WHY WOMEN COMMIT CRIMES
HISTORICAL TRADITION
REPRESENTATION OF
•hunters, warriors, bread winners
•focus on male violence
•nine cases out of ten
•murder, involuntary manslaughter by assault
REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN
•concept of mother/sister/daughter
•social restrictions: by nature, are ‘hard-wired’ to care for and nurture
•victims: male (intimate partners)
•home environment
•asphyxia (suffocation)
•manslaughter or infanticide
CELEBRATION OF WOMEN’S VIOLENCE
•female warriors such as Joan of Arc, Boudicca and the Amazon fighters
•leading role in the military
•the Nazis trained half a million women for military service, some 3,500 of whom served as concentration camp guards
There are still over 2,000 more women behind bars today than in the 1990s, and women make up around 5 per cent of the prison population.
‘HONOUR’-BASED
•a collection of practices, which are used to control behaviour within families to protect perceived cultural and religious beliefs and/or honour.
•women were both conspirators and hands-on killers in brutal crimes against
other women, even their own relatives, and could also be
EXAMPLES
JUDIAS BUENOANO
• Buenoano killed her husband James Goodyear, her son Michael Buenoano, her boyfriend Bobby Joe Morris, and potentially her boyfriend Gerald Dossett
• She was the first woman to be executed in Florida since 1848 and was the third woman to be executed in the U.S. since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976.
AILEEN WUORNOS
• She was captured after a minor traffic accident in one of her victims’ cars. She told the police that she murdered the men in self-defense because they raped her while she worked as a prostitute. However, she was sentenced to death for six of the murders. In 2003, a movie of her life, titled Monster and starring Charlize Theron, was released to high praise.