Murder is a staple of our newspaper front pages, and murders committed by women are becoming increasingly common.
Wellington psychologist Dr Sharlene Murdoch recently completed for her PhD thesis the first piece of New Zealand research into how and why women become violent. She found that although women committed just 12% of violent crimes in 2006, New Zealand female inmates are far more likely to have been jailed for violence – especially extreme violence – than their counterparts in the United States and England.
“New Zealand has the highest proportion of women violent offenders and women sentenced for homicide,” she wrote.
Murdoch interviewed 19 women jailed for violent offending during her study – including four convicted of murder, two of manslaughter, and many of aggravated robbery and assault – and feels she has a handle on our worst female offenders.
She says violent women were on average less likely than their male counterparts to have previous convictions or reoffend on release and were older.
In the majority of cases, they injured people they knew, with the gender split of victims being even. However, Murdoch notes: “Interestingly, all the victims of murder – and attempted murder – were male, while both manslaughter victims were female.”
Traumatic upbringings, including physical and sexual abuse and chronic drug use, were more prevalent among violent female inmates than their male counterparts.
In three-quarters of the crimes Murdoch studied, women acted with co-offenders. And weapons were used most of the time.
“Knives were the weapon of choice,” writes Murdoch, but pieces of lumber, frying pans, crowbars and motor vehicles were also used.
Dr David Riley, head of psychological services at the Corrections Department, notes the so-called weaker sex can overcome physical disadvantage by arming themselves. “We know that with males, often violence is more severe because of their physical ability to inflict serious physical harm. Weapons can be a great leveller.”
As an example of how these methods and motives play out, Murdoch used Pauline*, one of her subjects, as a case study. Along with two teenage female cousins, Pauline was convicted of murder.
Needing money to attend a 21st party “up north”, the three visited the home of an aunt’s “sugar daddy” who had often acted as a source of cash, albeit in return for sexual favours. The trio were, in Pauline’s words, “pilled up” and drunk the night the killing took place.
After some time at the victim’s home, with no money forthcoming, the teenagers grew frustrated and impatient. Pauline had brought her infant son and was feeding him in the kitchen when the idea of killing the man was raised. “Yep, let’s just kill the bastard,” Pauline agreed – although she later told Murdoch she thought her cousins’ plan was a joke. The three were laughing.
The victim was watching television when the first swing of the hammer missed. Murdoch writes that the ensuing struggle between the middle-aged man and the three teens quickly grew chaotic.
“Multiple weapons were selected and used during this offence, including a hammer, knives and kitchen pans. Weapon selection took place during the offence and seemingly continued until the victim’s demise … they all ran back and forth to the kitchen to obtain suitable weapons.”
Pauline related to Murdoch that although the frenzy abated, the violence did not: “A lot of times we wanted to stop, but the blood and that was already out there, and he was screaming and stuff, and we carried on and, like, two of us would stop but my cousin would turn around and go, ‘What are you stopping for?’, so we would carry on again … yeah, it was weird.”
After locking the body of the victim in the his car’s boot, the trio couldn’t find the car keys. After robbing the house, they fled the scene.
Within days they were in court facing murder charges. Relatives had refused to hide them. None of the trio is eligible for parole until late next year.
Manukau’s Auckland Regional Women’s Correctional Facility is one of the new tranche of jails to house New Zealand’s rapidly rising prison population. When construction began in 2002, it was thought 152 beds would be sufficient, but rising imprisonment rates led to an expansion. Within five months of opening in 2005, all 286 cells were full.
Staff and inmates at the new prison have noticed a worrying difference in the prisoners now entering. Anne Ede, a 21-year veteran warden of the Corrections Department, says certain types of offences have become more common: “You’d very rarely get a girl in for murder. But in the last wee while, it’s been escalating.”
Given newspaper stories on court cases and the images of violent women in music and fiction, it’s little wonder that during a formal powhiri to the Manukau jail – energetically performed by eight inmates – prison manager Jeanette Burns says: “It’s quite hard for us to shake that Bad Girls image.” Burns – since promoted to the role of assistant regional manager at Corrections – adds: “Although sometimes our women don’t help us with that.”
One woman who hasn’t helped is Jackie Taukano, serving a sentence for aggravated robbery. Taukano has blue tattoos on her hands and small crosses on her knuckles, but laughs when asked if she got inked in prison. “Nah, I got them done at school. When I was bored.
“I didn’t like it when I came in,” she says. She started fights and served the first part of her sentence in the high-security wing. “I was assaulting officers, assaulting other inmates that got in my face or if they got in my way or if something wasn’t done straight away. I had an attitude problem.”
Prison officer Beverly Goodrick says today, a year away from release, Taukano has changed dramatically. After a course in communication skills – “The girls were practising effective, instead of aggressive, communication on us” – Taukano’s behaviour improved enough for her to be shifted from high to low security and she has even picked up the cleaner’s job in her wing. Says Taukano: “I can’t live in a place that’s untidy.”
Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft says the age when women first offend is dropping. He attended a conference in the United States along with 1800 of his international peers and says trends in New Zealand are reflected overseas.
Becroft believes that young women are making up a larger proportion of his caseload. Across all ages, women make up 12% of violence convictions, but Becroft reckons that the figure is closer to 20% in the Youth Court.
“Young men usually offend spontaneously, are not premeditated, are under the influence of alcohol, against people that do not know,” he says.
“With young girls, offending is often against other young women. It’s planned, thought about, carefully done and often with other women they know.”
The gender differences in offending are also noticed by those working in the prison system. According to Dr Nick Wilson, a psychologist with Corrections, the surge in violence has resulted from a change in how women express themselves.
“My clinical impressions are that there are high rates of expressed emotion. A lot of their violence has in the past tended to be reactive violence – there’s an anger or rage element to it. However, I have noted that this is changing and there are increasing rates of instrumental violence – violence that’s more goal-directed.”
In her thesis, Murdoch noted that women who end up killing often change strategies mid-crime. What begins as a goal-directed robbery can become an opportunity for a violent attack to redress some perceived harm or threat.
Even those on long lags see the changes. Several inmates spoken to at Manukau’s women’s prison have noted an increase in the number of violent offenders and some are even willing to point at a cause.
“From a criminal perspective, it’s because of the P,” says one, who should know because she’s on remand awaiting trial on serious drug offences.
Jeanette Burns, head of the prison, concurs: “There’s a direct correlation with P, leading to an increase in violent offences.”
Women prisoners are more likely than their male counterparts to have abused drugs such as pure methamphetamine (“P”). Although the incidence of drug use inside the prison is low, Burns says, the mix of violent offenders and withdrawal from drugs can be explosive.
“The saddest thing,” says one female inmate at Manukau’s prison, “is that this is the safest place many of us know.”
Murdoch discovered many of her 19 interview subjects had suffered child or sexual abuse. More than three-quarters had been sexually abused and many were witnesses to and victims of extreme domestic violence.
Many women, says Murdoch, cited Once Were Warriors as providing realistic portrayal of their childhoods. One was whipped until she bled because she refused to get into a bath that was too hot. Another was forced to stay up late at night, watching her dad beat her mum.
Murdoch asked one woman how she ended up in foster care: “Cause my mum and dad gave me a hiding and I ended up in hospital.” Asked how old she was at the time, the woman replied: “Six.”
And Pauline, the woman serving time for murder with her two cousins, disclosed to Murdoch that she was raped by someone in her family, an IV-drug-using gang member, at age 11.
Murdoch says the women she interviewed did not try to use their past to excuse their violent actions. A history of extensive abuse, or what academics refer to as “polyvictimisation”, is more highly correlated with female violent offenders than with men who commit similar crimes. And such polyvictimisation can have dramatic psychological consequences, she says. “A lot of these women never learnt to empathise and regulate emotional responses with others. And if we don’t learn how to do this, it’s very hard to control anger and frustration – and the consequences of anger and frustration.”
A Ministry of Health study into the New Zealand prison population found more than a third of women behind bars had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and one in five had experienced an episode during the previous month. A Cabinet paper calling for better treatment for women offenders put this incidence of PTSD into grim perspective: “This figure is significantly higher than for the community in general and is more in keeping with victims of violent crime and combat veterans.”
One consequence of PTSD is hypervigilance – the need to protect oneself at all costs. Murdoch says the tendency for violent women, including the majority of her sample, to carry knives is symptomatic of this effect. Another psychological consequence is that PTSD sufferers often misunderstand social cues, she says.
“They’re seeing hostile cues that aren’t there, or what we call ‘hostile attributional bias’, where one misreads cues from another as being threatening when they’re actually quite benign.”
Although Rimutaka Prison, north of Wellington, has been running specific anti-violence programmes for its male inmates for some time, only in 2005 was a similar course for women – kowhiritanga – introduced. The kowhiritanga programme consists of 40 sessions spread over 10 weeks but Murdoch believes much more needs to be done.
“This is no criticism of Corrections – I believe Psychological Services do a great job with the resources they’ve got – but, on the whole, 40 sessions when you’re looking at the psychopathology bound into that violent offending is not likely to be enough, compared with community programmes that could go on for 18 months or two years.”
At Manukau’s women’s jail, Burns discloses that three generations of a single family are on the premises the day of our visit. A grandmother is locked up along with her daughter who is caring for her young baby.
This cycle could be cause for hopelessness, but despite seeing familiar names and faces during the course of her career, veteran Corrections officer Anne Ede says these women are not mad, bad or sad. “The women here are perceived as these Bad Girl types. But I get cards from many of them on Mother’s Day.”