'Shiver me timbers, it's a girl!: Women and Crime

Female pirate, Gunpowder Gertie was a hoax, which is a pity, with a name like that. Not so for sister/fellow pirates Sadie the Goat, or Jeanne Louise de Belleville - they were very real. Real and stupendously angry. The Goat head-butted her victims and de Belleville attacked only French ships in revenge for her husband's killing. Either would have been a 21st century criminologist's dream.

Analyses of why or how women commit crime, their explanations and causes read like either apologies or lame attempts to make us pity the female plight. This contributes to their condition as 'victims'. Money-crimes to feed the children predominate (credit card, benefit and utility fraud). Male prisons, let's not forget, are also full of victims. A toxic combination of childhood abuse, violence, substance misuse and undiagnosed learning difficulties points us to the revolving door syndrome - crime-prison-crime-prison……. for both genders.

The language of female crime is stale and long overdue for modernization. Phrases such as 'morality-linked offences' (prostitution), 'child-related offences' (child-abuse, direct or indirect/neglect, infanticide), or 'opportunistic' crimes (petty theft), soften the horror behind the act. The sub-agenda here is not the crime per se, but that female criminals have dared to step 'beyond their role'- the criminal act has put them on a deviant path, away from their (safe, controlled, socially constructed) private life as care-givers, into a public domain- Yoicks! they are behaving like men and appear to have poor anger-management thresholds. Simone de Beauvoir in 'The Second Sex' was ahead of us on this. Women who commit crimes connected to 'others' (either as agents, accomplices or to support children) are easy to classify and understand, forgiven, even. Women who plan, control and execute crimes by and (horror) for themselves are more difficult to pigeon-hole, and scary, especially if the crime involves physical violence.

The media is quick to print the standard 'outrageous' child-killing woman headline, but rather tardier when it comes to the hard stuff. China recently jailed a notorious 'lady' crime-boss gang leader- seemingly on a level with Capone et al - but you would have to scour the web to find details. The rapid, sound-bite world of 24/7 news is not compatible with long and detailed analysis of why and how (on any topic) so best not cover it at all. Even in the murky world of crime, women are rendered invisible, unless we are comfortable with our own explanations of their crime.

When all said and done, Emily Pankhurst (English female suffrage), Charlotte Corday (murderer of Jean Paul Marat) and Anne Boleyn (2nd wife of English King, Henry VIII) were all criminals. Does the passing of the years soften the crime? Was the law of their day an ass? Or was it their gender that allows us to condone? They were probably just angry, that would explain it.