Bad Girls

Bad girls
Violence by women has skyrocketed in the latter part of this century. Are they just showing their natural killer instinct?

By Barry Yeoman

A shorter version was published in Psychology Today, November/December 1999

SANTE KIMES DOESN'T EXACTLY MATCH the popular image of the career outlaw. A low-rent Elizabeth Taylor look-alike, the 64-year-old widow used to sashay into Victoria's Secret and sign autographs as if she were really the movie star. She was partial to gaudy jewelry, thick perfume and towering black wigs, and to rid herself of her wattles, she went to a California clinic for a procedure called lipo-sculpture.

But beneath the big hair is a criminal whose rap sheet dates back almost four decades. In the mid-'80s, Kimes went to prison for enslaving a platoon of teenage maids from Mexico City. The women were forced to work 18-hour days without weekend breaks, and Kimes kept them in line by beating them with coat hangers and throwing them in searing showers. When one young woman declined to strip for an inspection, according to court records and news reports, Kimes hurled her onto an ironing board and attacked her with a hot iron.

Then came the apparent murders, for which Kimes is a principal suspect. A banker vanished after a dinner appointment with Kimes. A family friend was pulled out of a Dumpster, a bullet in his head, after expressing his reservations about a real-estate scam involving Kimes and her husband. And last summer, New Yorkers were shocked by the disappearance of 82-year-old Irene Silverman, a diminutive former ballerina who was the landlady to Kimes' son. The Kimeses were allegedly trying to defraud Silverman out of her $4 million mansion—and then the retired dancer turned up missing. Police found blood outside her home. Kimes claims she's innocent.

What makes this gruesome crime spree hard to grasp is that Kimes doesn't fit any of our ruffian archetypes: the L.A. gang member, the Mafia hit man, the young street punk. A former pinup model, she's now at an age when many women are described as grandmotherly. Most significantly, she's a woman. Women don't murder their friends or brutalize their employees, we're told. "Woman is the creator and fosterer of life; man has been the mechanizer and destroyer of life," anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said. "Women love the human race; men are on the whole hostile to it."
But is that true?

According to a growing body of research, women have the same innate capacity for violence that men have. Myriad scientific surveys have indicated that women assault their dates and their spouses as often—or even more often—than men. And even though males commit the vast majority of street violence, females seem to be catching up. "In maybe 10 or 20 years, those statistics should be equal," boldly predicts Coramae Ritchey Mann, Ph.D., professor emerita of criminal justice at Indiana University.

The increase over the past century has been dramatic. When Auburn University sociologist Penelope Hanke, Ph.D., reviewed records from an Alabama prison from 1929 to 1985, she discovered that 95 percent of the cases where women murdered strangers occurred after 1970, along with 60 percent of slayings of friends and relatives. In another study, Illinois State University's Ralph Weisheit, Ph.D., discovered that women were becoming more stereotypically male in their reasons for murdering. In looking at the cases of 460 female murderers, Weisheit discovered that robbery-murders accounted for 42 percent of the cases in 1983, compared to 18 percent in 1940, while the proportion of domestic cases dropped over that time.

Some experts say the greater social movement toward sexual equality has brought women closer to men in the crime statistics. As the tightly constructed sex roles of previous decades start to weaken, women have more and more opportunities to break the law, says Freda Adler, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University. "Women are more involved in what's going on in the world than they were a generation ago," Adler says. "You can't embezzle if you're not near funds. You can't get involved in a fight at the bar if you're not allowed in the bar. In general, we're talking about the opportunities women have to commit crimes."

Violence at home

The most revolutionary discoveries about women and aggression involve violence toward loved ones. The common assumption has been that when it comes to domestic assaults, men are the brutes. Indeed, some studies still support this notion—but the preponderance of evidence shows otherwise. Martin Fiebert, Ph.D., a psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, has examined almost 200 studies with a total sample size of 60,000 people. Time and again, they demonstrated that women are as physically aggressive, if not more so, than their male partners. "It's a little like the Copernican revolution," he says. "Everyone looks at something one way, and the data shows something else."

The most famous of these studies come from Murray Straus, Ph.D., the founder and co-director of the University of New Hampshire's Family Research Laboratory. His National Family Violence Surveys, conducted twice over a decade with a total of 8,145 married and cohabiting couples, showed that 12.4 percent of women have assaulted their spouses, compared to 12.2 percent of men. When it comes to severe assaults, the numbers were 4.6 percent for women and 5 percent for men. Neither of those differences are statistically significant.

Since then, numerous studies have reached similar conclusions. A 1999 study by the British Home Office found that 4.2 percent of men—the exact same figure as for women—had been assaulted by a partner in the previous year. Over their lifetimes, though, women were more likely to be victimized.

Straus initially interpreted the high rate of violence by women as self-defense. But that hypothesis didn't pan out. In the second survey, women were the sole assailants in about one-fourth of the couples that reported violence, equal to men. That suggests that self-defense was not the motivation in many cases—although Straus warns that the data might be misleading. "If the woman hit first, she could still have been defending herself in a situation that she defined as posing a grave harm from which she could not otherwise escape," he wrote in a recent article. Straus also notes that men commit the most brutal domestic assaults—six times the number women commit. "If by violence, you mean 'who's injured?', then it's an overwhelmingly male crime," he says. That's why there's no great demand for battered men's shelters, and why a disproportionate number of wife beatings get reported to the police.

Intimate relationships are incubators for rage, jealousy and hurt—and women aren't immune. "People in relationships push each other's buttons and get angry with each other, and not everybody has terrific conflict-resolution skills," says Pamela Brand, Ph.D., who teaches psychology and public justice at the New York's Oswego State University. "People get scared when there's any perceived threat to the relationship." Families have fewer boundaries than other social units; parents are allowed to spank children, and spouses know they can usually hit one another with impunity. "The marriage license to this day is an implicit hitting license," Straus says.

Apparently, the patterns go back before marriage. Irene Frieze, Ph.D., remembers seeing studies that showed women to be more violent in dating situations. "I didn't believe it," recalls Frieze, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh. "I said, 'This is crazy. This can't be true. I'm going to do my own study.'" Sure enough, of the college students she surveyed, 58 percent of women had assaulted their dates, compared to 55 percent of men. Women pushed, shoved, slapped and kicked; men threw objects and committed sexual assaults. They threatened with weapons in low but equal numbers.

When Frieze brought up her findings in her classes, the students weren't surprised. "They said, 'Yeah, that's right, my girlfriend hits me' or 'I hit my boyfriend.' One woman said, 'Well, it makes me feel strong and powerful when I hit him.' They feel safe, that they can get away with this behavior because the men have this moral code that they'll never strike back." The men, Frieze adds, don't take the violence seriously, because little of it causes serious injuries. But she worries that by introducing violence into the relationship, a woman is giving her boyfriend tacit permission to assault her in the future. "He can really cause some serious damage," she says. "I don't think these young women know what they're doing."

The fact is that women, too, can inflict serious damage. Forty-six-year-old Stanley Green of Washington state says he knew there was something wrong with his marriage when he and his wife were working on a newsletter dealing with sexism in their church. At one point, the couple disagreed about the editing of an article. "My hair was quite long then, on the top and sides," he says. "I was sitting on one of those office chairs that tilts and swivels. She grabbed me by the hair and pulled my neck back till I was choking, and she was screaming, 'Get the point? Get the point?'" From there, he says, the violence escalated—until one day, she fractured and bruised his ribs, injured his groin and left his face bleeding. The couple is now divorced, with Green destitute and unable to find work as a transportation engineer, and his ex-wife living with their two children on a six-figure physician's income.

Needless to say, this has political ramifications that reach well beyond the academic realm. For decades, women's rights activists have been trying to get politicians to take family violence seriously, and to fund battered women's shelters along with prevention and treatment programs. Even though many of the researchers, including Irene Frieze and Murray Straus, call themselves feminists, some activists worry that their findings are being used to undermine political progress.

"In recent years, we've had more and more success with the Congress, with the passage of the Violence Against Women Act," says Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). "Now there is this concerted attack by those who have a disagreement about the role of government—they don't think the federal government should be dealing with this issue. They don't want to stand up and say, 'Yes, I think women should be beaten,' so they attack the statistics. They say, 'Y'all are biased to protect the women. What about the men?'"

Ireland believes the methodology used by some researchers has flaws, and she has support from some feminist academicians. Ruth Brandwein, a social policy professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has criticized Straus and his successors for counting violent assaults without understanding the greater power dynamics involved. "My belief on this, and it's shared by people with a more feminist orientation, is that you can't just equate numbers," she says. "Women who engage in violence are often already in violent relationships. They are living under such unbearable tension that it gives them some control over when they're going to be abused." Besides, she says, you have to consider the relative strength of the sexes. "If I slap my boyfriend, he's gonna to laugh. If he smacks me, it's gonna hurt."

NOW's Patricia Ireland says she doesn't question the motives of most researchers. But in the academic world, the infighting has gotten nasty. Murray Straus has been heckled and picketed on college campuses; his colleague Suzanne Steinmetz received a bomb threat when she was scheduled to speak at an American Civil Liberties Union conference. Professional seminars have become circuses. Coramae Ritchey Mann, the retired criminologist, remembers sitting on a panel with Straus during a Chicago conference. "Some of these feminist broads started to threaten him from the audience and shout him down," she recalls in her characteristically coarse style. "It was rude and nasty. And these were academicians! I got so annoyed, I said, 'Look, you chicks, this is a panel on violence, and you're gonna see violence if you persist in this.' They shut up."

Violence on the street

Unlike the domestic world, where violence has been shared between men and women, the world of street crime has historically belonged to men. Except for high profile lawbreakers like Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who robbed and killed at least seven of her johns, most of the crime news we hear involves male perpetrators. If a woman is involved, she's generally considered an accomplice to a man. (When Bonnie and Clyde were killed in the 1930s, the New York Times headline read, "Barrow and woman slain in Louisiana trap!") Even Karla Faye Tucker, executed in Texas last year for a pickax slaying, was working in concert with her boyfriend.

"That doesn't mean there's not a number of women out there who are mean, nasty creatures," says Dwayne Smith, Ph.D., chairman of the sociology department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "That number continues to pale compared to their male counterparts." According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, women made up 15 percent of all those arrested for violent crimes in 1996.

But the gap is closing. FBI statistics also show that arrests of women for violent crimes increased 90 percent between 1985 and 1994, compared to 43 percent for men. The numbers hold up across many specific crimes: aggravated assault (111 percent for women, 65 percent for men), other assaults (126 percent vs. 81 percent), sex offenses other than rape and prostitution (women increased 16 percent while men fell 5 percent). Only in the case of murder did men widen their lead: a 13 percent rise for men compared to a 4 percent drop for women. Experts say that women are moving into the traditional male realm, and masterminding their own crimes.

Freda Adler says the change stems directly from the breakdown of stereotypical male and female sex roles over the past century. "The equalization of social and economic roles absolutely leads to the same behavior patterns," says the criminal justice professor. "As you go up the latter, your criminal behavior is the darker side of your legal behavior."

Adler's "liberation hypothesis" has been criticized by some researchers, who question the data, and who note that female criminals often come from the segments of society that has benefited least from the women's movement. They are impoverished and often from racial minorities, with little education or work experience.

But some modern feminist leaders see the wisdom in the liberation hypothesis. "There's been such a huge shift between my grandmother's generation and mine, in terms of women's sphere," says NOW's Patricia Ireland. "Basically, a woman's place was in the home. As we've gained freedom and opportunity, it's had an impact on crime. I think we have to deal with what is, and not what we wish were the case."

Indiana University's Mann agrees with the liberation hypothesis, but she thinks there's something else going on: Crime statistics are starting to catch up with reality. "Women are just as violent as men, and were often just getting away with the violence," she says. That's because the criminal justice—from the police to the courts—has worked under the assumption that the real outlaws are men, and that female crime somehow isn't real crime. "Police didn't arrest them, judges didn't sentence them, and they got lost in the statistical morass. Now, with equal rights, the justice system is looking at females differently. Whereas before they were excused or overlooked, now they are being apprehended."

Over the years, there's been plenty of evidence that women have get more lenient treatment from the criminal justice system, perhaps skewing the statistics. When Frank Julian, J.D., a professor of legal studies at Murray State University in Kentucky, began looking at the relationship between gender and crime, he spoke to judges, attorneys, criminals and a policewoman. His interviews, along with a review of various academic studies, led him to believe that many women indeed get special treatment for their crimes. A criminal defense lawyer told Julian, "If she hasn't committed murder and she has children at home, she walks." A judge admitted, "It's difficult to send a mature woman to prison. I keep thinking, 'Hey! She is somebody's mother!'" Julian cities one study, conducted in Florida, that found men were 23 percent more likely to be imprisoned than women who committed the same crime, partly because of the sentencing recommendations of the probation officers. "Women offenders were often viewed as suffering from psychological or emotional problems, or as victims of family problems, bad marriages or dependent relationships," Julian writes. "Men were more likely to have their cases judged in view of the seriousness of the offense committed, employment history, and prior record." Julian's conclusion? "Chivalry lives."

Nature or nurture?

Is violence innate or acquired? Have women historically been less physically aggressive because of genetics or social conditioning? These questions are at the core of the debate over violence and women.

In the 1960s, psychologist Albert Bandura conducted a series of experiments in which children watched adult models hitting inflatable Bobo dolls. The children were then offered the opportunity to imitate the behavior. Under normal circumstances, the boys knocked down the dolls far more often than the girls did. But when the models got rewarded for knocking down the Bobos, the children's behavior changed—the boys and girls became almost equally aggressive.

That seems to suggest that males are innately more violent that females—but that women will resort to aggression when given the incentive. Which makes sense to Brenda Shook, Ph.D., a biological psychologist at Union Institute in Sacramento. Shook says violence gave men an evolutionary advantage. "The female is the childbearing one of the two," she explains. "During pregnancy and for protracted periods post-birth, the female is still feeding and nursing and caring for the offspring, so she is put at a considerable survival disadvantage. The male does play some role in perpetuating the species post-partum, and that includes defending the territory." Even though the modern male is more likely to be caring for his family by shuffling papers in an office than by fighting off marauding warriors, the vestiges of evolution take a long time to die off. "You can see these residual behaviors in all species, where they're no longer needed," Shook says.

There are other biological theories, including the possibility of a sex-linked chromosomal abnormality related to aggression. But mention these theories to many experts in criminal behavior, and the response will come swift. "There's nothing innate about violence," says Freda Adler of Rutgers. "We're talking about socialization." And for time immemorial, males have been conditioned to be aggressive. Boys got G.I. Joes; girls got Barbies. Men were sent off to war; women bandaged their wounds. Gangs, rugby teams, biker bars, police forces were all male provinces.

In fact, American girls get contradictory messages. Indeed, our culture rewards a certain type of violence in women. "It is the height of femininity to slap a man's face," says Murray Straus. "Generations of women have been told by their mothers, 'If he gets fresh, slap his face.' It's drilled into women.'" And the media increasingly promote females violence. Most cross-sex violence in soap operas is perpetrated against men, and weapon-wielding women are becoming the norm in everything from Hollywood movies to Saturday morning cartoons. "Thelma and Louise got cheered for their actions," notes Martin Fiebert, the California psychologist.

Women, like men, absorb the cultural messages aimed at their sex. But they also absorb something bigger: the cultural norms aimed at everyone. And the fact is that Americans like their guns. They like wars. They flock to movies like Saving Private Ryan, where heads and limbs get blown off bodies. "This is a violent country," says Coramae Ritchey Mann. "It was built on violence, with slavery and he treatment of Native Americans. There's no reason some of this wouldn't have rubbed off on women."

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