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Thread: She-devils: the enigma of women who kill

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    Default She-devils: the enigma of women who kill



    By Anna-Stina Nykänen

    A story: we need a story so that people might understand the world, themselves, and other people. A reason and an explanation need to be found for even the heinous of crimes. And how did it all go? And what kind of a person would do something like that?
    There are not many women in the annals of Finnish crime, but they are easily remembered. The stories are so familiar. They have become like cartoon characters – figures from a gallery of horrors of the worst of crimes.

    Remember the gladiator Virpi Butt, who appeared on the Gladiators television programme? She was a hormone user with a ferocious temper, who would attack big men in restaurants, and who ended up murdering her boyfriend.
    What about the shooting gallery killer Sanna Sillanpää? A quiet, withdrawn wallflower who silently lost her sanity and started to identify with a character in a TV series, and ultimately killed three men.
    Then there are the killer nurses – serial killers Katariina Pantila, who used insulin to kill patients, and Aino Nykopp-Koski, who was convicted of poisoning patients, and who was called a star by TV talk show host Maria Veitola.

    Currently in the public eye is Anneli Auer. The wife of a man killed in Ulvila will undoubtedly go down in Finnish criminal history, but in what role?
    First Auer was a victim, then a murderer, then innocent again. And now he faces charges of child sexual abuse. But she could be innocent.
    Auer’s role remains alive. It is just hard for the human mind to constantly change an image that has once been established.

    The image of what crimes usually are like has an influence when we think about who might be guilty and who might be innocent. Let’s first ask a detective story writer what a typical Finnish woman criminal is like.
    “The first thing that comes to mind is a woman who has been in the company of men, who is looking for adventure in her life. As a result of using drugs or hormones she ends up committing shocking deeds. Probably the most common type of violence is that which targets her own children”, says Leena Lehtolainen the author of dozens of detective stories.
    Lehtolainen is quite right in many respects.

    Violence often involves the heavy use of intoxicants. The proportion of women as perpetrators of homicides has increased as women have started consuming more alcohol. The figure is about 10 per cent. Victims of homicides perpetrated by women are often family members, but they increasingly include outsiders as well, says forensic psychiatrist Hanna Putkonen of the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).
    The threshold to violent behaviour remains higher for women than it is for men. Hitting, tackling, and fighting in wars has traditionally been permissible for men, but not for women. But the situation could change, Putkonen says.
    Young women commit acts of moderate violence as often as men do. With students, violence connected with couple relationships is almost as common on both sides of the gender divide.

    MP Kari Tolvanen (Nat. Coalition Party), a former police officer, recently said on a television interview programme, that nearly half of all stabbings, beatings, and attempted homicides that take place in homes in Helsinki are committed by women. It is no longer unusual for women to use a knife, and it is often touch-and-go whether or not the victim survives.
    Putkonen says that there is a type of women who commit homicides in the same way that men do. These women tend to be marginalised, and have had problems since childhood. They are more likely than men of the same type not to have finished comprehensive school, to have a history of suicide attempts, and psychiatric care. Half of the mothers in the group have had their children taken into foster care.
    The group remains small, but is easily recognisable. “Nor is society developing in the direction that this problem would be diminishing”, Putkonen says.

    Is slapping a boyfriend a gateway to becoming a killer who chops up her victims? Should we worry that there will be more heinous crimes as female behaviour becomes more aggressive?
    Putkonen says that exceptionally cruel homicides are always a different matter. It is not possible to draw conclusions of general trends on their basis.
    She also cannot give a reliable typology of Finnish female serial killers. Killer nurses are isolated cases “And extensive material on this matter is not something that we hope to get”, Putkonen says.

    international studies have shown that the motive for male serial killers is often a yearning for sadistic pleasure. With women it is material benefit. The women often know their victims, and their methods of committing the act are hidden, and not dramatic.
    The killer nurses are a case in point.
    When homicides committed by health care workers in 20 countries were studied, the main motivations were sadism and money. The stresses of the job also were a factor. Sometimes perpetrators might deliberately cause a medical emergency just to have an opportunity to demonstrate their resuscitation skills.

    It has been claimed that when women become violent, the element of fury is greater. It has even been suggested that women who kill are more likely to be mentally ill than men who do so.
    At psychiatric hospitals, violent women are put in isolation, or are subjected to other coercive measures more frequently than men, on average. Are they worse than the men, or do personnel react to their actions more strongly?
    “People at hospitals also wonder about this. Sometimes they notice that a male patient might be treated differently than a woman”, Putkonen says.

    The women’s actions were surprising because the belief that women are, by nature, safe and nurturing lives on.
    The maternal myth actually prevents people from recognising violence against children. Putkonen says that much of the crime can be hidden away.
    Statistics indicate that infanticide in Finland has declined sharply, as the standard of living has increased, but killings of newborns can often be hidden away, judging from the fact that most of the cases come to light only by chance, Putkonen says.

    The perpetrators are lonely, suffering from a fear of rejection, fatigue, and stress, or they are psychotic. Nearly half of them have problems that officials have had to address on previous occasions. Many also kill themselves.
    Putkonen notes that a psychotic, delusional mother has possibly imagined that she can save her child by killing it.
    In any case, there is a tendency to try to understand a mother no matter what. The killing of a child awakens sadness more than grief, and the perpetrator is sometimes actually seen as a victim.

    There is more of a tendency to look for a reason for homicides committed by women than those committed by men.
    “It is harder to see evil in women”, says detective story writers Lehtolainen.
    The reason for this is the fear, reaching mythical proportions, sparked by the idea that a mother, the giver of life, might be a killer. Reasons for the act are sought from the mother’s own childhood.
    “People are more ready to consider psychological factors when women are involved”, Lehtolainen says.

    Lehtolainen does not believe that women are less violent than men. People have a tendency to use power. It is easiest to use power on those who are closest. But on the other hand, people also have a genetic nurturing instinct.
    “However, show me a mother who has never had the urge to throw her child against the wall.”
    There have always been destructive monster moms in detective stories, but in real life it is something that is hard to even talk about. There is a caution against heaping blame on tired mothers.

    The greatest challenge to the maternal myth is the sexual abuse of children. How can such an act be explained?
    “It can’t be explained”, says psychiatrist Hanna Putkonen.
    The subject is a taboo, even in research. There has been much written about sexual abuse committed by men, but not on this subject.

    Putkonen feels that a mother who does something like that has to have some psychopathic characteristics. The capacity for empathy has to be so non-existent that she would be completely unable to place herself in the position of another person. She could be a sadist, or she might be seeking her own pleasure without thinking about the other person.
    Most of the time women who commit such a crime will do so with their partner.
    “Such serious psychopathic conditions are rare. It is even rarer for something like that to appear in a woman, leading to sexual abuse.”

    When an act is beyond understanding a person can seem like a monster. Are we dealing with evil here?
    “I don’t believe in absolute evil – or in absolute good”, Putkonen says. She feels that labelling a person a monster is an outsourcing of evil. It is a sign that the act sparks emotions that are too difficult to handle.
    There simply is no simple explanation. For a person to become a serial killer, for instance, Putkonen believes that there needs to be some biological susceptibility, and also a miserable childhood. But no degree of misery will inevitably lead to these kinds of acts.

    Literature nowadays increasingly portrays monstrous characters, and acts that are more gruesome than ever.
    “In Swedish and American detective stories there has been a return to the time of Agatha Christie, where evil existed inside exceptional individuals”, Lehtolainen says.
    It is the spirit of the times. In Norway the police said that the recent mass murderer was purely evil.

    People try to polarise everything – to divide people into the good and the bad. It’s just like in hate speech. There is a need to look for extreme phenomena and to create sensations. Horrors also fascinate people.
    “Usually even the worst of crimes can be understood – if one can withstand the negative emotions that are involved”, she says.
    What is more interesting for a writer: a criminal who can be understood, or one who can only be feared?
    “Definitely the one who can be understood. Absolute evil does not teach the reader anything about him, or herself.”

    Criminals make up stories themselves as well. Women criminals manipulate the media by giving interviews in which they present themselves as ideal mothers, or as nurses dedicated to their work.
    They take advantage of the images linked with their gender.
    They tell stories to outsiders in order to improve their predicament, but they might also be telling the stories to themselves as a way of explaining what they have done. Finally they might start believing the story themselves, says forensic psychologist Ghitta Weizmann-Helenius of the Vanha Vaasa Hospital.

    The stories can also change as time goes on. When Weizmann-Helenius interviewed women convicted of homicide, the stories they told her were quite different from what they had previously said during the mental evaluation. A woman who had killed her husband said that he had beaten her. Nothing like that had come out before, Weizmann-Helenius says.
    Who do the women blame themselves or the environment? It is most typical to blame others, their partner, or a state of intoxication.
    “But the feelings of guilt of these women were very minute, less than with men who committed similar crimes”, Weizmann-Helenius says.

    “Many of them were without emotion, they had psychopathic characteristics. They might say calmly that we just fought, or that I hit him with a knife.”
    Weizmann-Helenius has also studied the differences between women who commit their crimes while intoxicated, and those who were sober. The ones who murdered while sober did not have any psychiatric disorders!
    “They were relatively normal.”

    Certainly there is something exceptional in the emotional life of a person who kills another person, but they did not have anything that would have explained the act.
    “They had planned their act and decided to carry it out.”
    Cruel women – they do exist.

    Who is a more frightening figure, an enraged superwoman, a quiet mentally unbalanced person, a killer nurse, or a monster mother?
    Lehtolainen feels that it would probably be the nurse, who kills total outsiders. She is someone in a profession where the people should be trusted.
    However, the most frightening idea is that an innocent person would have to grapple with the accusations that Anneli Auer has faced. Is that something that people would even dare contemplate?


    Source - http://www.hs.fi/english/article/She.../1135269579685

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    I'd do Knox just to get an erection.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Captain Blackbeard View Post
    I'd do Knox just to get an erection.
    Uhh, what?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lagergeld View Post
    Uhh, what?
    Uhh, Knox is a killer. For every criminal phenomenon there is a sexually driven reaction.

    Knox is therefore a fucking whore goddess.

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