"In revenge and in love woman is far more barbarous than man." - Nietzsche
It is interesting to pull back from the study of individual cases to look at the broad patterns of crime and put the individuals in context. When women kill (SUNY Press 1996) by Coramae Richey Mann [Amazon ... SUNY Press] from the SUNY Series in Violence reviews the research from the 1950s to the 1990s on female homicide offenders. The author also did original research, studying hundreds of female murderers in six U.S. cities. Interesting patterns emerge that do not change much over time.
Of course, no human society has ever produced women who kill as often as their men. Women are roughly 15 percent of those arrested for violent crime. That number does not seem to change much over the generations. They commit the same types of homicides (justifiable, excusable, vehicular, negligent, intentional). Their motives are the same as men (self-defense, accident, defense of others, alcohol, mental illness, rage, jealousy, revenge, robbery).
Where there are differences: women tend to kill in their own home or the victim's home (or both) (70 percent). The female homicide offender has an average age of 31. Women become murderers at an older age than men. Women are more likely to kill at night than during the day. Women usually kill in anger in the kitchen with a knife or in jealousy or rage in the bedroom with a gun.
Female-on-female homicide is extremely rare; women usually kill men or children. When a woman kills her lover, it's usually in the bedroom (22 percent), sometimes the den or the yard, the driveway, the alley behind the pub. Lizzie Borden aside, axes or hatchets are rarely chosen by women as weapons. Poison is unheard-of today. Guns are used in the majority of cases and a knife a third of the time. Usually there is a single gunshot or stab wound.
This book also examined the punishment of female offenders, such as it is; women do get preferential treatment, no question of it.
A woman can call the police, announce her murder plans, and kill a man in public view of his entire set and more or less get away with it. The studies say so (though some outlier studies say otherwise) but -- the anecdotes in the book are shocking. Here is one to end this review and prove the point:
At about 2:20 on a Sunday morning, Amy, twenty-seven. here, min why was ten years her senior, in the walkway to her parent. Although both had been drinking for hours prior to the murder, they had not been drinking together. Earlier that Saturday the couple had argued, and Amy called the police to say that she was going to kill her lover. Witnesses later reported that the victim was beating Amy in the street that evening and hanging her head against a wall. Amy admitted going to her mother's house and obtaining a shotgun from her mother's boyfriend. When the mother's boyfriend tried to stop her, she shot in the air, reloaded the gun, and went looking for the victim at his friends' houses. Upon returning to her home, she found him waiting for her. As the victim walked toward her, Amy claimed that somehow the shotgun went off and the homicide was an accident. Despite having a prior arrest for felonious assault with a deadly weapon and another for cruelty to a child, Amy was charged with voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to one year in jail, with three years' probation plus a fine.
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