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"BAD" MOTHERS: THE POLITICS OF BLAME IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
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_________________| ARE WOMEN AS VIOLENT AS MEN? |
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WHEN SHE WAS BAD: VIOLENT WOMEN AND THE MYTH OF INNOCENCE
"BAD" MOTHERS: THE POLITICS OF BLAME IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In November 1997, the journal Pediatrics published the results of a terrifying experiment. Doctors at several hospitals in Great Britain had decided to covertly videotape 39 parents -- most of them mothers -- whom medical personnel had begun to suspect were deliberately bringing their young children to the brink of death. What they saw astounded them. In 30 of the 39 cases, the parents were observed intentionally suffocating their children; in two they were seen attempting to poison a child; in a third, the mother under surveillance deliberately broke her 3-month-old daughter's arm. Many of the parents seemed as methodical and as brazen, as scoured of fear or conscience, as any serial killer. "Abuse was inflicted without provocation and with premeditation, and in some instances, involved elaborate and plausible lies to explain consequences," the study's authors wrote. "For example, one mother claimed that she had suffocated her son because of stress related to his crying and continually waking her from sleep. However, under surveillance, the mother was seen, with premeditated planning, to suffocate her infant when he was deeply asleep. The majority of other cases showed attempted suffocation when the child was asleep or lying passively on the bed. Children did not appear to provoke their parents into abusing them." The odd thing -- the really chilling thing -- was that these were women (and a few men) who masqueraded as good parents, the sort who rushed their children to the emergency room when they had trouble breathing, and stood by them with fortitude and devotion while the doctors puzzled out what was wrong. They were slick, many of them; they could morph from demonic menace to concerned mum the minute a doctor or nurse walked in the room. They liked the social prestige of a mysterious disease; they liked the proximity to powerful medical professionals; they liked the attention and the drama -- the wail of the sirens, the adrenalin rush of the ER. And more than that, they seemed to get some acidy trickle of satisfaction out of terrorizing their children. "2:02 p.m.," reads the transcript of the case in which the mother snapped her daughter's arm before nurses, alerted to what was happening on videotape, could stop her. "Mother slaps the infant's head. 2:03 p.m.: repeated. 2:09 p.m.: repeated. 2:53 p.m.: The mother tears up the nursing record and throws it out the window. 2:58 p.m.: The mother swears at the infant, accusing her of being responsible for them having to remain in the hospital. There is growing anger with the mother repeatedly ordering the infant to kiss her. 'Give me a kiss, you little sod, give me a kiss. Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!'" And so on and on. With further investigation, it turned out that the 39 patients under surveillance, ages 1 month to nearly 3 years old, had 41 siblings, and that 12 of those siblings had died suddenly and unexpectedly. How could these parents have gone on so long unrecognized for what they were? How for that matter did others like them get away with it? Waneta Hoyt, whose five babies were thought to have died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- indeed whose experience was virtually the entire basis for the influential theory that SIDS runs in families -- and who, in 1995, finally confessed to having suffocated them herself. Marybeth Tinning, the Schenectady, N.Y., housewife who, over the course of 14 years, just kept ferrying her kids to the hospital, and collecting flowers at their funerals, until she was eventually found to have killed nine of them. "She was a predator," journalist Patricia Pearson writes of Tinning. "Had she been a man, she might have been a particularly ruthless entrepreneur, an organized criminal, a serial rapist. But she was a woman, and she located her well-spring of power in maternity." For Pearson, the author of a provocative new book called "When She was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence," the mystery of how these women eluded suspicion is really no mystery at all. It helped that they were accomplished liars. It helped that medical science had settled on the SIDS-in-families explanation. It helped that the kind of crimes they committed were rare (though perhaps less rare than we think; some researchers now say that 5 to 10 percent of the 3,200 SIDS cases reported each year in the U.S. should be considered suspicious). But above all, argues Pearson, these women got away with their crimes for years because so few of us are willing to acknowledge that women are as capable of cool and calculating brutality as men are. "Violence," Pearson writes, "is still universally considered to be the province of the male. Violence is masculine. Men are the cause of it, and women and children are the ones who suffer." The conventional wisdom, born of old-fashioned paternalism and new-fashioned feminist essentialism, holds that when women maim or kill, they do so only from the cringing posture of a battered wife or on orders from an unhinged boyfriend. Or, like Jean Harris, who murdered her diet-doctor boyfriend, or Susan Smith, who murdered her two little boys, they were really intending to commit suicide and somehow "found themselves" killing others instead. Either way, they manage to keep some saving drapery of innocence and haplessness, even of victimhood. Pearson's is in many ways an original book, but it did not emerge in a vacuum. Over the last few years, criminologists have been locked in an escalating debate about women's capacity for violence. And that debate has in turn been shaped by the longer-standing confrontation between equality feminists (who argue, in this context, that a woman can be as power-hungry, as greedy or as vicious as a man and that female criminals ought to take responsibility for their crimes) and difference feminists (who believe that women are gentler, more nurturant, more virtuous -- and as criminals, more easily bullied). In fact, that's just the trouble. So infused with ideology has this debate become that the numbers trotted out by the increasingly hostile camps have begun to seem muddled at best and suspect at worst. Are women treated more leniently in sentencing? The studies are all over the map. Are they just as likely as men to beat on their spouses? Those who think they are -- and that men are getting a bad rap as the sole perpetrators of domestic violence -- cite the 1980 survey conducted by family violence scholars Murray Straus, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz. In a random survey of 3,218 American homes, they found that 12 percent of men -- and 11.6 percent of women -- reported hitting, slapping or kicking their partners. It's also true that many counties and municipalities have reported increases in the number of women arrested for domestic violence over the last few years. But then again, these may be due to mandatory arrest laws, which oblige police officers to collar the wife who hurls a plastic jar of Jiffy in the general direction of her husband just as surely as they do the man who smashes his wife's nose. Battered women's advocates seem blind to the idea that some couples taunt and torment each other with equal gusto and that some men may actually be the brunt of domestic abuse; adherents of the women-are-as-thuggish-as-men school seem blind to the fact that even if a woman slaps first, men are physically able to inflict more damage. As for the observation that, yes, some women clearly are capable of mayhem but for whatever reason, women resort to it far less often than men -- suffice it to say that you'll wade pretty deep into this debate before you're likely to encounter such common sense. N E X T+P A G E: Why don't female serial killers scare us as much?
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