Why does empathy for violent criminals not stretch to their female victims?
Most women will be wearily familiar with the excuses pleaded by violent men - only a tiny proportion of all men, and yes, before someone writes it in the comments, violent women also exist. However, we seem to have reached a nadir. A few days ago there were news reports that a Jordanian asylum seeker who had been pestering women and then assaulted a female police officer by hitting her over the head, had been spared community service because ‘he didn’t understand English.’ Instead, he will have to pay a fine of £26 - big deal - which he will have to pay at a rate of £2 per week, almost certainly from the taxpayers’ money we are giving him.
Today, there was a news report about an Italian male nurse who had murdered his doctor wife during the pandemic. His life sentence has been annulled. Why? Because he was probably suffering from ‘stress’ during the pandemic, the poor diddums. Never mind his wife who was suffering the same pandemic stress but was also murdered.
It seems that the drive to empathise with others - in itself, not a bad thing - is leading to courts empathising more with poor ickle criminals than with the female victims of violent crime. There was a horrifying case a few years ago of a French Jewish woman who was murdered and pushed off her balcony by an antisemite in the same block in Paris who had previously made bigoted comments towards her in the lift. The man pleaded that he was high on drugs and that they induced a temporary psychosis, and he was spared jail. But whose choice was it to take the drugs? And his crime followed the same theme as his earlier harassment, suggesting that it was not born of delusions or hallucinations which characterise florid psychosis in illnesses like schizophrenia. A schizophrenic killing a stranger because they believe that they are the devil is a terrible tragedy, and that patient should have been injected with antipsychotics regularly. But an antisemite yob killing the woman he has long taunted? He is not mentally ill and belongs in jail.
These judicial decisions show less value being placed on the life of innocent women than on the sensitive feelings of grotesque criminals. And it seems that awareness of bigotry in general seems to have bypassed sensitivity to women. We now live in an era where crime statistics record violent crime by trans women who have had no medical or surgical treatment whatsoever as being carried out by ‘women.’ See the case of the transwoman who was recently arrested for murdering her husband in the council towerblock Wiltshire House in Brighton. No news reports have stated that the murderer was a man in a blonde wig. While I respect the right of anyone to choose whatever first name, clothes, and make up they wish, I do think that when it comes to recording crime statistics, we need to be vigilant and not skew them in this way.
All of this comes the wake of a hullabaloo about the Albert memorial in London’s Hyde Park, which carries sculptures representing Asia, Europe, Africa, and America being offensive because the Africa statue includes a woman reading a book to a young African man. This has been declared colonial. ‘Why is the young African man naked?’ people have demanded. Well, perhaps because traditional tribal dress does involve the members of the tribe being largely naked, an appropriate attire for hot climes. No mention has been made that the memorial is actually feminist in that the lead character in each continent is a woman in a position of power astride a large animal (elephant, camel, bison etc.) Nor that the woman reading shows that at that time, European women were willing to risk their health to try and better life for Africans. The memorial was built at a time when the monarch was a woman, Queen Victoria. Of course times have changed and it is no longer acceptable for white people to impose their religious or cultural views on Black people. But the memorial is a historical document in sculpture form. It tells us what the British view of life in different continents was like in the Victorian era. And although there were practices which we have now come to see as patronising, it is eye-opening to see the woman astride the elephant representing Asia lifting her veil from her head. In the century since the sculpture was built, women’s rights in much of Asia - Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan - seem to have gone backwards.
Perhaps those with the energy to throw tantrums in public could direct their ire at real injustice which kills people rather than imagined historical slights. And it would be good if those in the judiciary spared as much compassion for victims of violent crime as they do for the perpetrators.