Bad Girls


Most data about violent crime and criminal types has centered on males, and that's attributed to the idea that males are more aggressive, violent, and criminally versatile than females. However, it may also have something to do with the fact that most of the researchers and criminologists have been male. Traditionally, it's been more difficult for men to admit to violence in women than to dissect the methods and motives of their own gender. As British philanthropist Lord Astor put it, "Everyone starts out totally dependent on a woman. The idea that she could turn out to be your enemy is terribly frightening."
Yet fear and bias should have no place in research. From a review of the literature, it's clear that we have a long way to go to understand violence in females. "Violence is still universally considered to be the province of the male," says crime researcher Patricia Pearson. "Violence is masculine. Men are the cause of it, and women and children the ones who suffer. The sole explanation offered up by criminologists for violence committed by women is that it is involuntary."
Women are often viewed as "soft" and vulnerable: They're not really equipped for violence and usually end up being accomplices. One male writer even thought it was too cruel to allow a (beautiful) woman who'd killed 20 people in agonizing ways to choke to death on a hangman's noose. Would he have said the same for a male? That's doubtful. While it's true that male murderers far outnumber women, it's also true that all of our conclusions about violence are based on those who have been caught. Who's to say how many female killers and violent offenders there really are?
While researchers repeat one another in pointing out how even in violence, women are still the gentler sex, there are times when a female shows more spunk. Instead of poison, she may grab an ax, even a gun. Instead of killing a customer who failed to pay for drugs, she might bear and kill children one at a time. (In fact, women outnumber men in the deaths of children and come equal to them in killing siblings and parents.)
Some females are just as cold-blooded as males, but female psychopathy is an understudied subject. The feeble attempts to assess a female psychopath�psychopaths being the most criminally versatile and most likely to repeat an offense among all violent offenders ── base conclusions on samples far too small to make any assertions. It's clear that many interpretations about female violence are framed by social projections about what women are supposed to be like, rather than on what they really are like, and there's little acknowledgment of how changing social conditions affect personality. During the 1970s, however, after women were "liberated," there was a surge in violent crime by women. They may not go on a rampage killing, but the lower visibility of their crimes does not discount the lethality of their motives or their viciousness.
Even so, it's clear that the motives for women show a range as diverse as that of males:

• monetary gain
• ridding themselves of a burden
• revenge
• dislike
• pressure from a gang
• seeking power
• following orders
• delusions
• pleasure
• self-defense
• acting out from a history of abuse
• sexual compulsion
• team chemistry
• psychopathy
• misplaced mercy
• depravity
• rivalry

Serial Murderers and Their Victims, bookcover Of the 62 female serial killers in Eric Hickey's study for Serial Murderers and Their Victims, they accounted for between 400 and 600 victims. Some were nurses, some black widows, others were part of a team, and a few were predators. Three-fourths of them began their careers since the 1950s. The average age in the group was 30, and the longest period of killing without apprehension was 34 years. Some were grandmothers. In more recent years, females have turned increasingly toward strangers as victims, but they generally choose easy targets among vulnerable populations. They don't mutilate corpses, which is common to a certain type of male serial killer.
While people are appalled by women who kill their own children, it's more common than we think. Maternal instinct is sometimes no match for deadened emotions or personal ambition. Similarly, people are shocked when a woman who has professed love for her husband poisons his food or hires someone to kill him, but a woman is just as capable as a man of these crimes. Perhaps we don't recognize them as quickly, allowing women to get away with serial crimes for longer periods, because we don't want to. Yet Hickey's analysis showed that women were involved in serial crimes in some way 38 percent of the time.

Female Psychopathy: Equal but Distinct
Volume 2, Issue 2 -- Published: Wednesday, Dec 31, 1997 -- Last Updated: Monday, Mar 11, 2002
Email to a colleague Comment on article Bookmark article Copyright & reprint infoStudies of antisocial personality primarily focus on men, but women antisocials have distinct features. Can the same be true of psychopathy, increasingly distinguished from even those with antisocial personality as the emerging "baddest" of characters?
Researchers examined the construct and predictive validity of psychopathy as applied to 103 jailed female offenders diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (APD) (J Abnormal Psychology 106:4 pp. 576-585). The construct of psychopathy, generated largely on male offender populations, appeared applicable to female offenders; however, their absolute rates of symptoms and severity of symptoms were lower.
Three main instruments were used: (1) PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist—Revised), a 20-item semistructured interview intended to assess the extent to which an individual is judged to be a prototypical psychopathic individual; (2) PAL (Antisocial Scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory) a scale which measures psychopathy, setting it apart from other self-report measures because of its contemporary theoretical base; (3) PDE (Antisocial Scale of the Personality Disorder Examination), an extensive semistructured interview for the assessment of personality disorders. The investigation used concurrent data from these three measures to address hypotheses regarding the connection of different measures of psychopathy and their divergence from different but related traits.
Of the 103 women tested, only 16(16%) scored above the traditional threshold score of 29 designated as a psychopathic individual, as compared with 25% to 30% typically found in male correctional samples. In contrast to the PCL-R, the PAI yielded a substantially larger proportion of persons with psychopathic traits. However, when the PAI cutoff score was raised by 10, the two measures' prevalence rates for psychopathy were highly similar.
The PCL score encompasses measures of interpersonal traits and socially deviant behaviors. Analysis of the PCL-R scores in this female sample identified a substantially different factor structure for women than has been previously found for male psychopaths. For women, interpersonal traits were notable for lack of empathy or guilt, interpersonal deception, proneness to boredom, and sensation seeking. Antisocial factors of strongest link were early behavioral problems, promiscuity, and adult antisocial behavior. Female offenders manifested substantial loadings on two items not found in male populations: promiscuous sexual behavior and lack of realistic long-term goals.
Consistent with other study results, the researchers found psychopathy and histrionic personality disorder to be related in their female sample. Their patterns of results strongly supported the relationship between psychopathy and aggression. But the study also clearly demonstrates that any equation of female psychopathy with acts of aggression or other problematic behaviors is facile and unwarranted. In one surprising finding, the results also suggest that psychopathy among female inmates does not indicate less willingness to receive treatment.
Forensic mental health is in the dawn of a fascination with psychopathy. Some forensic hospitals have already gone so far as to routinely administer psychopathy checklists. Efforts to refine our understanding of psychopathy are timely and needed in light of what may be inappropriate use of PCL-R scores to predict future dangerousness.

However, when the PAI cutoff score was raised by 10, the two measures' prevalence rates for psychopathy were highly similar.
The PCL score encompasses measures of interpersonal traits and socially deviant behaviors. Analysis of the PCL-R scores in this female sample identified a substantially different factor structure for women than has been previously found for male psychopaths. For women, interpersonal traits were notable for lack of empathy or guilt, interpersonal deception, proneness to boredom, and sensation seeking. Antisocial factors of strongest link were early behavioral problems, promiscuity, and adult antisocial behavior. Female offenders manifested substantial loadings on two items not found in male populations: promiscuous sexual behavior and lack of realistic long-term goals.

Meanwhile women are the greatest abusers of children under 4 and it's totally ignored by feminists and their sex-selective followers. Goes back to the "women are blameless" mentality that feminists have always promoted even with studies and facts stating the direct opposite..

To be a feminist is to be a compulsive liar..

A very interesting book (yes, I've read it)..."Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty" by Roy Baumeister.

EVIL. INSIDE HUMAN VIOLENCE AND CRUELTY by Roy Baumeister

W.H.Freeman and Company 1999. ISBN 0-7167-3567-9
Roy Baumeister holds the Professorship of Liberal Arts at Case Western Reserve University. In the preface to his book he states that he has resisted the temptation to use fictional illustrations from literature, films etc. He bases his conclusions on what the criminals themselves say and do.
Coupled with a wide survey of other writing on the subject, Baumeister certainly manages to draws his reader into the world of evil. He proposes that to understand it, one has to identify with it to some extent, and he gives the warning that "....identifying with evil is the first step to perpetrating it, so it is necessary to step back out of that role once one is in it."
It is interesting to look at the U.S. terror bombings in the light of what he has to say.
In chapter 2, "Victims and Perpetrators", he makes the point that almost all perpetrators of evil do not see what they are doing as evil. The Nazis for example set out to correct the (real) injustices of the post WWI Versailles Treaty and avenge the imagined conspiracies and betrayals of Germany. They saw Germany as the victim.
Perhaps similarly, Bin Laden sees the Palestinians as suffering (real) injustice and he sets out to avenge the imagined American occupation of Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. A sort of Crusade in reverse with the Islamic world as the victim. (top)




Baumeister concludes that high self esteem rather than the popularly assumed low self esteem is a major source of criminality (see an interesting commentary on this), particularly when it is challenged.The Nazis exaggerated esteem for Germany and its perceived humbling by outside forces after WWI could be paralleled by Bin Ladens exaggerated esteem for Islam and the perception of its powerlessness against America and the West.
Combine this with the de-individuation of a (religious) group and its functional advantage of the division of labour and you have international organized terror. Religion demands greater than usual steadfastness and idealism and "...it is fair to expect that violence will become relentless and merciless."
In the final chapter he refers to the role that culture plays although in my opinion he should have emphasised it more. As he says," Yet culture can exert a great deal of influence in teaching people how to express and control their aggressive impulses. Culture also shapes the situations that for the context for those impulses, including the opportunities for response, the importance of the proper response, and the norms of what is proper. And culture articulates the beliefs and myths about evil."
Overall this is a very good book.

It's not just "feminists" who promote this mentality, seems that many men buy into it, as well. Society in general, in fact, find it's "hard to believe" that women could be capable of cold-blooded, lethal crimes...

My psych professor (who is a fair-minded individual who speaks out against feminism, even in class) once told us that there are far more male sociopaths and psychopaths than females. Yet, I challenged this idea in class. I think the numbers are roughly equal. I believe that women are more likely to be mis-diagnosed or under-diagnosed for sociopathy and psychopathy because of society's belief that women just aren't wired for or capable of violent or sociopathic behavior. Yet I have seen, in my own life experiences, just as many women who fit the criteria for these disorders as I have seen men who fit them.

I agree Tera men want to believe that women are innocent and incapable of such things.

Another point I would like to make is that the recorded numbers of murders are of those convicted not the ones who are guilty.

Women tend to poison and if no autopsy is done it can be reported as heart attack or other narural causes. So the numbers are skewed incredibly to appears males are more likely to kill.

The first lie we ever hear about girls is, "Sugar and spice and everything nice." no truth to that.

Daddies like to believe it.

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Yes...and I wonder, how many SIDS deaths are actually homicides? I know that's not a politically correct thing to say in a feminized society...but one does wonder. And how many "accidents" aren't accidental? Will we ever know the whole truth? It's scary looking at the tip of the iceberg and wondering what lies beneath...

Interesting, too, is Roy Baumeister's book on human violence, and the correlation between the rise in self esteem and violent or aggressive behavior.

If such a correlation is correct, then we would see a rise in violent and aggressive behavior of women since the beginning of the feminist movement. And though some may argue that women have been violent and aggressive all along (and I think that's true), is it true that we see a rise in these areas since women's self-esteem has been rising with feminism?

I think it may correlate to overt violence rather than overall violence. A egocentric person is less likely to try to hide what they do.

That makes sense. Also interesting is that women tend to, when aggressive, be destructive in ways that harm others' relationships. I see this often in daily life. Women who gossip, manipulate, "get back" at someone by say, "stealing" someone else's boyfriend, destroying others' friendships, using kids as pawns to get back at a boyfriend or husband. And in many of these cases, these women make no attempt to hide what they are doing- in fact, the point of it seems to be for the intended harmed person to KNOW that she has been harmed by that person. It is very ego-centric. It may not be a fist fight, per se, (although those seem to be more common today than ever before), but can be just as, if not more so, damaging.