Women and Violent Crime
Feedback to the women in crime page
by Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, Ph.D., Violent Crimes Institute, President, www.drdsk.com:
Hi, I saw your page and thought you might want some updates. (...) I am a criminal profiler who has studied serial killers for 17 years. Last year I had a book come on out female serial killers "The New Predator: Women Who Kill, Profiles of Female Serial Killers." Aileen Wuornos was not the first or only female serial killer. There have been others. In fact, since 1970, there have been over 26 cases of female serial killers in the U.S. Most researchers are unaware because female killers get let media attention, and further, no other researcher was able to interview these elusive killers for a book on profiling them. Thus, they have been ignored.
(...)
Best,
Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, Ph.D. Violent Crimes Institute, President
www.drdsk.com.
Overview
Women do in fact commit multiple murders, but they tend to do so in a spree, and not sequentially, as is the pattern with men. Serial killers are mostly male, white, and in their twenties or thirties at the time of their murders.
There has been a lot of research and speculation on this subject. On a physical level, people with higher levels of testosterone (male sexual hormone) tend to be more aggressive than people with lower levels (mostly women). Psychological evidence points to the fact that while men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from with similar childhood stressors tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others. While a man therefore might kill, hurt, or rape others as a way of "dealing" with his rage, a woman is more likely to internalize her feelings and become self-destructive (drug or alcohol abuse, prostitution, or suicputs it: "I can't think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own".
When they do kill in a series, they tend to kill people they know, i.e. patients when working in a nursing home or hospital, not strangers (see also The Anatomy of Motive by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, 1999).
Example: In May of 1993, pediatric nurse Beverly Allitt, a woman in her late twenties, was convicted of murdering four children and of the attempted murder of several others during a fifty-eight-day period in 1991, while the children were under her care in the Grantham and Kesteven District Hospital (U.K.). There had been seven similar "angel of death" cases in hospitals in the U.S. in previous years, and these had involved what has become known as the "Munchhausen by proxy" syndrome. In the better-known "Munchhausen" syndrome, people fake symptoms that are not there, and deliberately harm themselves, in order to get attention, even if it entails painful surgery. In the "by proxy" version, the perpetrator harms someone else in order to get attention for himself or herself. In a few cases in the U.S., nurses or other hospital personnel have injected poison, have unrigged respirators, or done other things that caused "code blue" emergency bells ro ring and brought emergency specialists running to the scene. The perpetrator did it so that he or she could then "save" the patient and be a hero (the "hero murder" was adopted as a category in the FBI Crime Classification Manual). Under questioning, Allitt did not confess. It was not until medical specialists and pathologists examined the dead children and the impaired survivorrs, and determined that they had been injected with substances that poisoned them, that police could even look for further patterns. They found that only Allitt had been present on every occasion when a child went into undue cardiac arrest or had other near-fatal problems. Beverly Allitt appeard at her 1993 trial; in the intervening two years she had become anorexic, losing so much weight that she was herself in danger of death. It was yet another attempt to gain attention for herself, this time without the "proxies". She was convicted and sentenced to a prison term. The public inquiry into the hospital's appalling lack of supervision and its failure to react sooner embroiled the highest authorities in Great Britain, including Prime Minister John Major.
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