Why are women who kill regarded as ‘doubly deviant’?

When Molly Martens and her father Thomas were arriving in court a fortnight ago for sentencing for the manslaughter of Jason Corbett (39), the body of another victim of domestic violence – also aged 39 – was being brought from the United States to Ireland for burial.

Like Corbett, Denise Morgan was a parent – her daughter Mollie was “the centre of her life”, her funeral mass in Co Louth heard. Her killer, Joed Taveras, shot himself dead. “There will be no justice for her in this world,” said parish priest Fr Seán Dooley.

There is no hierarchy of grief but a grim reality is that some killings get more public attention than others. And some killers attract more notoriety.

According to historian and author Prof Joanna Bourke, how we reflect upon and remember violent crime says something about our cultural norms. Historically, women who committed vile acts such as murder were “doubly-damned, doubly-deviant” in the eyes of the community, she says.

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“If women do these particularly horrendous crimes it’s seen as somehow much worse than when men do it, that it’s much more difficult to explain. Men don’t commit these acts much either but somehow this is an extreme of what we consider to be masculinity whereas it’s not there, or it’s not supposed to be there, with women.”

Bourke is in Ireland this week to deliver a talk on the theme, which includes research from her forthcoming book. The well-travelled academic, who was born in New Zealand to a family with distant Tipperary roots, has a track record of tackling tricky subjects. Her 2020 book exploring “the modern history of sex between humans and animals” prompted calls from Australia’s arts minister for her to be banned from a public conference.

Conscious of how quickly discussions of violent crime can drift into “whataboutery”, she emphasises she is not trying to downplay terrible acts committed by women. However, such acts can be magnified for a number of reasons. Some of it is to do with their comparative rarity but “a lot of it is about going against one’s nature, the idea that violence is a property of men”.

Looking at famous cases such as Myra Hindley, Rose West and Karla Faye Tucker, she says examples of “evil women” are deployed in wider cultural debates, including “a rather invidious anti-feminist debate about ‘women do it too’.” She says: “There’s a big argument that says gender is irrelevant for these discussions [about evil] because women behave just like men and they are just as capable of evil as men are, and part of the undercurrent of this argument is ‘And women are now doing it more because of feminism’; as women become more equal to men they become more like men in their actions and therefore are more likely to act violently.

“There are many responses to that. The first response is women don’t act violently as often as men. The second is the chronology doesn’t work. The third is men still carry out the most crimes, and they carry out these crimes of rape and murder against women.”

In some cases, women are punished more harshly than men for the same crime, says Bourke. Also, “the men disappear; you never hear about them again” but the women stay in the public consciousness. She gives Hindley as an example – the police mugshot of her “remains an icon” whereas people today would struggle to name her accomplice, Ian Brady, from his photograph alone.

But is there more to be said for the argument that women are, by nature, less violent? After all, it is commonly claimed that the world would be a more peaceful place if there were more women leaders.

“I strongly do believe that women potentially make better leaders. They are less likely to go immediately to military solutions or violent solutions. We have good evidence of this in the context of wartime violence. Societies where violence is low are precisely those societies where there is a high proportion of women in positions of power and where there is lower military spending.

“This is not innate to being female – not at all – and it’s also not innate to being male to be aggressive and to use violence. These are deeply socialised attributes assigned to different genders. In order to make a success of life, girls and women tend to act in a particular way, and boys and men in another way,” says Bourke, who is delivering the annual Edmund Burke lecture at Trinity College Dublin.

Over the past five years, she headed up an international research project on sexual violence – the key concern of which is “how can we create worlds without violence”. To that end, she says it is “really important not to confuse trying to understand or explain” violence with excusing it.

“I do believe really strongly that by analysing violence, making some kind of sense of senseless violence, that it’s a step towards a world where we don’t have this.”

* Prof Joanna Bourke’s lecture ‘Contemplating Evil: “Monstrous” Women in History, Politics, and Law, 1890s to the Present’, hosted by Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, takes place on Thursday, November 16th at 6.30pm. Tickets are free from eventbrite.com