The following essay will cover some aspects on traits and motives which drive women to commit acts of crime in domestic setting. Some reasoning on the question will also be provided. The work is intended to break down most common stereotypical ways of thinking about female murderers and provide grounds for well-argued personal opinion.
Introduction
The topic for this essay was chosen based on the fact that there is a relatively little number of female murderers compared to male ones which as a consequence leads to misconceptions due to lack of studies and required popularization of the issue. There is a popular opinion that female serial killers do not exist at all.
Perhaps there is not a single person who does not realize how prevalent violence is in our society. There are wars in all parts of the world, an increasing number of crimes such as murder, rape, and armed attacks.
In the mass consciousness, violence is often reduced to a stereotype - purely physical abuse of a person, primarily associated with a crime committed outside the house and by strangers. However, the reality is not what it seems. Women suffer more from domestic violence than robbery, rape by strangers and victims of car accidents combined. But this is a narrow, one-sided approach. In other words, violence as a social phenomenon means discrimination of a person and family, infringement or restriction of their rights and freedoms. Violence exists in open or disguised forms in all spheres of public life: political, economic, spiritual, family and domestic. It has a universal character. Any person and any family, regardless of their social status, the standard of living, place of residence, can become its object. Women are usually pictured based on their social role. They are less aggressive and violent compared to men and that is where some prejudice comes to play. Nobody expects a woman to be a criminal in the first place due to associated maternal and care-giving function.
Main Body
The peculiarity of the relationship between husband and wife in families prone to outbreaks of violence is that their wives can also be the attacker. They are usually less susceptible to physical violence than men, but nevertheless, at times are able to demonstrate clear aggressiveness. This happens most often when men provoke them or break out into threats, prompting them to take protective measures. However, even in an excited state, not many of the wives actually strike their spouse. (Berkowitz, 1993)
You might be surprised to know how many women are able to act in a last way. After analyzing data from a study conducted in 1975 on families in which only one spouse resorted to violence, Murray Straus and his co-workers discovered that their husband acted as the sole source of aggression in 28% of cases, and his wife in 23%. Information about the frequency of committing aggressive actions paints a largely similar picture. (Mikhailova, 2001) According to the results of the same study in 1975, wives attacked their spouses, inflicting on them both light and serious injuries, about as often as their husbands did. It turned out that women were seriously injured in 8.9%, and men - in 8.0% of such cases. Thus, no matter how different the statistical information about the commission of violent acts by men and women outside the home, in their own families, the wives no less than their husbands struck their spouses or threatened them with knives or pistols (which reflects the availability of weapons in the USA). (Berkowitz, 1993)
Interesting, cited by Mac Neely and Robinson Simpson, the data that in a domestic skirmish, in an exchange of blows, the probability that a man, usually with greater physical strength, will inflict more damage to a woman than she to him will be higher. However, spouses do not necessarily fight only with their hands or feet. They can also use various objects, such as knives and pistols, which are capable of inflicting much more serious damage than a bare fist.
Moreover, according to the data of these researchers, in many cases, it is the woman who resorts to the use of weapons. When analyzing more than 6,000 cases of domestic violence (in 1973–1975), weapons were used in 25% of cases in which the woman was the victim of violence, and in 80% of the cases in which the man became the victim. Thus, a man was more likely to get seriously injured in a quarrel with his wife. (Berkowitz, 1993)
A woman, of course, is not the main aggressor, and she does not always resort to violence first. Quite often, a woman only responds with physical actions to insults and threats. However, regardless of whether she was the initiator of the conflict or not, a woman can cause serious damage to her spouse (in any case in the USA).
Almost all researchers of family problems noted one feature of its members, prone to violence: many of these people themselves were victims of violence in childhood. In fact, the attention of scientists turned to this line so often that in our time it has become quite customary to talk about the cyclical nature of the manifestation of aggressiveness or, in other words, about the transfer of the tendency to aggression from generation to generation.
Violence begets violence, so say these researchers of family problems. People who have been abused during childhood usually also become prone to aggression. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, and some family specialists are wondering whether there is real evidence that forms of abusive behavior are passed on from generation to generation. However, the accumulated research results are increasingly in favor of the validity of the concept of a cycle of violence. (Berkowitz, 1993)
Studies conducted by the INPS in 1975 revealed a pattern: the more often a man or a woman was subjected to physical exertion in childhood, the higher was the likelihood of their ill-treatment of their future wife or husband, as were the parents most cleanly subjected to corporal punishment in their family own memories) were among those most likely to be mistreated with their children. (Berkowitz, 1993) According to the same data, men who saw parents in childhood fighting became aggressive husbands twice as often as men who did not observe similar family scenes in childhood. In a study by Hotaling and Sugarmen, in 90% of the works analyzed by them, it was found that husbands who beat their wives more often than normal men witnessed cases of aggression in their family. The same authors found that battered women also often observed scenes of violence in their families in childhood. (Berkowitz, 1993)
The authors cite a number of reasons why familiarity with childhood violence contributes to the manifestation of aggression in adulthood.
Firstly, it is people who often see scenes of violence become relatively indifferent to aggressive behavior. Their ability to suppress internal aggression may be rather weak due to the lack of perception that it is unacceptable to attack other people in order to achieve their own interests. (Richardson & Baron, 1994)
Secondly, learning can play a big role when children learn the right actions in a particular situation by observing the actions of other people. So, the boys, seeing the brawl of adults, learn that they can solve their problems by attacking another person.
Last and most obvious, people can also mimic the actions of their parents. When mothers and fathers choose physical violence as a punishment for their children, they often tell them after the fact: “In the future, act like me.” Thus, they taught their son or daughter to the idea of the need for strict punishment of the child in case of violation of the existing rules. It is possible that at the same time they convinced their children that aggression is an effective way to solve many problems. (Berkowitz, 1993)
It must be immediately added that parental clashes do not necessarily cause serious emotional trauma to each child and thus could not be called a common reason for women to commit violent crimes driven only by poor family relationship. Some children may not experience the serious consequences of family quarrels, or at least experience them in a form that does not immediately become understandable to the outside observer. But even if this is so, then open clashes between father and mother can be considered as a risk factor that increases the likelihood that their child, becoming an adult, will also show a tendency to aggression. (Berkowitz, 1993)
It should be noted that the pattern - “violence begets violence” is also true in the sense that insults to another will most likely cause a response in the form of violence than detente and conflict resolution.
Another interesting situation to consider is when women kill not their spouses but their children. I believe it carries a complex and convoluted character of the question since women traditionally carry out their maternal duties.
Sometimes, a woman might have an internal conflict which might lead to committing suicide. There has recently been a case in Bremen when a woman intentionally provoked a gas tank explosion which killed her and her little son. Police considered severe depression and frustration as the leading motive for the crime. The most popular grounds for such behavior would be described as an unwillingness to leave one’s child alone in an allegedly violent world. Only in this way will these women find liberation and salvation for them and their children.
The previous example represents a common tendency – women tend to kill having a positive intention as their motive while men would most likely have revenge as a prevailing reason to kill their children. However, it often appears that former partners kill exactly common children. Men more frequently than women kill their ex-partners and kids due to revenge, jealousy, and anger. They would often have narcissistic characteristics.
Another curious motive for a mother to commit murder is doubt and fear of failure to carry out expected responsibilities. I have heard a story that a woman who graduated from an early childhood education program has killed her own daughter. It is hard to believe, but the girl was only six months old. A young mother was afraid that she would not be able to raise a child with physical defects after she dropped the girl on a tile floor. She did not call emergency and did not go to the hospital but only put the child back in the cradle. After two hours the girl stopped breathing, the woman called a doctor but the only thing he could do is to state the death.
Often, it is chronic stress which causes parents to stop paying attention to their children so they stop care for them not expecting that it might lead to death. It then evolves into the feeling of guilt and most likely leads to more complicated psychological issues. In other cases, it might even end up being psychotic states.
A famous example is Waneta Hoyt. After she killed 5 of her 6 children with the oldest being 2 years old she said she killed them because they wouldn’t stop crying. A cry is a loud noise which might cause frustration, panic, and annoyance. Some people are of the opinion that she also had a Munchausen syndrome by proxy which provoked those terrible murders.
Usually, murders like that have a groundbreaking reason and do not appear out of anywhere. An example is Marybeth Tinning. Over 13 years she suffocated 8 of her own children. She lost a newborn to natural causes in 1972 which led to a series of murders caused by guilt and doubt. Her words were recorded as “I am not a good mother.”
Opinion
I believe that social media and papers played a giant role in creating a female killer image and formed readers` attitude towards female offenders. Their murders were more isolated but way more notable for the eyes of the public than those crimes committed by male killers. Women`s crimes had always attracted more emphasis and attention of the general public and patriarchal society.
After thorough research on female killers’ studies it was concluded that many studies of violence by females tend to be limited to small numbers of cases (fewer than 20) because there are small numbers of reported cases. (Nettleton, 2016)
In a domestic setting, it is common for an ordinary woman to fight back and protect herself in the face of the batterer in a traditional relationship. At least, it seems common to me. A mentally healthy person is driven by a motive of self-defense. At that point, it is more about personal safety and not about an attack.
If a woman chooses to kill her partner, it might be sparked by financial benefits. However, greed for money is one of the most primitive reasons for any human to commit a crime so it does not seem suitable to me to consider it in this research just because it is not an outstanding feature for the particular case we take into consideration.
Overall, the most distinctive feature that has grabbed my attention in a number of sources analyzed is that those women were not properly heard by society. What I mean is that if society would have paid more attention to problems women face on a daily basis, it would be much easier to prevent a decent number of tragedies. Nowadays, a woman works like a perpetual motion machine – career, household chores, and family, and many more things going on in a modern fast-paced environment. We are all stressed and do not know how to take our time for some things. It is not absolute, but applicable to many of us. Ideally, if women choose maternity as a conscious, well-weighted step in their life, they would seldom kill their kids just because they cry all their time. If a woman who seeks help with raising her child requires help, it should be diagnosed and precautions should be taken beforehand, so mothers who struggle do not desperately kill their children. More social attention has to be paid in order to keep a pulse on individuals’ mental health. It is not only about women, it also touches everybody. And not only mental health should be a concern. If a woman experiences domestic violence herself, it increases her chance to become a subject of the action and creates a motive to commit a murder towards her spouse or partner. (Especially, when they know they might get away from it playing a victim). That is why it is important to stay socially responsible and improve oneself in that sense to make a change. Women give hints which often remain to be misunderstood or misheard. Some topics are still failed to be loudly discussed. It is hard to judge women who are violent in domestic setting since all of us “store our skeletons in our wardrobes”.
Conclusion
The problem of domestic violence has long existed in all countries and reflects the disharmony and imbalances that exist in relationships in society. The severity of this problem indicates an unhealthy social and moral environment. In fact, we are accustomed to seeing in the media, on television and in movies, all kinds of violence. They began to treat it calmly and not to notice. Tolerance of society to any kind of violence, including domestic violence, is, in essence, the rejection of the creation of modern civilized society.
Domestic violence violates such human rights as the right of everyone to protection before the law and the absence of discrimination on the basis of sex, age, marital or social status; the right not to be ill-treated; the right to life and physical integrity; the right to high standards of physical and mental health. It is not customary to pay attention to the problem of violence of women, but perhaps the problem is more global and acute than it is commonly believed.
References
Berkowitz, L. (1993). Aggression: Its causes, consequences, and control. New York, NY, England: Mcgraw-Hill Book Company.
Mikhailova, O. (2001). Psychological mechanisms of criminal sexual aggression. Rostov-on-Don.
Nettleton, P. H. (2016). Lady Killers: Twenty Years of Magazine Coverage of Women Who Kill Their Abusers. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Richardson, D., & Baron, R. (1994). Perspectives in social psychology. Human aggression (2nd ed.). New York, NY, US: Plenum Press.