dahariya, a lower-caste woman unfairly evicted from her home, rises to become the leader of a gang of women who punish those who hurt other poor women.

And, in Syria, teenaged Cicek Mustafa Zibo joins an all-female militia that's fighting a violent campaign against the Islamic State group, which is terrorizing their country.

How this violence changes each of these women and has lasting implications on them and their broader communities is the subject of a new book called "The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice." And it is written by journalist Elizabeth Flock.

Liz, so good to have you back on the "NewsHour."

Can you just tell us a little bit more about these women and why their stories jumped out at you?

Elizabeth Flock, Author, "The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice": Yes, so I started this project as a journalist because I found myself so interested in stories of female vigilantes, antiheroes. They populate so many of our movies and songs and books and mythology.

And I really wanted to understand why that was. And I think we're obsessed with these stories because we wish in a way that we could be them. One in three women has faced domestic or sexual violence in this country and in the world. And so I think when we see these depictions on screen in pop culture, we wish that we could be those women fighting back.

And so, as a journalist, my next question was, are there real-life versions of these women who have fought back? So I spent five years going around the world looking for women who had fought back against violence with violence of their own, and I wanted to understand whether that violence helped or harmed them and their communities and to understand why they had to fight back and what had happened that they hadn't been protected.