The women that kill, abuse and torture

bbc.com/future/story/20160601-the-women-that-kill-abuse-and-torture

By Katharine Quarmby From Mosaic 2 June 2016

Its the visit that we all hope well never experience. The police arrive at your home to tell you that a family member
has been murdered. For Marian Partington, 20 years of not knowing what happened to her sister Lucy ended with
one such visit on a Saturday morning in March 1994.
Lucy disappeared in December 1973 while waiting for a bus in Cheltenham. She was 21 years old and in her final
year of an English degree at the University of Exeter. It was two decades before Lucy was found and the grim truth
about her death could emerge. She had been tortured, murdered, dismembered and buried in the cellar of 25
Cromwell Street, Gloucester, along with other victims of the serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.
Fred West took his own life in prison on New Years Day 1995. In the November of the same year, Rosemary was
convicted of ten murders, including that of her 16-year-old daughter, her eight-year-old stepdaughter and her
husbands pregnant lover. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Lucys death was about sexual exploitation and cruelty, Marian says. Her death was tortured and tortuous. But I
couldnt 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 didnt 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.
Rosemary West has become one of the most hated figures in Britain's recent history (Credit: Rex Images)
Coming to terms with the crime has not been easy. Marian recalls Wests committal. I dont 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 dont 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

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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.

Women would strew chilli pepper around houses, knowing it would cause any hiding children to
sneeze

The sense of betrayal when women were involved seemed deeper, somehow, because women shouldnt 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 womens lib would lead to
a wave of aggressive crime, says Frances Heidensohn, a criminologist and visiting professor at the London School
of Economics. Womens share of crime has increased a bit, but we havent 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

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 Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary on honour-based violence,
female genital mutilation and forced marriage concluded that both men and women are perpetrators. Female family

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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.
In May 1993, nurse Beverley Allitt, known in the media as the Angel of Death, was sentenced after being found
guilty of murdering four children and harming several others. On 5 May, the Daily Express, a UK daily newspaper
opined: Women should nurture, not harm. By and large they do. Even today, violence is a male speciality. But
nurses are supposed to be the epitome of female care. They are the angels of newspaper headlines. When women
do things like this, it seems unnatural, evil, a perversion of their own biology.
The paper was summing up what is known as the biological essentialism argument that women, by nature, are
hard-wired to care for and nurture, rather than to hurt and kill. Men do, of course, commit more violence than
women. But are our brains and bodies, through genes and chemicals, responsible for the crime gender gap? Are
women who commit violent crimes therefore doubly deviant and, somehow, not really women?
The idea of there being a typical male and female brain or character is not backed up by current research.
In one paper, Gina Rippon of Aston University and colleagues highlight non-trivial overlap between men and
women on traits that are commonly considered either masculine or feminine, such as physical aggression, tendermindedness and mental rotation. Recent papers by others have characterised the extent of the overlap between
men and women. In fact, Rippon says, splitting the people they are studying into male and female is actually
impeding progress in gaining any insights into how brain and behaviour relate.
But while male violence is sometimes valorised in war, for example or tolerated as in a pub brawl its rarely
the same for womens violence. We either pity the women who commit heinous crimes or try hard to distance
ourselves from them. Rather than identify with them, it is easier to class each woman who abuses or kills as
exceptional instead. Particular cases are elevated to mythical status, and those who perpetrate them are pitied or
vilified, rather than understood. The image created by female offenders can be more powerful, because it is seen as
transgressive of gender. It leaves a longer-lasting impression.

All too often, women offenders are painted as mad, bad or sad

Another way to deny female violence is to argue that women act only under the influence of evil men. All too often,
women offenders are characterised as mad (and so to be pitied, rather than blamed), bad (set aside from women
as a whole) or sad (forced into violence by pressure of circumstance, in retaliation or by coercion).
Typically, a woman who is violent will have her sexuality portrayed as deviant, and her sexual attractiveness or
lack of examined. Her role as a woman will also be scrutinised is she a bad wife, or a bad mother? We need to
keep the very essence of womanhood separate from, and untainted by, women who kill.
Intimate terrorism
Home is meant to be where we feel safe, somewhere were looked after and nurtured, so violence that occurs there,
or in other places where people are cared for, seems the most shocking. The traditional focus on male violence in
intimate relationships is understandable, as men are more often the perpetrators, and women are more likely to
suffer serious injury or die. However, men are not always the offenders, and women not always the victims.
According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, in 2014/15, 27 per cent of women and 13 per cent of men
had experienced any type of domestic abuse since the age of 16, equivalent to an estimated 4.5 million female
victims and 2.2 million male victims. Same-sex relationships are no less violent than heterosexual ones. A 2013

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study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 44 per cent of lesbians had been physically
assaulted by a partner, compared to 35 per cent of straight women. Bisexual women were even more likely to be
targeted.
The much-cherished role of mother, key to the identity of so many women, cant be ignored, especially when it
becomes distorted for example in cases of sexual abuse. Dr Anna Motz, a clinical and forensic psychologist and
psychotherapist, explains how difficult it is to scrutinise that role: We can now talk about women as sexual beings.
That has been possible since the rise of feminism, she says, but, related to that, women can be deviant and misuse
their role as care giver and mother, and it has slowly become more possible to think about it, allow it to be seen.
Estimates by charities working with perpetrators and victims of child abuse vary, but according to ChildLine, a UK
charity for children, 17 per cent of its calls from children reporting sexual abuse are about women. The Lucy Faithfull
Foundation, which works to safeguard children and young people from sexual abuse, estimates that women are
responsible for somewhere between 10 and 20% of all sexual offences against children. But, according to official
statistics, 1% of all child sex offences are committed by women. This discrepancy is likely in part because children
who say they have been abused by a woman are not always believed.

Mothers are also thought to be responsible for almost all cases of (albeit rare) Munchausens
syndrome by proxy

In the UK, in 2014/15 (as in other years), the age group with the highest rate of homicide was children under one
they accounted for 5 per cent of homicide victims but only 1 per cent of the population. The majority of children that
are murdered are killed by a parent or step-parent. While mothers are responsible for a large proportion of the
murders of very young infants mothers are more likely than fathers to kill their child soon after birth fathers are
more likely to kill in later childhood. Mothers are also thought to be responsible for almost all cases of (albeit rare)
Munchausens syndrome by proxy, also known as fabricated or induced illness.
Mother, stands for comfort?
Estela Welldon has explored the relationship between mothers and children. This relationship can, at its worst, turn
perverse and damage children, sometimes irretrievably. Womens violence, she writes, is directed towards their
own bodies or their creations their children.
My discovery was about the internal circular motion of perversion. When it happens again and again it gives you a
new theoretical framework, she says. Welldons book Mother, Madonna, Whore was banned in one iconic feminist
bookstore in north London. Even now, some feminists see her as a traitor to the cause. I broke new ground and
some people do not forgive you for that, Welldon says, but she stood firm, knowing that her findings came straight
out of clinical observations that she felt she could not ignore.
I began to think and listen: What are they talking about? They hate their child It is important to think, and not to
judge. Welldons work has changed clinical practice, and her work at the Portman Clinic in London led the way in
treating violent women using intensive psychoanalysis and group therapy.
Psychologist and psychotherapist Anna Motz says that the idealisation of motherhood and the denial of the capacity
for female violence can prove a risky mix, particularly for mothers who were damaged themselves at some point.
Women are forced into caring roles, says Motz, but can become envious of those for whom they care vulnerable
creatures. When they have been abused or neglected themselves, she argues, they can re-enact violence on that
vulnerable creature, or another who takes that place in their imagination: a sadistic revenge crime against their own
abuser in their own minds, at least.

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Women who kill or abuse their own child are often trying to annihilate a hated part of themselves, she says, and they
see the baby as part of themselves too. In more recent, disturbing work, Motz has started to explore the world of
what she calls toxic couples, where two damaged people come together and create their own family, which gets
damaged in turn most famously seen with serial killer couples such as the Wests.
We view women who kill in domestic settings with horror except those who are mentally ill, are seen as defending
themselves against domestic violence, or are carrying out so-called mercy killings of their children. For individual
women, this can result in sympathetic legal treatment, but treatment that removes responsibility from them (and a
chance of justice for those affected). Men who kill their young children, even if they are mentally disturbed, are very
rarely treated with similar sympathy.
To what extent has our propensity to excuse some sorts of female violence allowed some women to, quite literally,
get away with murder? In a piece of historical research, criminologists Dr Elizabeth Yardley and Professor David
Wilson analysed Mary Ann Cotton, who murdered many of her family members some sources suggest as many
as 21.

The FBI still thinks of women who kill as reluctant sidekicks

Yardley, who dubs such intimate killers hearthside murderers, says: She was constantly creating manifestations of
the family that she would then wipe out. This feeds into our expectations of women, that they are carers and
nurturers and to a large extent this hasnt changed. It is only recently that we have acknowledged that female serial
killers, for example, exist. The FBI still thinks of women who kill as reluctant sidekicks.
Cotton killed alone, and her motive seemed to be money. Yardley adds that studies suggest that some 15 per cent of
serial killers may be women an underrepresentation, but not an absence per se. Recent data for England and
Wales reported that in 2014/15, 9 per cent of homicide suspects were women, and in 19 per cent of all recorded
violent incidents the offender was a woman.
The sex lives of murderers like Myra Hindley (right) often come under intense scrutiny (Credit: Alamy)
Away from the home, other places where vulnerable people are looked after, such as care settings, can be a place
of opportunity for dangerous women. In conjunction with Wilson, Yardley has also carried out research into what are
known as healthcare serial killers (HSKs), with the most famous British case being that of the nurse Beverley Allitt.
Yardley and Wilson found that there was a growing body of evidence suggesting that HSKs tended to murder the
people least able to protect themselves (such as the elderly or young), were of a more or less even gender split
(with slightly higher numbers of female perpetrators), and that most murdered both male and female victims. In all,
63 per cent had a history of mental instability or depression.
Enabling murder
Myra Hindley is arguably the UKs number one woman folk devil. One half of the Moors Murderers alongside Ian
Brady, Hindley killed five children in the north of England between July 1963 and October 1965. As a young woman,
barrister Helena Kennedy QC acted for Myra Hindley when she was put on trial after an abortive prison escape.
Kennedys book Eve Was Framed, about the injustices women suffer at the hands of the criminal justice system,
remains a key text about women and violence, but she is not starry-eyed about the subject. The Myra that I was
seeing was no longer the Myra that was, the ill-educated girl that was in thrall to a very powerful character and
sexually intoxicated by him and wanted to meet his needs, she says. But can you hang up your moral
responsibility? No. She may not have killed children, but she was an enabler; the children might never have got into
cars with a strange man. With a woman there, it changes the whole perception of a situation, it makes it seem safe.

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Kennedy thinks that it was right that Hindley was never released, given that Britain does not have the death penalty,
although she sets that judgement in a wider context. Women are less forgiven, she says. We live by two sets of
rules: the criminal justice system and the other set of rules. This other set, she says, encompasses the sense that
you have done something that runs counter to the rules of womanhood.
We expect women to be better than men there is that unspoken thing that we are more shocked when women
do terrible things. I feel it myself, she says. Kennedys analysis goes some way to explain the sheer hatred of
women who do break the taboo or even those who are connected to them, however innocent.

Myra Hindleys sister and brother-in-law were instrumental in her conviction yet they were
ostracised in the community and physically attacked for years afterwards

David Smith, who was married to Maureen, Myra Hindleys sister, witnessed the brutal murder (by Brady and
Hindley) of Edward Evans on 6 October 1965 and went to the police, which stopped their killing spree. His later
testimony as chief prosecution witness was instrumental in their conviction. Yet he and Maureen were not only
ostracised in the community; they were physically attacked for years afterwards. His account of the day in 1966 that
he and Maureen, then heavily pregnant, left their flat so he could give evidence says: The crowds screams reach
fever pitch I know from experience that most of them are women and many will have brought their kids along
were manhandled into the car, the doors slam shut and fists pound on the windows in another unforgettable
symphony of hatred.
It is hard to forgive violent women, castigated as they are for offending twice: once for their crimes, once for
breaching unwritten essentialist rules. But there are some extraordinary people who are able to do that. As
impossible as it might seem, Marian Partington is able to talk about Rosemary West, her sisters torturer and killer,
with empathy. Her journey has also helped the family of the perpetrators to move on. Freds brother Douglas has
been in touch, as has Anne Marie Davis, Freds daughter, who was grievously abused.
Hindley's sister and her brother-in-law came under attack from the local community - despite the fact that their
evidence was crucial for the conviction (Credit: Getty Images)
Forgiving Rosemary West was no easy task. Marian had to make an effort to humanise her, rather than to
demonise her. But the cycle of violence that psychologist Anna Motz refers to made sense to Marian. When I
heard that Rosemary West had been seriously sexually abused by her father and brother and abducted at a bus
stop at the age of 16 I get that. Shes not excusing it, but is trying to understand what it was like to grow up in that
kind of environment. Was there any love? Was it just fear? How could you learn to be loving when you dont have
any love?

It is hard for me to be hopeful when people have killed. It becomes difficult for people in that position
to ever trust themselves again Anna Motz

Does the work of people like Marian demonstrate that there can be redemption for violent women? Anna Motz
believes so. She too talks of forgiving the offenders with whom she has worked, but adds a note of caution. It is
hard for me to be hopeful when people have killed. It becomes difficult for people in that position to ever trust
themselves again. It takes a personal toll on the therapists too. After 25 years in the field, Motz has taken the
difficult decision to leave psychotherapy for a role in consultancy and training related to female offenders instead.
Marian Partingtons journey towards forgiveness began on 16 February 1995 when she wrapped her sister Lucys
bones in the mortuary. She lifted Lucys skull and kissed the bone of her brow. She then wrapped it in Lucys soft

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brown blanket and laid a sprig of heather on top. An old friend, Beryl, placed Lucys childhood toys Chocka and Oneeyed Bunny at each side of her skull, with a posy of primroses. Marian then placed a painted Easter egg in the ring
of her pelvic bone.
Somehow, we all have to see female violence more clearly, and with more empathy. We have to address it head-on,
however hard, rather than just deflecting and distorting it through the prisms of art, literature and the media. That
means doing the difficult stuff, and talking to the women who commit violent acts. It was so important to
acknowledge the place of beauty in the world, despite the horror and the atrocity, says Marian about putting Lucys
bones to rest. What we dont face gets passed on to the next generation.

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