Killer women

Women are capable of violence and that can extend to killing

Image: Margaret Garner, a slave who escaped from Kentucky to Ohio; Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b31109/

Women can kill. The dated stereotype is that women are the gentler sex. There is evidence that women warriors rode the steppes of Eastern Europe and a warrior Queen led her forces against the colonising Portuguese in present-day Angola.

Around 2,500 years ago four women were buried in what is now western Russia, along with arrowheads, spears and riding gear and, for the near-40-year-old woman, a gold headdress, indicating her high status. These grave goods indicate these women took an active part in battling other nomadic tribes on these steppes.

Queen Njinga fought Portuguese would-be colonisers in what is now Angola in southwest Africa in the early 17th century. Njinga put her military and diplomatic training to effect in fighting the Portuguese, establishing alliances with other tribes and the Dutch West India Company. She was ruthless in eliminating rivals (including a 7-year-old nephew). 

Njinga married a neighbouring warlord and allied with his state. This involved participating in the cannibalistic initiation rites required for a woman to become a leader in this society.  From this base, she invaded another state, then expanded her control of the slave trade, and continued her battle against the colonial ambitions of the Portuguese until signing a lasting peace treaty in 1656.

Nancy Wake was born in Wellington in 1912, and raised in Australia by a single mother after the family was abandoned by the father. Before the second world war, she talked her way into a job as a journalist in Europe, fabricating her experience and skills. She was the partner of a French industrialist when Germany invaded France, and then an ambulance driver.  In 1944 as an agent of the Special Operations Executive she parachuted into occupied France to support French partisans. 

Wakes’s job was logistics – coordinating the supply of materials such as uniforms, boots, arms and pay to the partisans. Wake actively participated in their attacks on German forces – on one raid killing a sentry with a karate chop to break his neck. 

Extreme violence by women is rare. New Zealand research shows that both males and females can be violent, but when it comes to murder – men outnumber women 90:10. Terri Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi reported in 1999 on the intimate partner violence of nearly 1,000 New Zealanders followed since their birth in 1972-73.

Men in this sample reported being victims of partner violence more than women did (34% v 27%). Was that a rationalisation for their violence? Possibly not, this gender disparity matches self-reports of initiating violence – 22% of men reported being perpetrators, and 37% of women reported that they had meted out violence.

Violence begets violence – the strongest risk factor for violence for both men and women was a record of physically aggressive offending by 15.

Women do murder.  In the 2020 survey by the UNODC (United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime), women accounted for 2% of murders across the world.  In New Zealand, men dominate the proportion of murderers. Over the 10 years 2013-2022 twenty-nine New Zealand women were convicted of homicide, 10.4% of the 279 convicted.

Violence can be split into proactive or reactive. Proactive violence is the result of a predatory plan. Reactive violence is more clearly triggered by an external threat. Evolutionary dispositions are also in play – this seems the best explanation for the peak in violence (and lethal violence) in young, unmarried men – when they are competing for mates.

Women’s motives for murder are often different to those of men.  Women who kill their intimate partners are often reacting to these men’s controlling, proprietary violence.

Some women have a more instrumental, means to an end, motivation to murder.  In 1911, a midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekar arrived in the Hungarian village of Nagyrev.  She had no husband.  She had perfected the technique of extracting arsenic from flypaper and dispensed it to women in the village to poison troublesome husbands, or parents with legacies.  As the midwife allegedly asked the poisoners, “Why put up with them?” Ultimately 34 women and one man were indicted for over 40 murders.

Fazekar appears to have been relatively high on the disagreeable, self-serving aspects of personality that make murdering someone less of a bother.

One apparent paradox is the situation where women murder their children. 

There is evidence that such murder was a common practice in prehistoric human groups.  Estimates of palaeolithic infanticide vary from 15% to 50%.  The evolutionary logic is that infanticide gives a woman the ability to ensure her maternal investment will be paid back with a healthy child. If she cannot adequately care for this child infanticide could be logical, if horrifying.

Anthropologist Majorie Shoslak talked with !Kung women to get the human aspect of this logic. A woman described to Shoslak her mother giving birth and being concerned that the new baby would mean she could not adequately feed the elder sister.  The then girl persuaded her mother not to bury the baby alive.

Jared Diamond describes how on the Melanesian island of Tikopia infanticide ensured that the inhabitants kept their population within the limited resource capacity of the island.

Similarly, women have decided that killing their children was a fate better than enslavement or some other horror.   In 1856 Margaret Garner and her four children escaped slavery in Kentucky by running over the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati.  When recaptured by bounty hunters she killed her daughter rather than allow her to be returned into slavery.

In contemporary food-rich and relatively free societies infanticidal thinking could be initiated when thought-disordered mothers see threats that don’t exist, triggering attempts to ‘save’ their children through murdering them.

Women are capable of ‘instrumental’ or ‘pro-active’ murder, as demonstrated by Queen Njinga’s removal of rivals and plotting of war, and the mercenary approach of Zsuzsanna Fazekar.  Women are also capable of ‘reactive’ murder, where they are fighting for their lives against, usually, a male aggressor.  There would seem to be a pre-programmed capability to kill unwanted children, encouraged over millennia, by the survival of the tribe during lean times. 

Early interventions could help young people predisposed to violence. Psychological support for mothers who experience the world as a violent and dangerous place for their children could help them and their at-risk children.