Why Women Snap

By Silja J.A. Talvi, In These Times. Posted December 14, 2005.

The typical American female TV criminal is nasty, cutthroat, cunning, duplicitous and sexy to boot.

Oxygen, a women-oriented cable channel, hypes its popular "Snapped" series this way: "From millionaire brides with everything to lose, to small-town sweethearts who should simply know better, these shocking but true stories turn common assumptions about crime and criminals upside down."

The show promises to reveal that there is "something far more sinister to the fairer sex than 'sugar and spice and everything nice.'" As proof, "Snapped" offers up Carolyn Warmus, the daughter of a self-made millionaire. "To put it simply," Carolyn, a "young temptress" with "blond hair, a voluptuous figure, and sassy personality, got what Carolyn wanted, including men."

As temptresses do, Carolyn began an affair with a married man. Then "the sexy nymphet … turned her charms on [a] private dick," who eventually provided her with a silencer-enabled gun.

One dead wife-of-her-lover later, Carolyn Warmus finds herself on trial, "dressed to kill … arriving every day in very short, very tight miniskirts and designer clothes. With her striking good looks, expensive outfits, and murderous persona, Warmus was the embodiment of the 'femme fatal': a sexy, dangerous blond bombshell that seemed to step right out of the hardboiled detective films and pulp novels of the '40s."

Words that could have been lifted out those colorful paperbacks -- this is what passes as entertainment for women?

Other outlets have also joined the fun. E! Entertainment Television's series, asks viewers to contemplate: "How does a match made in heaven turn into hell on earth?"

In response, E! offers "True Hollywood Stories: Women Who Kill," in which audiences are introduced to Margaret Rudin, "a gold digger with a dark side," and Kristin Rossum, who is presumed to have killed her mate "because she had a handsome lover on the side."

Deeper motives

Are there cunning, narcissistic women who would kill for thrill or profit? Sure. Why not? Someone's gender doesn't ascribe ethical character traits, no matter how much essentialist thinkers would like to think otherwise. But the fact is that cold-hearted women who are simply out for themselves are a tiny minority of women doing time for murder -- or any other crime.

When women kill their mates, such acts are usually in self-defense -- or as a result of longstanding physical and emotional abuse. According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), at least half of all women in prison, including those jailed for nonviolent offences, were abused by spouses before their incarceration.

Unfortunately, even strong evidence of being battered doesn't do much to help tip the scales of justice in women's favor. According to Harvard University domestic violence researcher Angela Browne, women who kill men in self-defense -- and where there is evidence of severe assault prior to the killing -- are acquitted only 25 percent of the time.

On top of this, women who are charged with the murder of their partners have the least extensive criminal records of any group of convicted offenders. Yet the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that the average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners ranges from two to six years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced to an average of 15 years. In states ranging from Florida to South Carolina, many are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In 1993 an Ohio-based research team studying the motivations for murder in intimate relationships found that 82 percent of men in custody who killed female partners or wives did so because they were motivated by "possessiveness," whereas 83 percent of women in custody described their motivation for murder as "self-defense."

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times. Her work appears in the anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge, 2003).

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