From Mosaic

“Lucy’s death was about sexual exploitation and cruelty,” Marian says. “Her death was tortured and tortuous. But I couldn’t talk about it without facing the horror of what had happened to her. One huge thing was her not having a voice. Lucy was gagged… I felt if I didn’t speak about what had happened, I might as well be dead too.”

Marian works with a secular organisation called the Forgiveness Project and tells her story to male and female prisoners as part of restorative justice work. In 2004 she wrote to Rosemary West – who has become a hated figure in the UK – a letter full of compassion and empathy. West responded by asking her not to be in contact again.

Coming to terms with the crime has not been easy. Marian recalls West’s committal. “I don’t use the word corrupt lightly, but I remember sitting and listening to what she had done… and I could feel myself being corrupted.” Work with female offenders, she says, is particularly challenging.

Women are far less likely than men to commit crimes, but rates of female violence reported in the UK have increased. The number of girls and women arrested for violence has more than doubled between 1999/2000 and 2007/08. Whether this reflects an increase in violence per se or in its visibility – or both – is much debated.

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.

Female violence is not easy to confront, but a growing number of people are exploring the idea that to rehabilitate women offenders and support their victims better we must move towards a more progressive understanding of what makes a woman harm or kill.

A history of violence

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 that 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. A small number stood trial for war crimes.

It was 1997 when I first visited Rwanda, three years after the genocide there. I was struck then, interviewing survivors and perpetrators, and later, when translating testimonies for a charity for survivors, by how many women had been involved. They had taken part 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. One chilling testimony, that haunted me because it implied such intimate knowledge of childhood, reported that women would strew chilli pepper around houses, knowing it would cause any hiding children to sneeze and allow them to be found and hauled out to their death.

Since the 1970s there has been a focus on male violence against girls and women. In many ways that has shifted the framework for characterising violence – particularly intimate and domestic violence – to one that is largely gender-related. This is not surprising – the ‘gender gap’ in recorded crime is well-known. Men commit crime at higher rates than women, are involved more in serious and violent offences (they are responsible for 80 per cent of violent acts), and are more likely to reoffend. They are also more likely to murder their partners, to be convicted of domestic violence and to commit physical stalking and sexual offences.

None of this means, however, that female offenders do not exist – and how they are treated has become a major part of criminological research. “Some American criminologists had argued that so-called ‘women’s lib’ would lead to a wave of aggressive crime,” says Frances Heidensohn, a criminologist and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. “Women’s share of crime has increased a bit, but we haven’t seen a big rise… We are talking about a modest contribution to crime and an overreaction to it, with a sensational treatment of perpetrators.”

The number of women in prison in England and Wales nearly trebled between 1993 and 2005. Although that number is now declining, 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. At end of March 2016, more than a quarter of the women sentenced in English or Welsh prisons were there for violence against the person.

Typically, women commit violence against people they know, often the vulnerable or those dependent on their care – children, disabled people, the elderly. Their crimes happen more in private and intimate ‘caring’ settings than in public.

Women are involved, either as bystanders or leaders, in crimes including ‘honour’-based violence, terrorism and human trafficking. In one recent case, a woman narrowly escaped being murdered by a man who wanted to marry her. Disturbingly, a very close female family member of the woman admitted that she and her husband had known of the planned attack and had waited by the phone to hear whether it had been successful.

This is not unusual. A recent report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary on ‘honour’-based violence, female genital mutilation and forced marriage concluded that both men and women are perpetrators. “Female family members can be involved in facilitating violence and abuse through informal conversation, pressurising males of the family to undertake [honour-based violence] acts or assisting in arranging violence, or actually being involved in the violence or killings,” the report stated. Recent reports have also highlighted the often neglected role women may play in terrorist activities and human trafficking.