More Double Standards

RightGirl emails a story from the Daily Mail entitled, "How DARE anyone make excuses for fathers who murder their own children." Funny, "feminists" make this excuse for women who kill their kids all the time as does the writer of this article:

In fact, of all children killed by a parent, half are killed by their mothers. But the difference is that men, as shown by the examples above, are known to be able to kill out of spite.

When women kill their children, they almost always do it because they are mentally ill.

In most cases, they are suffering from post-natal depression; in others, they have undiagnosed diseases such as schizophrenia.

Indeed, so much is this the rule of thumb that even in Texas, where they love to hang 'em high and psychology is regarded with suspicion, the last four women who killed their children were spared death row by reason of insanity. Women, in short, love their children differently.

So men kill out of spite only and women kill because they are mentally ill. Has this writer ever heard of Susan Smith who allegedly disposed of her children so that she might have a relationship with a wealthy local man who had no interest in a "ready-made" family? The author of the Daily Mail article, Carol Sarler, may call Smith's actions "loving her children differently," I call them selfish, cruel and yes, spiteful.

And if mental problems should excuse these crimes, turnabout is fair play. Men who rape, it seems, have often been abused by females:

.....there is an alarmingly high rate of sexual abuse by females in the backgrounds of rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men - 59% (Petrovich and Templer, 1984), 66% (Groth, 1979) and 80% (Briere and Smiljanich, 1993). A strong case for the need to identify female perpetrators can be found in Table 4, which presents the findings from a study of adolescent sex offenders by O'Brien (1989). Male adolescent sex offenders abused by "females only" chose female victims almost exclusively.

My guess is that some of these rapists who have been abused by women are mentally ill and this illness plays a part in their decision to rape. Maybe there should be some excuse for male rapists like "Abused by Female Rapist Syndrome" just as there is the "Battered Women's Syndrome" as an excuse for women who kill their husbands. We all know that it would be a cold day in hell before that happens. And perhaps it shouldn't.

But neither should we make blanket statements about women who kill or commit atrocious acts. To say that they always act out of mental illness is to imply that women cannot be held accountable for their actions, that they are children or too mentally disturbed to know what they are doing or to be held accountable. This view has its downside. If this is the case, then women are too crazy to vote, make serious decisions or engage fully in life as autonomous human beings. Women have a full range of human emotions and actions, just as men do. We should not automatically excuse behavior because the perpetrator is female nor should we always find men guilty because they are male.