Women And Violence

Natasha Cooper

The expression on Tony Blair's face at the Women's Institute last summer said it all. Angry women terrify men. And men still can't understand what all the fuss is about.

Any woman could tell them that it's about the male assumption that women have smaller, less significant lives than theirs. It's about the habit of mind that allows gynaecologists to think, "A few unnecessary hysterectomies here, a missed diagnosis or a slipped scalpel there, but so what? A chap can't get it right all the time." And it's about the phenomenon recorded in Angela Browning's The Trouble with Boys (HarperCollins, 1993) that men whose wives work outside the home establish their superior status by ensuring that their own working days are at least an hour longer than their wives'. Even now, men's experience, work and tastes are perceived to be more important than women's. That's what makes publishers advise women authors to take a unisex name for their latest pseudonym, or, like J. K. Rowling, use their initials. Unambiguously female names - as well as book titles that sound too girlie - lead to lower sales. Few men buy or read what they perceive as 'women's fiction'.

And yet when women writers move into territory assumed to be male they are rebuked. Women are still supposed to be gentler, more restrained, than men, which is presumably why they are also considered to be somehow less. When Mo Hayder published her first crime novel, Birdman, last January, she was attacked for the extreme nastiness of the violence in it. Much of the criticism was centred on the fact that she, a woman, was writing scenes in which other women were tortured and mutilated. In one, for example, the killer removes a woman's breast implants while she is conscious because he likes smaller tits. I hated the violence in Birdman. I wouldn't have read the relevant passages if I hadn't been asked to discuss the novel with the author and Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. But I wouldn't have hated them any less if they had been written by a man. Would anyone condemn a man in the same terms that were used for Mo Hayder if he had written about a female character castrating men? I don't think so. Nor do I think he would have received so much attention. Even though Hayder's novel was criticised, it was also widely publicised by the media. Any mixture of women and violence is sexy. Sexiest of all is violence done, or imagined, by a woman. But any woman who provides such a frisson must expect to be condemned for the very excitement she arouses. Of all the double standards that still exist, this is the oddest.

Chris Tchaikowski of the pressure group Women in Prison says that on the rare occasions when a woman is convicted of serious violent crime, journalists besiege her office. They quote Kipling's "the female of the species is more deadly than the male" and long to hear about the growth in girl gangs and unrestrained female violence; and they nearly always ask whether feminism has led to an increase in crime. To Tchaikowski, that question exposes the full depths of misogyny that still exist in this country. In fact, she says, last year there was a fall in the number of indictable crimes committed by women, although there was an increase in the number of women in prison. She also points out that there are at the moment around 2,670 men in prison for killing - and 120 women. Unlike men, women rarely murder for sexual or pecuniary motives, and she has never yet come across a woman who abused and killed a child unless there was a man involved. But those few women who do kill are given quite disproportionate attention by the media.

No one has suggested that Ian Brady was less culpable than Myra Hindley, but the world is far less interested in him. If you put together the press cuttings about Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and any other notorious male killer, the pile wouldn't be nearly as large as hers. It used to be said that only two women could raise the circulation of a newspaper by twenty or thirty thousand on the day their photographs appeared on the front page: Diana Spencer and Myra Hindley, the idealised woman and the demonised. Interestingly Rosemary West no longer arouses quite the same frenzied attention. According to Tchaikowski, this may be because many people who are around her 'for twenty-four / seven' believe that she is innocent. Whether or not that is true - and I have no idea - accounts of her case have added to the assumption that women are as violent as men. Lawyers' gossip implies that Myra Hindley is still in prison only because of the press, and that other women who have committed similar - or worse - crimes have been released long since. In fact, again according to Tchaikowski, only one other woman has ever been convicted of the same sort of crime, and she died in prison, drowned in the bath.

The Home Office could not provide me with any figures to show whether women lifers spend longer in prison than men; but men move through the system to open prisons more easily than women and it is therefore logical to assume that they may also move on to release more quickly. Some attitudes within the legal system are beginning to change. During the 1980s women were generally given longer sentences than men for similar offences, but that is no longer the case. And it is becoming accepted that the definition of provocation as a defence, which entails a momentary lapse into irrationality akin to temporary insanity, discriminates against women. In the past a man who hit out at a nagging wife on the spur of the moment and killed her tended to get off. But a woman who had been subjected to appalling physical cruelty for years would be jailed for murder if she had waited until her abuser was asleep or drunk before taking premeditated action. My own belief is that no killing is acceptable and that the sex of the killer is irrelevant.

As a crime writer I am often asked about my views of violence on the page, whether it encourages real crime, and where the line should be drawn between legitimate realism and pornographic wallowing in cruelty. Every writer has to choose for him- or herself. While I think that treating fictional murder as not much worse than a slap in the face can be dangerous, I also loathe graphic violence. The idea that lavish descriptions of brutality can make an otherwise insignificant book important appals me. And I am sure that writers of explicitly violent novels, who up the ante with each book, contribute to the perception that our society is a lot more dangerous than it actually is. Most stranger violence is committed by men on other men. (What happens in domestic settings is different. There are conflicting reports, at least one of which suggests that equal numbers of men and women are assaulted in their own homes and that more men suffer wounds that need medical care.) But women fear it more than men and alter their behaviour because of it. Virtually no children are allowed to play or walk alone in the streets during the day for fear of paedophiles, even though we are told that abduction of children is no more common now than it was sixty years ago. At night even peaceful suburban streets are empty of women walking alone, and few women would willingly approach a posse of young men at night or in full daylight.

Crime writers, like journalists, must take their share of responsibility for that. If we exaggerate violence against women, we make them feel more vulnerable and therefore constrain their lives by making them avoid danger that may not exist. If we overstate violence by women, we risk feeding the myth that they are deadlier than men and possibly add to the difficulties of real women in the courts and in prison. Women are angry, but we are nothing like as violent as men. Pretending we are, whether for excitement or in an attempt to be taken seriously, is a dangerous game.