December 16th 2009

Article Reposted from The Times (UK)

The shocking case is another example of society not accepting that females can commit horrific crimes

Yesterday Vanessa George, (pictured left with co-defendant Angela Allen) a nursery worker from Plymouth in the United Kingdom, was jailed for an indeterminate period for her part in an internet paedophile ring.

George, an innocuous, overweight woman, just shy of 40, who occasionally liked to wear her hair in teenage-style plaits, had sexually abused young children in her care and posted photographs of them taken with her mobile phone on an online networking site. Whether or not George had done all this for the benefit of Colin Blanchard, a man she had never physically met but with whom she shared many of the images on the internet, remains for many people a key aspect of the case.

For the public, the most obviously shocking aspect of the case was the fact that George was a woman, a mother, and had therefore behaved in every way contrary to the instinctive nurturing role with which it is generally assumed most women are born. There was further disbelief and outrage when it transpired that George had also posted naked images of her own 14-year-old daughter online, together with a handful of smutty, sexual comments.

As often happens in such cases, it was hoped that she represented some sort of monstrous anomaly. But then came the news that George was one of four women investigated in connection with the case who had allegedly posted or swapped photographs of children (one of them, Angela Allen, (pictured above) was also sentenced yesterday). Did they do so for their own sexual titillation? Or were these sexually vicarious acts, fomented by a man, Blanchard? Does it matter? And is the sexual abuse of children by women new?

Certainly, as a phenomenon, it feels unfamiliar, something the media didn’t report until recently and whose existence was denied even in psychiatric circles until the 1980s — in the same way that incest was denied until 20 years before that. But even now, when similar cases surface all the time, there is a public reluctance to get to grips with the underlying meaning of such crimes. It is a reluctance which, say the female psychiatrists who have done the most to understand such cases, not only gets in the way of effective treatment and implementing preventative measures but is at heart a denial of female agency, sexuality and capacity for violence.

As a case in point let’s look back to August when, in America, the news broke of the horrific kidnapping and incarceration of a young girl, Jaycee Dugard, who had disappeared from home in Lake Tahoe aged 11 and had spent the intervening 18 years imprisoned in a house owned by a middle-aged couple.

One of her alleged jailers, Nancy Garrido, was a dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties when she first met the man who was to become the love of her life. Nancy was visiting her uncle in Leavenworth jail, Kansas, when she came across Phillip Garrido, a convict incarcerated in the same prison. Nancy had been raised a Jehovah’s Witness, so she would have been instilled with particularly strong views about sexual morality. Phillip, meanwhile, was serving time for the abduction and rape of a woman in Reno, Nevada. Nevertheless they struck up a correspondence and later married in prison. After his release the couple set up home together in the town of Antioch. Phillip started a printing business, while Nancy worked as a nursing assistant and executed her duties in ways that earned her a reputation among both patients and colleagues as a particularly caring individual.

Even if the young Nancy had been unaware of some aspects of her new lover’s past — that he had threatened to gouge out his ex-wife’s eyes with a safety pin, for example — she would have known when she met him why he was in prison. The severity of his sentence, even if Phillip had told her nothing, would have given some indication of how dangerous he was. Possibly, given her religious background, she set out to save him. But it was apparently Nancy who eventually became converted. In August, Nancy Garrido was identified as the woman in the passenger seat who had pulled Jaycee Dugard into a car before it sped off, with Phillip at the wheel. The year was 1991. Dugard was kept a prisoner in the Garrido household and soon gave birth to two children, the product of repeated rapes. One of the first things that Nancy said to her lawyer after her arrest was that she missed the two girls, her “family”, as she called them.

When the story broke, the wide assumption was that Nancy was a victim of “catastrophically low self-esteem”. The implication was that no woman could be capable of assisting in sexually violent acts against children; somehow she must have sleepwalked her way through Dugard’s 18-year ordeal, a coerced victim of her pathologically disturbed husband. But when it was later claimed that Nancy had acted as the jailer when her husband returned to prison for several months for violating his parole terms, the tone changed. Nancy was an anomaly and a monster.

But what happened in Antioch is not unique, although the public’s readiness to hope that it may be remains very strong. The reaction to Nancy’s still murky role in the abduction and abuse of Jaycee Dugard brings to mind comments made last year by the detective investigating the Josef Fritzl case in Austria. Fritzl’s wife, Rosemarie, was never properly questioned by the police, Detective Franz Polzer said, because “it defies logic” that she could have known what her husband was doing. “What woman,” he continued, “would stay silent if she knew that her husband had seven children with his daughter and was holding her prisoner in the cellar?” There is no suggestion that Rosemarie had any idea what her husband was doing.

But back to the question: what sort of woman might stay silent? Isn’t the “logical” answer Nancy Garrido? Or Rose West. Or perhaps Monique Olivier, who, like Nancy, like Rose, like Myra Hindley before her, helped her partner to pick up young women and, later, to rape and kill them.

Yet, separated from the men in their lives, usually only by force, these women revert to the innocuous, passive, seemingly harmless people they used to be. In most cases they will remain passionately attached to the idea that they were coerced and victimised. And in many cases police, social services and the courts are more than ready to believe them.

The notion that women are capable of sexual violence is still considered widely unacceptable even two decades after the seminal study on the subject was published by Estela Welldon, which went on to have a major impact on the psychoanalytical understanding of female perversion. Before her study, it was commonly held by many of those working in the mental health professions that only men — by virtue of their anatomy — were capable of sexual deviance or violence. Women, by contrast, were merely “neurotic” and therefore relatively harmless in this respect.

Welldon, however, was emphatic that female deviance existed. There was much evidence to suggest that male perversion was often the result of faulty mothering, she said, and she further claimed that self-harm, including anorexia, was not in fact a symptom of female anxieties about appearance but an example of female perversions: self-harm constituted sexualised expressions of aggression. Welldon pointed out that when the self-harming woman became involved in a sado-masochistic relationship with a man, the self-harm would often cease: subconsciously the violent partner was being used to perpetrate the abuse. When the masochistic woman had children the self-harm might be taken out on them, as narcissistic extensions of her own body.

Welldon’s study was extremely controversial when it was published and was vilified by both conservatives and feminists: “There were feminist bookshops that refused to stock my book because there was a lack of recognition that this could happen among females,” she says. “There is still a general denial of female sexuality and also an idealisation of motherhood that makes it very difficult to make sense of sexual crimes with women involved. Male assumptions (in the courts, among the police and in the psychiatric community as well as in the media) made it difficult to understand female behaviour.”

At first glance, the statistics do not seem too much of a problem — figures from the UK Home Office show that only 1 per cent of those convicted of sex offences are women. Figures from ChildLine published in 2004, however, are more shocking and serve to illustrate how difficult it can be to assess the true picture — 25 per cent of the children who call ChildLine with allegations of sexual abuse report that it has been perpetrated by a woman.

The problem with studying abusive behaviour among women is its secretive nature. When Anna Motz set out to write Crimes Against the Body, a study of female violence, “I was told by a male colleague that I shouldn’t bother because it ‘hardly existed’. There is a real assumption that where women are involved there is no female agency or gratification; I think this comes from very rigid and stereotypical ideas about women in general. If a potential female perpetrator seems outwardly to be post-sexual, if she is frumpy or someone’s granny or has a funny haircut, you will get social workers or judges assuming that she has no sexual or aggressive desires purely because of her appearance, even if she has a history of abusing.”

When women do commit acts of violence, they are likely to do so in the private sphere — in the house, against themselves or their children — as opposed to the traditionally male areas of public life. One could argue that the nursery, where a female carer essentially takes on a maternal role in an atmosphere of complete authority, has many similarities to a domestic setting, a sphere in which women, much more than men, like to assert their power. “These may be considered hidden crimes and will not necessarily show up in the criminal statistics,” says Motz.

Another difficulty in determining the extent of perverse female behaviour is how rarely women will admit to their part in a sexual crime, Motz says. “I have seen real denial. They’ll say things such as: ‘It was disgusting, what he did; I wouldn’t have done it,’ and I think that’s because it’s more devastating for a woman to acknowledge her role. There will be real distortions in how they will have perceived what was going on, a delusional aspect that the abused victim is a loved child or part of the family. There may be confusion about what constitutes affection and what is abuse. More often than not they will see themselves as victims.”

Where female abusers are concerned, psychiatrists will often talk of indirect psychopathology, a passive satisfaction derived from the violent acts, where a woman might encourage her male partner to enact her violence for her. “It’s not simply the case that they have followed orders in a robotic action, or that they are some kind of very perverse Stepford Wife,” Motz says.

Who are the women who commit such acts? One of the most detailed studies on the different types was put together by Jackie Craissati, a consultant clinical and forensic psychiatrist who has worked with sex offenders, male and female, for more than 20 years. “What often comes up is that you will ask a male perpetrator whether he has been abused in childhood and he will say no,” she says. “But if you ask: ‘At what age did you first have sex?’ they will say: ‘When I was 12, with my best friend’s mother.’ The abuse will have the same kind of complicated effect on a man as it does on a woman, but how men experience and interpret it will tend to be very confused. There is a dissonance between the personal experience and the social labelling of having a sexual experience with an older woman. But if you talk to men about it, they’ll come up with the same issues of anger and humiliation as a woman would.”

In her work, Craissati has identified three main types of female sexual abuser. There is a “teacher/lover” abuser, who will “seduce” a young boy and mask the position of power that she obtains in this way with her conviction that she is seeking a loving sexual expression in her actions. Second, there are women who are “predisposed”: they victimise their own children in early childhood without male accomplices and are often motivated by anger and compulsive sexual desires. Such women tend to have been abused in their own childhoods, become involved with abusive male partners and will have suicidal thoughts or exhibit self-harming behaviour. It is not unusual for such women to go from one abusive partner to the next.

By far the most common type, however, is the “male coerced or accompanied” abuser. More than half of all convicted female sex offenders belong in this category. They are influenced by a male to participate in sexual abuse, often joining in sexual abuse that their partner has previously committed alone. The female perpetrator will tend to fear her partner and feel powerless in interpersonal relationships, resorting to desperate measures to maintain the relationship, including initiating violence or sexual abuse to please her male partner. But she will be motivated by anger and sexual gratification and reveal a wide range of attitudes towards her victim — from remorse and a wish to repair the relationship to overt hostility towards the victim, who is perceived as the focus of attention and responsible for the abuse.

What is so difficult about treating such women, says Craissati, is the difficulty that many of the professionals working with them may have in imagining that they could be capable of the crimes of which they have been accused: “They are often rather bland women and they will indicate that they had been coerced and completely controlled by their partner. There are women who feel their entire identity has been developed around being a victim and, when they hook up with a pathological man, they take on his persona. It’s something about women who fail to develop their own internal sense of themselves.

“You see it in some women who were very badly violently abused. They’ll say to you: ‘I did have a nice boyfriend once, but I didn’t feel alive.’ And so they derive a sense of themselves through others — rather like a fantastic religious experience, perversion makes the woman feel that she knows who she is. And when the man is gone she reverts to being a relatively innocuous, passive person. It can be difficult to imagine what these women are capable of. And they don’t believe it themselves. They will say ‘I never meant it to happen’, which of course is a way of evading responsibility.”

The temptation among those who meet them is often to accept their version of events: not doing so would require all sorts of uncomfortable digressions into the nature of female sexuality. The judge who eventually convicted Myra Hindley said: “Though I believe Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel that the same is necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence.” Craissati says: “I don’t think Hindley was predestined to kill children, but she egged Ian Brady on. The moment she was separated from him, she reverted.”

But if in the end such women are usually separated from their lovers only by the law, one can only assume a desire, if subconscious, to continue the relationship, therefore perpetuating the abuse. The myth of the infantilised woman, who is helpless under the spell of a powerful and wicked man, does little to undermine the inescapable reality of her guilt.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6957938.ece