No, I don’t think courts should be draconian, but there have to be limits to how much we are prepared to “understand” offenders. A very beautiful girl from a good family lures a lonely, middle-aged man she meets in a bar up to her flat to rob him of his plump wallet. She tries to strangle him with her stockings, but needs to call her boyfriend up on his cell-phone for support. Bad idea! Yet some months later, the girl makes doe-eyes at a judge and jury and gets off as good as free. The boyfriend is not so lucky. This case, a very local one, happened a few years ago and was the first link in a chain of events that have set me to wondering about our equality before the law.

Since then there have been numerous other cases in Belgium, France, Germany and probably elsewhere in Europe, in which a female culprit has been treated with unexpected, almost deferential leniency by a court. I am not sure whether the justice system has yet learned that sexual equality is also an expression of impartiality, because nowadays, women almost ALWAYS get a better deal. Their circumstances are somehow more mitigating, their motives more comprehensible, particularly for serious and what were previously “capital” offenses.

No one digs very deep into the motivation of the male murderer, wife beater or sex offender. He’s just bad to the bone: it’s that simple. But when a woman chops up her children, buries her babies, poisons her husband, lets her lover torture her three-year-old son with cigarette burns, hides pieces of her ex in the freezer or aids her significant other in a nasty abduction and killing, we go all touchy-feely about the trauma she must have suffered to have reached this point: the pressures of her domestic environment, the fragility of her will, a lack of love, an over-forgiving and too malleable nature, a terrible past or a dark childhood. The press, male and female, goes looking for something we can comprehend, something we can use as an excuse, if only a partial one.

What they find is usually vengeance, jealousy, sexual depravity or good old-fashioned greed. None of these are anything the male of the species is immune to, but somehow they seem more appealing, less damning when the deadly vector is female. Female offenders spend significantly less time behind bars for capital offenses and proportionally more of them receive commuted sentences or the cushier option of institutional treatment. Female criminals awaken our compassion; the quality of our mercy is less strained. Someone (male) must be at the root. Someone (male) must have put them up to it, worked on them, coerced them and messed with their minds. Yeah, yeah, cherchez l’homme!

You see, we want women to be “innocent” with their “guilt”. We look at our mothers, our sisters, our daughters and imagine how we could possibly condemn that which we cannot grasp. And so we try to encompass, try to sympathise, and end up with excuses and a fuzzy sort of closure. We develop an instinctive, inherently self-justifying (because socially acceptable) line of unreason: the man who kills is a killer; the woman who kills is expressing her emotions inappropriately.

Personally I call that sexism and not even reverse sexism, but plain, down-home, old-school, macho condescension. Hey girl, even when you top your boss with an axe, we still won’t take you seriously. There’s nothing sexier than a femme fatale. Come back Roxy Hart, all is forgiven.


© Edwin Drood, June 2012