According to tradition, little girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice,” meaning they are docile and consistently sweet-tempered. Yet violent incidents involving female children are quite common. 24% of four-year-old girls are physically aggressive, while 27% of boys in the same age group use force to try to achieve goals or get their own way. These behaviors used to be rapidly socially conditioned out of little girls, but this no longer appears to be the case.
Statistics Indicate Violent Female Criminals on the Rise
The majority of adult child abusers (59%) are female; women are involved in 32% of child fatalities. Between 1992 and 1996, the percentage of violent crimes committed by females, including armed robbery and aggravated assault, increased by 23%.
Nonetheless, many people continue to insist that boys are naturally violent and assaultive; while female children are noted mainly for passivity.
Men and Women Have Traditionally Killed Using Different Methods
One of the reasons the myth of female non-aggression continues is that men have not “flown under the radar” as well as female criminals. Men had a tendency to utilize knives, guns, bludgeons, and so forth; the sexual/power motivation behind their crimes is more obvious.
Women often kill children, other women, or elderly or sickly males, and they have usually used methods such as poison (less blatant than the traditionally male weapons of choice) to dispatch their victims. This is not a new phenomenon by any means. In the 1880s, so many female poisoners were operating in Great Britain that Parliament actually discussed passing legislation to ban sales of arsenic to women. German serial poisoner Anna Zanswiger commented after her death sentence, “It is perhaps better for the community that I should die, as it would be impossible for me to stop poisoning people.”
The typical female choice of weapon may be changing, however; as gun violence by females is also on the rise. The latest example is the 2010 University of Alabama mass murder in Huntsville, where a Harvard-educated female professor faces capital murder charges in the alleged slaying of three coworkers at a faculty meeting.
Why Female Serial Killers go Unrecognized
There have been over 100 female serial killers caught in the last 100 years; about one-half of whom were captured in the U.S. in the last 35 years. Nonetheless, when Florida prostitute Aileen Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992, she was loudly proclaimed “America’s first female serial killer” by the press, largely because she wielded a firearm during her crime spree.
A cultural bias against correlating women and violent offenses has existed for centuries. Female serial killers generally start killing somewhat later in life than males, but they operate on average about twice as long before capture; possibly because society refuses to recognize how dangerous they are. While male serial killers are vilified in the press as “the Ripper” or “the Night Stalker,” we wrap our female slayers in cutesy nicknames like “Giggling Grandma,” “Old Shoebox Annie,” “Jolly Jane,” and “the Barbie Killer.”
When female serial murderers are not considered simply adorable, they must be seductive and sensual: the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, Lady Bluebeard.
Failing a sexy persona, they just have to be a sympathetic sort; no matter how black their crimes actually are. Charlene Theron’s portrayal of Wuornos in the 2003 biopic Monster implies that she was really a fairly nice person, an abused child who never grew up; and a soft-hearted romantic who, if true love had only entered her life earlier, would have never slain six men in cold blood.
Imagine such wildly idealistic malarkey applied to a male serial killer, like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy, and the insidious nature of the myth of female non-violence will become clearer. A problem denied, romanticized, and covered-up is virtually impossible to solve.
See also, Sillup, Amy, "Angels of Death and Infanticides," Politics & Society, Law, Crime, and Justice, Suite 101.
Sources
Garbarino, Dr. James, See Jane Hit: Why Girls Are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It, Penguin, 2006.
Schechter, Harold, The Serial Killer Files, Ballantine, 2003.
Vronsky, Peter, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters, Berkley Publishing Group, 2007.
Anna Zanzwiger’s statement taken from Schechter, p. 37.
Amy Sillup - I have a B.S. in Chemistry from Delaware Valley College and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. I have worked as a ...
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