Very good article, why do we treat female perpetrators differently despite the fact that they can be more brutal perpetrators than men.
"The idea of a woman being violent, even murderous, is shocking. But why? Is violence at the hands of women somehow different to that at the hands of men? Regardless, we don’t treat male and female violence the same. Female offenders are often cruelly stereotyped by the media, and they – and their victims – can be poorly served by the criminal justice system."
In the past, female power and violence was recognised and even celebrated. Female warriors such as Joan of Arc, Boudicca and the Amazon fighters are iconic. More recently, women in Western and non-Western societies have often taken on leading roles in the military. Women have proved they are capable of deploying violence in ways that seem to demonstrate choice and agency – sometimes in heinous ways. For example, the Nazis trained half a million women for military service, some 3,500 of whom served as concentration camp guards. And in 1997, when I first visited Rwanda, three years after the genocide there, I was struck by how many women had been involved as bystanders, instigators and even key figures in the genocide – just as they had in the Holocaust. The sense of betrayal when women were involved seemed deeper, somehow, because women ‘shouldn’t’ commit such crimes."
Again, women are involved, either as bystanders or leaders, in crimes including ‘honour’-based violence, terrorism and human trafficking. A recent report on ‘honour’-based violence, female genital mutilation and forced marriage by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary concluded that both men and women were perpetrators. And in a recent study published in the Middle East Quarterly – which looked at cases where women were involved in ‘honour’ killings – it found that women were both conspirators and hands-on killers in brutal crimes against other women, even their own relatives, and could also be involved in spreading the gossip that can lead to murder.
Rather than identify with them, it is easier to class each woman who abuses or kills as exceptional instead. Particular cases are elevated to mythical status, and those who perpetrate them are pitied or vilified, rather than understood. The image created by female offenders can be more powerful, because it is seen as transgressive of gender. It leaves a longer-lasting impression.
Another way to deny female violence is to argue that women act only under the influence of evil men. All too often, women offenders are characterised as “mad” (and so to be pitied, rather than blamed), “bad” (set aside from women as a whole) or “sad” (forced into violence by pressure of circumstance, in retaliation or by coercion).
Typically, a woman who is violent will have her sexuality portrayed as deviant, and her sexual attractiveness examined. Her role as a woman will also be scrutinised – is she a bad wife, or a bad mother? We need to keep the very essence of womanhood separate from, and untainted by, women who kill.
The idealisation of motherhood
Dr Estela Welldon has explored the relationship between mothers and children. This relationship can, at its worst, turn “perverse” and damage children, sometimes irretrievably. Women’s violence, she writes, is directed towards their own bodies or their creations – their children.
“My discovery was about the internal circular motion of perversion. When it happens again and again it gives you a new theoretical framework,” she says. Welldon’s book Mother, Madonna, Whore was banned in one iconic feminist bookstore in north London. Even now, some feminists see her as a traitor to the cause. “I broke new ground and some people do not forgive you for that,” Welldon says, but she stood firm, knowing that her findings came straight out of clinical observations that she felt she could not ignore.
“I began to think and listen: ‘What are they talking about? They hate their child…’ It is important to think, and not to judge.” Welldon’s work has changed clinical practice, and her work at the Portman Clinic in London led the way in treating violent women using intensive psychoanalysis and group therapy.
Psychologist and psychotherapist Anna Motz says that the idealisation of motherhood and the denial of the capacity for female violence can prove a risky mix, particularly for mothers who were damaged themselves at some point. “Women are forced into caring roles,” says Motz, “but can become envious of those for whom they care – vulnerable creatures.” When they have been abused or neglected themselves, she argues, they can re-enact violence on that vulnerable creature, or another who takes that place in their imagination: “a sadistic revenge crime against their own abuser” – in their own minds, at least.
Women who kill or abuse their own child are often trying to annihilate a hated part of themselves, she says, and they see the baby as part of themselves too. In more recent, disturbing work, Motz has started to explore the world of what she calls ‘toxic couples’, where two damaged people come together and create their own family, which gets damaged in turn – most famously seen with serial killer couples such as the Wests.
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Women offenders are often characterised as mad, bad or sad (Brea Souders)
We view women who kill in domestic settings with horror – except those who are mentally ill, seen as defending themselves against domestic violence, or carrying out so-called ‘mercy killings’ of their children. For individual women, this can result in sympathetic legal treatment, but treatment that removes responsibility from them (and a chance of justice for those affected). Men who kill their young children, even if they are mentally disturbed, are very rarely treated with similar sympathy.
To what extent, then, has our propensity to excuse some sorts of female violence allowed some women to, quite literally, get away with murder? Well, Myra Hindley is arguably the UK’s number one woman folk devil. One half of the Moors Murderers alongside Ian Brady, Hindley killed five children in the north of England between July 1963 and October 1965. As a young woman, barrister Helena Kennedy QC acted for Myra Hindley when she was put on trial after an abortive prison escape.
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