This dissertation addresses three key questions in the criminological understandings of gender and violence: Why do women convicted of murder kill? What are the particularities of the circumstances of the women charged or convicted of murder? Which particular structural constraints influence women’s decision to kill and in what ways? To answer these questions, I conducted face-to-face interviews with 33 women in a maximum-security male prison that also housed female prisoners in a segregated compound within in Lahore, Pakistan. These women had been remanded in judicial custody or convicted for murder. The results show complex interactions between agency and structural forces that shape women’s pathways to prison and violence. In particular, this study demonstrates the ‘situatedness’ of individual choices in an individual’s structural context. The results have important implications for criminological understandings of the relationship between agency and structure. This study also raises issues relevant to cross-cultural comparative studies of gender and violence and feminist scholarship.