The Language of Crime and Deviance

Women and crime

In this chapter, we will examine media portrayals of female criminals and reflect on the ways in which notions of gender intersect with the coverage they receive. As we saw in Chapter 4 on youth and crime, not only is there is a relation between age and crime, there is also a strong link between gender and crime. The stereotypical picture of criminals is of young males, and according to crime statistics it is men who continue to commit the vast majority of (recorded) crime – in England and Wales men account for about 80 per cent of those convicted of serious offenses. In spite of this, about one-third of violent crime stories in the media focus on female offenders (Marsh and Melville, 2009). Violence is a leading topic, with British newspapers devoting about 65 per cent of their coverage of crime news to news of personal violence (Naylor, 2001). This, of course, is related to the issue of newsworthiness, with newspapers more keen on covering crimes committed by women, especially of a violent nature, as they are seen as rare and therefore more appealing. Violent female offenders are therefore deemed more newsworthy than violent men and are sometimes also treated more harshly by sectors of the media for their crimes.

Through a combined linguistic and visual analysis of several recent cases of female criminals from Britain, we will analyse some of the stock motifs and stereotypes that are employed in conveying deviant women as ‘other’ and look at how their agency (or lack thereof) is constructed. We examine the way in which images of criminal women are used to convey society’s abhorrence, particularly of those women who violate society’s expected gender norms by committing crimes of a violent and/or sexual nature. We will also explore the question of why we, as a society, find it so difficult to accept that women can intentionally abuse and kill. In so doing, we first need to provide a brief overview of some of the theories and views that have been put forward to explain female criminality, some of which still hold sway in today’s media (and legal) discourses.

Women as ‘other’ and as the enigma of criminology

In traditional criminology, views of why women turn to or refrain from crime have been rooted in biological and psychological explanations that focus on women’s nature, which is supposedly different from men’s. More recently, feminist criminologists and media scholars have begun to challenge these perspectives because of their tendency to perpetuate sexist perceptions of female criminal behaviour. Traditionally and historically, women have been perceived essentially as ‘other’: less rational and more emotional than men, passive and demure by nature, and yet deceitful and basically unstable because of their biology and emotionality. Criminology has constructed femininity as a paradox and an enigma, and as an ‘analytical opacity’ (Young, 1996: 27). This process is commonly taken to have begun with Lombroso, the founder of anthropological criminology, according to which there are links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. Based on painstaking measurements of women’s body parts, such as their heads, anklebones and middle fingers, the sound of their voices, number of grey hairs, wrinkles and tattoos, Lombroso divided women into three categories: the ‘normal woman’, the ‘occasional offender’ and the ‘born criminal’, the latter being ‘more terrible than any man’ (Lombroso and Ferrero, 1895: 151).

Lombroso’s approach was based on the conceptualization of women as docile, reserved and sexually apathetic; in the absence of these qualities, which ‘normal’ women should display, it was to be suspected that a ‘born criminal’ was present. The born criminal lacked femininity, exuded savagery and was altogether closer to the male sex, according to Lombroso. He perceived her to be ‘doubly exceptional as a woman, and as a criminal’, since criminals are ‘an exception among civilized people, and women are an exception among criminals’. Therefore, ‘as a double exception, the criminal woman is consequently a monster’ (Lombroso and Ferrero, 1895: 152; our emphasis).

Lombroso’s description of the (born) female criminal as monstrous is significant and has cast a long shadow in criminology, the media and popular culture. The degree to which media discourses are still stuck in a Lombrosian view of female criminality can be seen in the continued ‘monsterization’ (Morrissey, 2003) of certain female offenders and the media’s focus on their physical attributes, which are often interpreted as evidence of their evil nature. We can illustrate this by giving just two examples from press headlines about two well-known British female criminals from recent years: Tracie Andrews, who was found guilty of the murder of her boyfriend in 1997, after initially claiming he was stabbed in a ‘road rage’ incident; and Rosemarie West, who was convicted of the torture and murder of ten young women (one of whom was her own daughter) together with her husband Fred West in 1995. Whereas news coverage on Andrews, who was conventionally pretty, described her as ‘former model Tracie Adams’ and ‘blonde Tracie Andrews’, West was described in terms of her ‘frumpiness’ (e.g. ‘toad on a stone’). In West’s case, some tabloids argued that she took part in the killings of young women because she was insecure about her looks. A comparison of headlines at the time of the women’s convictions and more recent headlines demonstrates the popular press’s ongoing concern with these women’s appearance:

The Blonde from hell (Daily Star, 30 July 1997)

Road rage murderer Tracie Andrews gets £5,000 of plastic surgery at taxpayers’ expense. (Daily Mail Online, 11 November 2009)

Rose just looks like an ordinary housewife, but she is the most evil woman in Britain.

Rose West, the dowdy housewife who became one of the worst killers in history, was last night beginning 10 life sentences. (Daily Record, 23 November 1995)

Gross West’s diet of beans

FLABBY House of Horrors Monster Rose West has been put on a crash diet – of BEANS (Sun, 7 March 2008)

These headlines perfectly illustrate the dichotomy of the ugly duckling (the ‘dowdy housewife’ who is ‘gross’ and ‘flabby’) and the femme fatal (‘the Blonde from hell’), which is pervasive in the reporting of criminal women, especially in the popular press, although the so-called quality press is not always immune to representations of this kind either, as we shall see later in this chapter. West is ‘monsterized’ by being labelled ‘the most evil woman in Britain’, ‘one of the worst killers in history’ and the ‘House of Horrors Monster’. The term ‘House of Horrors’ is taken from a 1946 low-budget horror film of the same name and has become associated with the West case. This shows how popular culture and media shape our understanding of who our current (female) ‘monsters’ are.

In the 1970s, feminist criminologists began to criticize criminal justice for seeing female offenders as more pathological than their male counterparts, arguing instead for ‘positing an equivalence of deviation for all individuals who break the law’ (Young, 1996). Smart’s (1977: 34) influential critique of Lombroso’s view of female offenders was that such women are ‘doubly damned for not only are they legally sanctioned for their offences, they are socially condemned for being biologically or sexually abnormal’. The idea that ‘abnormal’ female sexuality and criminality are connected is prominent in some sectors of the media, which often draw a link between sexual promiscuity, lesbianism and female deviance (see Birch, 1993; Wykes, 1998).

Feminist and media scholars have also taken issue with common-sense assumptions about what constitutes ‘appropriate behaviour for women (and men) and with the ways these are reflected in media reports on crime. Initially, feminist commentators explored constructions of gender in studies of women who became the victim of male violence. A strong tradition of victimology theses operates in feminist theory, and feminist media and legal theorists are not exempt from it. Feminist work has almost exclusively focused on women’s experiences as victims (Daly, 1994). This is why the use of the victim stereotype has been particularly prevalent in feminist discussions of battered women who kill their abusive partners or women who abuse or kill children in collusion with their male partners (e.g. Myra Hindley, Rose West). But, as Allen (1998: 66) has observed, it appears that if women who abuse and kill (children) cannot be made to fit the stereotype of the victim, feminists have remained silent. It is much easier to defend the actions of a battered woman than it is to talk on behalf of a woman who has abused a child of her own volition. Female violence remains intrinsically shocking, even to feminist commentators, although some studies of women who have committed premeditated and malicious acts of violence have been undertaken (e.g. Daly; 1994; Allen, 1998; Matravers, 2001; Morrissey, 2003). Cultural theorist Belinda Morrissey (2003) points out that in their portrayals of violent female criminals, the mainstream media, legal and feminist discourses are similar in that they frequently deny the women’s agency, something which she feels has important ramifications for the representation of women in general as active human subjects.

Feminist scholars have more recently addressed the following interrelated issues: whether criminal women are treated more harshly or more leniently than men in court; whether women who commit crimes in partnership with a man or against a man are victims of male oppression or active lawbreakers acting out of choice; and, in relation to the previous two questions, how women who abuse or kill are portrayed in the media. We will now report some of their findings and illustrate these with two case studies we have selected from the British national and regional print media.

Female crime, gender and the news

As previously stated, much mainstream media discourse about offending women is still constructed around ‘essentialist’ notions of women and conservative attitudes about marriage and family which remain ‘curiously embedded in the Victorian age’ (Jewkes, 2004: 109). In essence, society’s predominant view is that women are biologically predisposed to caring and nurturing and not to violence. As Cameron and Frazer observe, ‘femininity as our society constructs it, is incompatible with transgressive behaviour’ (1987: 50). This is why women who fail to conform to the cultural stereotypes of the maternal, caring and monogamous female often face especially vitriolic treatment by the media, particularly the popular press.

Morrissey argues that when men offend, their crimes will often be ‘both imaginable and possibly even seen as human’ (2003: 16). Unlike crime committed by females, she argues ‘male crime in all forms, from fictional to factual, is frequently articulated, debated, portrayed, glorified, even fantasized’. Some male criminals inspire sympathy and even celebration, especially when they act as avenging underdogs, as could be seen in the case of Raoul Moat, who, after being released from an English prison for a six-week sentence for assault, shot three people: his ex-girlfriend, her new partner (fatally), and a police officer, whom he targeted simply for being a police officer and who is now blind as a result. After six days on the run, Moat was contained in the open by the police, which led to a standoff, during which he shot himself. Moat attracted some sympathy from sectors of the public not least because he managed to evade capture for a week and ‘got one over’ on the police. He was also variously described in some media as having a ‘hulking physique’ and being a ‘notorious hardman’, expressions which glorify more than they condemn (Hari, 2010). After he shot himself, a Raoul Moat RIP memorial website was created on Facebook, which attracted more than 35,000 members.

Female offenders, in contrast, tend to described in rather different terms and seem to confirm people’s worst fears about society falling apart. Naylor (2001), for example, in a study of four British newspapers, observed significant differences in the nature and intensity of reporting on violence by men and women. Different explanatory frameworks were employed; women’s violence was more likely to be reported as irrational, emotional or ‘wicked’, while men’s violence tended to be presented as ‘normal’ and rational. Naylor also found that news producers treated violent female criminality as the most deviant and transgressive of all crime scenarios.

It has also been shown that when women are involved or implicated in a very serious crime, they tend to be punished more harshly and, in addition, ‘punished symbolically by the media’ (Jewkes, 2004: 114). However, the reverse is also true in certain cases. Recent research carried out by Grabe et al. (2006) on journalistic representations of female offenders in a local US newspaper tested the so-called chivalry hypothesis, according to which female offenders receive more lenient coverage than men. They did find support for the hypothesis, although it applied only in cases in which the women did not violate gender stereotypes, and that, in fact, women who commit violent crimes or crimes against children receive the harshest treatment of all, especially if they act together with a man.

In Britain, the archetypal male–female partnerships in recent crime history are those of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and Fred and Rosemarie West. Hindley and Brady were convicted of a number of child murders between 1963 and 1965. Although Brady was the dominant force behind the killings, Hindley’s infamy far outweighed Brady’s. Hindley’s status as an ‘iniquitous criminal’ (Penfold-Mounce, 2009) was further enhanced and immortalized in the now iconic police mug shot of her as a blonde with dark roots, taken at the time of her arrest in 1965, in which she stares out defiantly at the viewer from under her fringe. The image has been used effectively in the ‘othering’ of her as a particularly unnatural killer, owing to her gender, connoting evil in a way Brady’s photograph never has. Even though she died in 2002, Hindley remains powerfully present in the British psyche and continues to be used as a point of comparison for other female criminals, even those who did not kill. For example, a woman whose toddler was abused by ‘nursery paedophile’ Vanessa George described the latter in the Daily Mail (12 October 2009) as follows:

She did everything he (Blanchard) told her to do in a similar way to Hindley and it all went from there. It seems he had some sort of spell over her.

The demonization of Hindley and West and other, less well-known cases as evil ‘monsters’, can be explained through Jenks’s (2003: 185) notion that they represent ‘frightening possibilities’ that need to be rejected from the category of ‘women’. Lexical choices such as ‘House of Horrors killer’, ‘monster’, ‘black widow’, ‘lesbian vampire killer’ and so on are obvious ways of linguistic othering, which works to remove (female) offenders from their society, thereby avoiding the uncomfortable truth that they were produced by that society.

The consistent public and media abhorrence expressed towards these women shows that they are a particularly potent image of the embodiment of evil, which is related to their gender. These images or discourses are conveyed in the mainstream media through a number of stock stories or narratives. Jewkes has identified eight standard narratives used by the mainstream media for women who commit serious offences:

Sexuality and sexual deviance (e.g. promiscuity, lesbianism, frigidity)

(Absence of) physical attractiveness (e.g. frumps or femmes fatales)

Bad wives

Bad mothers

Mythical monsters (e.g. Medea and Medusa from Greek mythology, vampires)

Mad cows (criminal women at the mercy of their hormones or biology)

Evil manipulators

Non-agents (women who are denied agency in their criminal acts).

(2004: 113)

Often these stock narratives come in the form of binary classifications arising from popular stories or myths, such as the Virgin or the Vamp. Naylor points out that while ‘male deviance is seen on a continuum, female deviance is polarized: madonna/whore, the gentler sex or the more deadly species’ (1990: 5). Women are either Lady Macbeth figures or dupes who will abuse or kill in order to secure their relationship with a man (see Cameron and Frazer, 1987). Some of these narratives focus on women’s biology and psychology, drawing a link between femininity and madness. The ‘evil manipulator’ narrative has been applied to infamous British criminals Myra Hindley, Rose West, and more recently, Maxine Carr, among others, and presents these women as particularly wicked because it suggests that they are somehow to blame for their male partners’ descent into depravity. This image has many historical precedents that may even go back to the biblical Eve. Finally, the narrative of non-agency is significant in that it can be found in media and legal, as well as feminist, discourses. It therefore deserves closer attention.

Female criminals and the denial of agency

Non-agentive media narratives confirm that female aggression has no place in our culture, particularly with reference to the notion that women can abuse and kill as women – hence the portrayal of these women as ‘mannish’ or the appearance of headlines such as ‘When women are as evil as men’, as was the case with ‘nursery paedophile’ Vanessa George (see below, p. 130 in this book). Morrissey has identified three techniques to achieve non-agency: vilification/monsterization, mythification and victimism (2003: 25). Vilification/monsterization denies agency by representing the female criminal as essentially evil and beyond redemption. What is denied here is the woman’s human agency, although she is clearly represented as having acted. This negates the need for serious consideration of her acts ‘in the context of her society and her experience as a human subject’ (Morrissey, 2003: 104). We have already given two headlines as examples of this strategy, at the start of this chapter, and below are two more:

Monstrous abuse by two evil mothers

Evil incarnate

An evil mother who inflicted appalling injuries on her toddler son as she battered him to death was jailed for life yesterday. (Sun, 15 May 2010)

Nursery monster Vanessa George to enjoy life of anonymity at taxpayers’ expense as furious parents call for her ‘to be skinned and rolled in salt’. (Mail Online, 3 October 2009)

In the two examples above the women are sub-human creatures (‘evil incarnate’, ‘nursery monster’). In the first case the woman is clearly cast as agent (‘inflicted appalling injuries . . .’) but her abuse is regarded as ‘monstrous’, so not the action of a human being.

Mythification relates the criminal woman to frightening mythic characters, such as Medea or the ‘Black widow’. Like monsterization, it is a very effective distancing strategy and can be found mainly in the popular media:

Black widow: Japan’s ‘Black widow’ killer accused of killing six men’ (Daily Telegraph, 10 November 2009)

Victimism, in turn, relies on the depiction of women as powerless and oppressed, which can function to deny their responsibility, culpability and even rationality:

Black widows: two women driven to kill by years of violent abuse

Women driven to kill by years of violent abuse

Physical, verbal and emotional torment blighted lives of slayers. (Belfast Telegraph, 11 December 2010)

Here the women retain their humanity only because they are believed to have acted in self-defence against abusive husbands/partners. The headline and lead imply that the women are non-agentic or not fully responsible for the killings (‘driven to kill’), although they are still referred to as ‘black widows’ and ‘slayers’, two potent labels for women killers. In contrast, through the use of nominalizations such as ‘abuse’ and ‘torment’, the agency of the women’s violent partners remains implicit.

The following headline and lead may also be seen as an example of the victimism strategy:

Maxine Carr is one more Huntley victim: Why do we demonize her?

After serving half the sentence imposed for covering up for her killer boyfriend, Maxine Carr is expected to be released on Friday. She has already been demonized, says our correspondent, and is a victim of a deep-rooted misogyny in British society that means higher moral standards are expected of women. (Sunday Times Online, 11 May 2004)

Here the commentator, Joan Smith, argues that Carr’s vilification is unjust given the mundane character of her crime (perjury) compared to Huntley’s (murder of two schoolgirls). Although Carr’s demonization by the media certainly was unjust and misogynistic, one could still argue that labelling her a victim of Huntley to explain her perjury is simplistic.

Some feminist media commentators argue that women who commit crimes with men have fallen under their spell and that battered women who kill their abusive partners should be exculpated. Other feminist scholars (e.g. Birch, 1993; Morrissey, 2003; Jewkes, 2004) argue that society has to come to terms with the less palatable idea that women have free will and that they, like men, can be cruel, sadistic and violent. There can be no denying that women have been and continue to be oppressed because of power differentials between the sexes, long-term structural inequalities and gender-related poverty. But female victims never seem to be aggressors, bearing little or even no responsibility for their acts (Allen, 1998). When men commit a crime, the link between victimization and criminalization is not so readily drawn, which makes victim-centred explanations of female crimes a gendered one.

Narratives similar to those we have just outlined can also be found in legal interpretations of female criminality. Winter (2002) found that when women commit acts of violence, their representation in legal reports falls into three distinct categories. The offender is either a lunatic (hysterical or suffering from premenstrual or battered woman syndrome), a monster (the ‘bad’ mother, the lesbian, the just plain evil) or an idiot (the dupe, the tool carrier, the confidante). Rarely are women’s crimes seen as a rational response to social, political or physical inequalities, as is often the case with men (Wilczynski, 1991). On the other hand, sympathetic media and legal treatment based on these narratives has been successful in securing some women shorter sentences in cases ranging from shoplifting to murder. Morrissey, however, argues that, ultimately, the strategy of victimism is disadvantageous to women, as it stands in the way of challenging negative stereotypes and myths about them. The media have helped in the dissemination of these legal discourses about female criminality, which points to the symbiotic relationship between the media and legal institutions in presenting crime stories (Morrissey, 2003).

We will now move on to analysing and comparing two case studies on media representations of criminal women, taken from the regional and national press, which exemplify the use of the standard narrative techniques identified by Jewkes (2004) and Morrissey (2003) to explain their deviant behaviour.

Our first case study concerns a case from Northern Ireland, where in 2008, a 27-year-old woman, Roisin Doyle, fatally stabbed her estranged husband, Kevin Doyle, for which she received a three-year sentence, followed by two years probation. Here we compare Doyle’s portrayal in Sunday Life with an Ulster Television (UTV) online article. Sunday Life is a Northern Irish Sunday tabloid newspaper which is also sold in the rest of Ireland and Britain. It is published by Belfast Telegraph Newspapers Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Independent News and Media. UTV is a broadcasting and New Media company based in Belfast. We first compare the lexical choices in the two headlines and leads:

Black widow duped friend

Roisin fooled her pal into washing the lethal weapon. (Sunday Life, 28 March 2010)

Wife jailed for husband killing

A Belfast mother of four who killed her husband by stabbing him in the chest during a heated row has been jailed for three years (UTV News, 26 March 2010)

We can see that in Sunday Life Doyle is constructed as a mythical ‘black widow’, whereas in the UTV text she is a ‘wife’ and ‘mother of four’ who was jailed for killing her husband. The ways in which journalists name people in the events they report on always involve choices. Reisigl and Wodak (2001) call these naming options ‘referential strategies’. These not only ‘project meaning onto the referent, they also establish coherence relations with the way that other social actors are referred to and represented’ (Richardson, 2007: 50). Because Sunday Life blames Doyle for her actions, she is described in terms which suggest depravity and sub-humanity. The UTV headline, in contrast, is far more measured in tone.

Let us first look at the social actor categories employed in Sunday Life for Roisin Doyle, Kevin Doyle and the other two participants, Carol Ann McLurg, Roisin Doyle’s close friend, and the prosecuting barrister, Gordon Kerr:

Roisin Doyle: black widow; Roisin; a black widow killer; evil Roisin Doyle, 27; the killer; sneaky Roisin; the jealous wife; the defendant; callous Roisin; the wicked wife.

Kevin Doyle: husband Kevin Doyle; her husband; Kevin Doyle, 30; her hubby; dad-of-four Kevin; Kevin; a dying Kevin

Figure 5.1 Black widow duped friend (Source: Sunday Life, 28 March 2010)

Carol Ann McLurg: friend; her pal; her best friend; close pal Carol Ann; Carol Ann; an unsuspecting Carol Ann; her best mate; Carol Ann McLurg; the witness.

Prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC: Prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC; Mr Kerr; the Crown barrister.

In keeping with (red-hot) tabloid style, Roisin Doyle is nominated mostly informally (‘Roisin’) and classified once as ‘the defendant’. When she is named informally, she is also called ‘sneaky’, ‘evil’, ‘dangerous’, ‘jealous’, ‘callous’ and ‘wicked’, all negatively evaluative adjectives. Kevin Doyle, on the other hand, is merely described as ‘dying Kevin’. He is identified both semi-formally (‘Kevin Doyle’) and informally (‘Kevin’). He is also identified relationally, that is, in terms of his kinship relations, as ‘husband Kevin Doyle’, ‘her hubby’, ‘dad-of-four Kevin’, all terms that essentially humanize him, whereas the same does not apply to Roisin Doyle, who is not referred to as a ‘mother-of-four’. The third participant, Roisin Doyle’s friend, Carol Ann McLurg, is also mainly identified relationally as ‘her pal’, ‘her best friend’, ‘close pal Carol Ann’, ‘her best mate’ and informally as ‘an unsuspecting Carol Ann’. She is classified as a ‘witness’ once. Predictably, the prosecuting barrister is nominated formally (‘prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC’; ‘Mr Kerr’) and identified functionally (‘the Crown barrister’).

The actions of the social actors are described as follows:

Roisin Doyle: duped friend; fooled her pal; tricked her best friend; the knife that she used to stab her husband; stabbed Kevin Doyle, 30, in a violent rage; after knifing her husband, Roisin rang close pal; began to casually clean the living room; lifted a steak knife off the sofa and handed it to Carol Ann, telling her to put it into the kitchen sink; had plunged the same knife into the chest of her husband causing him to bleed to death; tried to dupe her best mate; appeared in court; rang Carol McClurg, had changed out of her blood-stained clothes before ringing Carol Ann; was screaming; was no longer wearing the clothes she had gone out in; had changed into a T-shirt; tried to pick Kevin up; pushed him onto his back; tidied up the living room; lifted a steak knife from the sofa and handed it to Carol Ann and asked her to put it into the kitchen; held the hand of his heart-broken mother; kept up the pretence that she had found Kevin already stabbed outside the house; changed her story, claiming that she had thrown the knife at him; admitted to stabbing her husband; pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Kevin Doyle: fighting for his life, bled to death; sitting on a kerb outside the house; was on his knees; said; lay dying; took his last breath.

Carol Ann McLurg: Believing the lies; rushed over to Roisin’s house; did as she was asked; got a taxi and went to Summerhill Grange; saw Kevin Doyle sitting on a kerb outside the house in what she thought was a drunken state; approached the house; spoke to Roisin; said that Kevin was outside; urged Roisin to phone an ambulance.

Prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC: explained; said; added.

In terms of the transitivity patterns used to describe Roisin Doyle’s actions, we can see a preponderance of active material processes, which semantically denote negative activities and which grammatically are all in the active voice and, therefore, clearly cast Roisin Doyle as a callous killer and culpable agent (e.g. ‘stabbed Kevin Doyle, 30, in a violent rage’; ‘kept up the pretence that she had found Kevin already stabbed outside the house’). However, by insisting on the evil nature of the murderess, the article deprives her of her humanity, and agency denial takes place: she is cast as having acted, but not as a human woman.

There is also a smaller number of mental processes, which portray her as a devious manipulator, who deceives even her best friend (‘duped’; ‘fooled’; ‘tricked’; ‘tried to dupe’). The actions of her friend, Carol Ann McLurg, are the result of Doyle’s manipulation (‘did as she was told’) and she at least tried to help Kevin Doyle (‘urged Roisin to phone an ambulance’). In terms of verbal processes, Doyle ‘was screaming’, ‘changed her story’, ‘admitted’ and ‘pleaded guilty’, whereas the prosecuting barrister merely ‘explained’, ‘said’ and ‘added’.

As we saw in Chapter 2 on lexis, vocabulary is one of the most obvious means through which ideological meanings can be expressed about people and events. Another important function of lexis is that it enhances lexical cohesion, which in the above text is achieved through the repetition of words that are linked in meaning, particularly synonyms and near-synonyms, to refer to Roisin Doyle and her actions, such as ‘black widow’/’ black widow killer’/‘ the killer’; ‘evil’/’ wicked’; duped/fooled/tricked; ‘stabbed’/’ knifing’/’ plunged the knife into’; ‘the lethal weapon’/‘ the knife’/‘ the same knife’/‘ a steak knife’. The function of this excessive repetition or ‘overlexicalization’ (Fowler et al., 1979) is to intensify meaning. Doyle’s friend is also overlexicalized as ‘friend/pal’/‘ best friend’/‘ close pal’/‘ her best mate’, which reinforces the notion that Doyle did not even stop at the deception of her best friend. Her ‘callous’ nature is further underlined through some of the comments made by the prosecuting barrister:

‘Whilst awaiting the ambulance Roisin Doyle tidied up the living room,’ added the Crown barrister.

‘She lifted a steak knife from the sofa and handed it to Carol Ann and asked her to put it in the kitchen.’

Together with the evaluative terms to describe Doyle, these quotes by the Prosecution add up to a picture of her as a calm and calculating killer who cleans up after she murdered her husband. Doyle’s vilification through lexis also leads to her mythification: by being called a ‘black widow’, she is transformed into the embodiment of one of the most frightening of mythic characters in the popular press. Her agency is no longer that of a ‘normal’ human being.

Visually, the page is dominated by a large photograph of Roisin Doyle, in which she wears a low-cut, black halter-neck top, hoop earrings and a white pearly bracelet, and looks at the viewer (a ‘demand’ picture) with her tongue stuck out and her right hand raised in an ‘up yours’ gesture (Figure 5.1). The picture may have been taken by a friend at a party, in a pub or at home. There is nothing in the image as such that would suggest anything sinister, but in combination with the text we have just analysed and the caption on the top right-hand side of the photograph, ‘DANGEROUS: Roisin Doyle’, it may be interpreted by the reader rather differently. The image also adds to Doyle’s negative evaluation in terms of her physical appearance.

The second, much smaller photograph shows Roisin looking off-frame in what is an ‘offer’ image. She is shown positioned close behind what appear to be two men whose faces have been cropped out. There is no background to provide any information about location. In this context, a reasonable interpretation by the reader is that she appears to be being escorted by police. The expression on her face is hard to read and could be anything from bewilderment to fear. That she looks off to the side could suggest a degree of ‘shiftiness’. The close-shot effect created by the cropping takes the viewer closer to her emotions, which in this case are given an interpretation by the added caption, which reads, ‘CALLOUS: Roisin admitted stabbing’.

According to Barthes, images are ‘polysemous’, that is, they have many meaning potentials: ‘they imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain” of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others’ (1977: 39). This is why words are needed to ‘anchor’ this floating chain of signifieds, thereby selecting for them a single specific meaning. The meaning we are meant to glean is that of Roisin Doyle as a ‘dangerous’ and ‘callous’, but also sexually attractive killer. The power of photographs lies in their ability to denote and connote. So while the photographs of Roisin Doyle in isolation may denote rather innocuous events in her life, connotatively they suggest something altogether different, particularly as they are juxtaposed with text that already constructs her as ‘evil’ and ‘wicked’. In contrast, Kevin Doyle’s cropped photograph shows him smiling amiably at the viewer, taking us close to him. In combination with the caption, ‘STABBED: Husband Kevin Doyle’, he is humanized as the tragic victim who has fallen prey to his ‘evil’ wife.

Barthes also points out that the photograph ‘is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation’ (1977: 19). We can see that this ideological process took place with the newspapers’ choice of the images of Roisin and Kevin Doyle and with the editing process, during which the images were cropped or otherwise manipulated by zooming in on their faces, and finally with the choice of their size; all of these features influence the ‘preferred’ reading, in this case of Roisin Doyle as a callous killer and her husband as a helpless victim.

As for the narratives identified by Jewkes (2004), it is obvious that the article draws mainly on the ‘bad wife’, ‘evil manipulator’ and ‘mythical monster’ motifs. The ‘bad mother’ narrative can be said to be present implicitly also, as no ‘good’ mother kills the father of her children. Roisin Doyle is vilified, and there is nothing in the article that would exculpate her even in the slightest; there is no information as to what may have led to her stabbing her husband, except the suggestion that she was ‘jealous’. We learn nothing about the two main participants’ backgrounds, except that a ‘jealous’ and ‘callous’ wife has murdered her husband ‘in a violent rage’. There is no sense that the husband might have behaved in a way so as to provoke an argument. He is described merely in terms of a small number of behavioural processes: ‘fighting for his life’, ‘bled to death’, ‘lay dying’, ‘took his last breath’. There is also no information about the pressures of social and personal problems, mental health issues and so on. One of the authors formerly worked in the Home Office as a researcher on cases in which those suffering from mental health issues committed violent offences. Many of these offenders, especially the women, would have long histories of abuse and tragic life circumstances.

We now use the text from the UTV News website on the same case for comparison (the italicized bits are in the original newspaper text and are quotes taken from the Belfast Crown Court Judgement Report).

Figure 5.2 Wife jailed for husband killing (Source: UTV News, 26 March 2010)

Wife jailed for husband killing

A Belfast mother of four who killed her husband by stabbing him in the chest during a heated row has been jailed for three years.

[. . .]

Roisin Doyle originally charged with murder pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the morning her trial was due to start.

‘Tragic’

The Crown said that while she intended to harm her husband, there was no evidence she had intended to kill him.

The judge Mr Justice Treacy said it was one of the most ‘tragic’ cases he had ever encountered.

The court was told that after she returned from a night out with friends, Roisin Doyle discovered that her husband from whom she was separated had come to the house and sent a babysitter home.

The couple started to argue and Mrs Doyle got a steak knife from the kitchen and tried to cut her own wrist.

She then claimed she threw the knife at her husband but later admitted to police that she struck him in the chest with it. He died in hospital several hours later.

The judge said it was of those cases ‘which posed a significant challenge in seeking to reach a disposal which does justice to everyone in this sad situation’.

The judge said the couple’s relationship which had initially been a happy one had become ‘destructive and turbulent’.

‘The reports in this case paint a picture of a truly tragic mismatch of two people each of whom had flaws,’ he added.

Mr Justice Treacy said the Doyles had both suffered grievously from their destructive relationship and he added: ‘The relationship was consistently and, I suspect, mutually abusive’.

He said that Kevin Doyle had a tendency to suffer depressive episodes and had engaged in self-harm.

He said that Roisin Doyle had also tried to take her own life. ‘But towards the end of this relationship she was a woman on the edge,’ he added.

The judge said Mr Doyle’s death had been ‘unexpectedly tragic’ because the knife had entered his body at a precise point where it severed his mammary artery and if the wound had been half an inch to either side he would almost certainly have survived.

Turning to the force used by Mrs Doyle with the knife, Mr Justice Treacy said medical reports had suggested it was extremely unlikely that ‘a blow of this level of force would cause the death of a mature healthy man’.

A comparison between the Sunday Life article and the UTV News text above reveals that Roisin Doyle is named rather differently:

Roisin Doyle: wife; a Belfast mother of four; Roisin Doyle; Mrs Doyle

Kevin Doyle: husband; her 30-year-old husband Kevin; Kevin Doyle; Mr Doyle

Justice Treacy: The judge Mr Justice Treacy; the judge; Mr Justice Treacy.

As we can see, Doyle is identified relationally as a ‘Belfast mother of four’, which immediately humanizes her, and as a ‘wife’. The remainder of the article describes her formally as ‘Mrs Doyle’ or semi-formally as ‘Roisin Doyle, 27’. Kevin Doyle is also identified relationally and informally as ‘her husband’ and ‘her 30-year-old husband Kevin’, ‘her husband from whom she was separated’, and semi-formally (‘Kevin Doyle’). The judge is named formally, which is to be expected. Roisin Doyle’s friend and witness to the prosecution, Carol Ann McLurg, gets no mention at all.

The actions of the social actors are described thus:

Roisin Doyle: killed her husband by stabbing him; pleaded guilty to manslaughter; intended to harm her husband; returned from a night with friends; discovered that her husband had come to the house; got a steak knife; started to cut her own wrist; claimed she threw knife at her husband; later admitted she struck him in the chest; tried to take her own life; was a woman on the edge; agreed to complete two years on probation

Kevin Doyle: died; had a tendency to suffer depressive episodes; had come to house and sent babysitter home; engaged in self-harm

Judge Mr Justice Treacy: said; added.

Looking at the transitivity patterns, it again becomes clear, through the material processes used to describe her actions (‘killed her husband by stabbing him’), that Roisin Doyle is made responsible for killing her husband. However, the UTV News article also states that ‘the Crown said that while she intended to harm her husband, ‘there is no evidence she had intended to kill him’. We also learn that she ‘tried to cut her own wrist’ and to ‘take her own life’. Her estranged husband is not completely constructed as the passive and helpless victim, but as somebody who ‘engaged in self-harm’, which put aconsiderable strain on the relationship. This is confirmed in the Belfast Crown Court Judgement report (26 March 2010): ‘[. . .] from the start there were difficulties arising particularly from the deceased’s tendency to suffer depressive episodes and to engage in self-harm’. The report further states that the husband ‘had come to the house and sent the babysitter home’, which are actions which may have provoked the argument between him and his wife.

Whereas Sunday Life quotes the prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC, UTV News cites from Judge Justice Treacy’s comments in the Belfast Crown Court Judgement report. These statements by Justice Treacy about the case, which he refers to as ‘tragic’, paint a far more sympathetic picture of Roisin Doyle, and the blame is put on both parties (‘the couple started to argue’). Doyle is also said to have killed her husband ‘during a heated row’, which implies that both parties where involved in an argument, unlike in the Sunday Life article, where she is said to have stabbed him ‘in a violent rage’, which puts the blame solely on her. Justice Treacy is also quoted as saying that the relationship had become ‘destructive and turbulent’, and that it was ‘consistently and, I suspect, mutually abusive’.

As for the visual representation in the UTV News text, only the victim, Kevin Doyle, is shown, in a small picture placed between the headline and lead, in which he can be seen smiling at the reader. The cropping again gives the impression of an extreme close shot which has the effect of creating a sense of intimacy. It is in fact the same picture as in Sunday Life, although it has been tilted. In film editing and photography, there has been a tradition of these ‘cantered’ shots being used to bring more energy and vibrance to an image. So unlike the straight shot used in Sunday Life, this one brings more sense of ‘life’ and energy to Doyle. And through the cropping, the viewer is given an added sense of insight into to this ‘life’. As in actual social situations, in which social distance/proximity has meanings of intimacy or a lack of intimacy the same set of associations apply to images.

As we saw in the two articles we have just compared, legal narratives of both offender and victim given in court are copied into the two newspaper articles. These two articles therefore illustrate the close relationship between the media and legal institutions, which means that mainstream media depictions often mirror courtroom portrayals. The Sunday Life article quotes and paraphrases the statements of the Prosecution in support of its construction of Roisin Doyle as a callous killer (e.g. ‘Details of how Roisin tried to dupe her best mate were made public when she appeared in court’; ‘It was also revealed that she had changed out of her bloodstained clothes before ringing Carol Ann’). The actions and statements of the witness for the Prosecution, Carol Ann McLurg, are also reported. Morrissey (2003: 19) points out that media reports of criminal trials centre around transcripts of legal rhetoric and evidence given by witnesses who have been called to support particular sides of the legal debate, something which the reader is rarely informed about, and whose evidence is treated as neutral and objective rather than partisan, particularly in the case of expert witnesses.

In the UTV News article, Doyle is far more humanized and contextualized by being placed within her social world and culture, which is made partly responsible for her predicament. The quotes from the Belfast Crown Court Judgement report (26 March 2010) serve to acknowledge that Doyle was at the mercy of societal inequities. It remarks on Roisin and Kevin Doyle’s marriage as ‘truly destructive for both people’and states that neither ‘seemed to have the emotional tools to either improve their relationship or disengage from it’. There is also the suggestion that Roisin Doyle may have been too young to enter into a relationship with a man almost five years her senior: ‘[. . .] she had a miscarriage before her 16th birthday followed by several pregnancies in quick succession. There can be no denying the fact that the defendant’s early involvement with a man significantly older than her had the effect of changing her course in life and materially altering her prospects for the future’. From these statements in the Belfast Crown Court Judgement report it can be inferred that Doyle’s status as a victim and as somebody who has been more ‘sinned against than sinning’ is confirmed.

These background factors were crucial to the outcome of the case and need to feature in newspaper reporting for a more balanced understanding. However, Allen, in her study of psychiatrists’ and probation officers’ reports in Britain, takes issue with the way that female offenders tend to be represented as having no control over what they were doing at the time and that their crimes are often recast as a natural disaster or tragedy. These reports, she says

acknowledge the trajectory of objects in space – the knife in the hand, the thrust of the blade into the heart – but progressively delete from that trajectory all that would mark it as an action by an intentional and culpable subject. (1987: 83)

The following excerpt from the UTV News article (quoting Judge Mr Justice Treacy) perhaps exemplifies this:

The judge said that Mr Doyle’s death had been ‘unexpectedly tragic’ because the knife had entered his body at a precise point where it severed his mammary artery . . .

[. . . ] medical reports had suggested that a blow of this level of force would cause the death of a mature healthy man.

In the first excerpt, ‘the knife’ is turned into the actor which ‘enters’ the victim’s body, and in the second it is the ‘blow’ which ‘causes’ the victim’s death, rather than Doyle herself. Allen goes on to say that ‘even at the very moment of their victimization and coercion’ women can still be ‘conscious, intentional, responsible, and potentially dangerous and culpable subjects of the law’ (1987: 94). The question is, when media and legal discourses portray women such as Roisin Doyle as victims of their circumstances, does that mean that in a way they preserve female oppression? While it is of course important to recognize elements other than individual volition when people commit a crime and to place them within their social and cultural milieu (as was done in the UTV News article with Roisin Doyle), the question is whether the portrayal of criminal women in terms of impotent victimhood (or madness – ‘a woman on edge’) undermines a concept of women in general ‘as fully fledged moral subjects and responsible agents’ (Morrissey, 2003: 35). According to Jewkes, both media and legal institutions play a vital role ‘in maintaining notions of female wickedness in cases where women offend, just as they preserve ideas of feminine oppression in cases where women are portrayed as victims’ (2004: 111).

To sum up, both articles can be said to deny the agency of the female offender. Whereas the narratives in Sunday Life restrict Roisin Doyle’s portrayal to that of mythic evil, the UTV News article draws mainly on narratives of women as non-agents and victims.

Our second case study concerns Vanessa George, a child nursery worker from Plymouth who was involved in an internet paedophile ring with a convicted child sex offender, Colin Blanchard, whom she met on the social networking site Facebook. Another woman, Angela Allen, was also involved in the case. George took indecent images on her mobile of some of the small children in her care and posted them to Blanchard. They never met in person, but recorded their attacks on mobile phones and swapped the images through emails. In this case, all three pleaded guilty to a string of child sex offences. George pleaded guilty to seven counts of sexual assault, and six of making and distributing indecent pictures of children. In December 2009, both George and Allen were given indeterminate sentences, with George having to serve at least seven and Allen at least five years. Blanchard, who pleaded guilty to 17 child pornography counts and two child sex assaults, and admitted a further charge of possessing extreme pornography, also received an indeterminate sentence, having to serve a minimum of nine years. Although it later emerged that two other women were also involved, the main focus has always been on George, because she was the one who took the images. Initially, Blanchard, already a convicted paedophile, did not receive the same amount of coverage. It was only at the sentencing stage that some newspapers began to see them as equally guilty. This could also be seen in some of the visual representations, which showed them as a trio.

The demonization of George was a current throughout the press representations. The fact that she was herself a mother caused even more outrage. This can be seen in the following headline, where the word ‘mother’ is in capitals:

How could a MOTHER abuse these kids? (Sun, 3 October 2009)

Just like the previous text from Sunday Life about Roisin Doyle, this article uses a ‘monsterization’ discourse to condemn George. She is even compared to archetypal child killers Myra Hindley and Rosmarie West (‘in the malevolent club of vile and evil female monsters’). The most important additional aspect of this story was the hostile reaction to George being inflamed by her transgression of expectations of female behaviour. Rather than nurturing the children in her care (and her own), she actively procured child victims for Blanchard, if only in the form of internet images.

George is described as ‘even more disgusting than even Blanchard’ because her acts go ‘against every possible maternal instinct’. Therefore, the nature of her crime, that is, passing on images of children intended for sexual purposes, is placed equally alongside the violent murders of Hindley and West. The same comparison is not found in the representation of Blanchard. While described as a pervert, he is not placed in the same category of child murderers Ian Brady or Fred West.

We find something different in the next news item (from the Daily Mail Online, 3 October 2009). Here there is an acknowledgement that women do form a significant percentage of those convicted of this type of charges and that therefore George is not an anomalous case. But this fact is, in itself, used not as evidence to reconsider the nature of female paedophiles but as cause for further moral outrage.

When women are as evil as men

It is still difficult to take in: that the catalogue of sexual abuse of very young children revealed in this week’s paedophile court case was carried out by a 39-year-old female classroom assistant, at a nursery called Little Ted’s.

In a sordid three-way exchange, Vanessa George swapped pictures of children in her care with another woman and a convicted sex offender businessman.

The fact that two of these paedophiles were female – and also mothers – is sickening enough without the fact that the victims had been entrusted into this sick woman’s care by parents who were unaware of her true nature.

But what was even more upsetting about this case is that it subsequently emerged that 20 per cent of all sexual offences against children are now committed by women.

And far from the traditional image of these women being vulnerable individuals manipulated by evil men, experts say most are driven by their own perversions.

The second woman in this abominable triangle of ‘Facebook friends’, a prostitute living on welfare benefits in a squalid flat where she sent pornography from her computer, more easily fits the profile of a woman paedophile.

But Vanessa George was different – described as ‘an angel’ and a ‘second mother’ by some parents who used her nursery. She was in a position of trust. Hers, therefore, was a far worse abuse of innocence.

Apart from this depraved trio, this case shows how frighteningly easy it is for the internet to bring together perverts like this twisted nursery teacher, the cunning sex-obsessed mother and a known sex offender.

Along with the usual ‘monsterizing’ language and evaluative terms such as ‘sordid’, ‘shocking’, ‘sick’ and ‘abominable’, we find additional outrage at the fact hat George was a female and a mother. Her actions are regarded as even more ‘sickening’ due to the way she had betrayed trust put in her as a nursery worker:

It is odd, on the one hand, to point out that parents were unaware of her true nature. If they had known, they would have removed their children and informed the authorities. But on the other hand, this plays an important role in emphasizing parents’ vulnerability in situations like this. It also allows the writer to emphasize the abuse of trust.

The text then goes on like this:

But what was even more upsetting about this case is that it subsequently emerged that 20 per cent of all sexual offences against children are now committed by women. And far from the traditional image of these women being vulnerable individuals manipulated by evil men, experts say most are driven by their own perversions.

The first sentence is phrased in a way that suggests that more women are now carrying out sexual offences against children, which is important in the moralization of any issue: it is getting worse! There could have been reflection on the nature of women as offenders. The statement about this crime being ‘sickening’ as the perpetrators were women and mothers, could have been questioned. Why is it considered more sickening when women commit crimes like this one than when men and fathers are the perpetrators?

Finally, in this item, we also find evaluation of the character of the women:

We are not told why ‘a prostitute living on welfare benefits in a squalid flat’ would fit the profile of a woman paedophile more easily, perhaps what is meant is that it better corresponds to society’s stereotype of a female paedophile.What we see here again are the structural oppositions of sordidness and perversion versus innocence and victimhood, which preclude a more informed debate of the case. The reference to George as an ‘angel’ is represented as evidence that she was masquerading as someone on the other side of the structural boundary between good and evil. In terms of Jewkes’ (2004) list of narratives, we find a very strong theme of the ‘bad mother’, the ‘sexual deviant’ and the ‘evil manipulator’ (e.g. ‘the cunning sex-obsessed mother’).

In the following text from the Times Online (16 December 2009), we find just the level of analysis that is missing from the Sun and Daily Mail articles. Here the fact that women were responsible for a significant proportion of child sex offences is considered as a reason for society to reconsider some of its prejudices. However, we still find a number of the usual features used to evaluate women perpetrators of crime.

Vanessa George and the evil that women do

Yesterday Vanessa George, a nursery worker from Plymouth, 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, 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.

In this item, we find a level of reflection on women’s roles in child sex offences not found in the Sun or the Daily Mail. This is shown in the lexis, which is much less informal in nature than in our earlier articles. There are no morally evaluating terms such as ‘shocking’, ‘pervert’ or ‘evil’. This is dealt with as a ‘phenomenon’ which is connected to ‘psychiatric’ interests. We are pointed to ‘the underlying meaning of such crimes’ and the implementation of ‘effective treatment’ and ‘preventative measures’. We are told of a public reluctance to consider this underlying meaning, although what this might be is not discussed. Importantly, the text points to the denial of female agency and women’s ‘capacity for violence’, which needs to be addressed by society.

This more measured approach also suggests that the moral panic model may be problematic in some cases (Garland, 2008). There are many mainstream news outlets that will report on such stories using a language of good vs evil, but we will also find more moderate and informed reactions in others. The problem with the moral panic model is that it tends to understate the diversity of voices available in society and to overemphasize the nature of public and political agreement as to the meaning of social problems.

However, although the Times article is more reflective towards the end, it still begins with one of the usual narratives associated with female crime (Jewkes, 2004): we find George being represented in terms of her level of attractiveness. We are told she is

innocuous

overweight

just shy of 40

occasionally liked to wear her hair in teenage-style plaits.

So on the one hand, she is placed in a discourse that includes psychiatric and social issues, but on the other, she is still evaluated in terms of her appearance. She is an ‘overweight’, middle-aged woman who inappropriately wears her hair ‘in teenage-style plaits’. Further, we find the kind of question being asked that we would not find in the case of male offenders – that they might be doing it for the benefit of a woman and not their own sexual gratification (perversion):

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.

While male sex offenders are usually seen as operating on their own, with female sex offenders this is sometimes questioned, not least because some of these women themselves state male influence or coercion as a reason for becoming abusers. Matravers’s (2010) study of female sex offenders in England and Wales, whose offences ranged from indecent photography to sexual murder, revealed that while some of these women did not fit the popular stereotype of the sexually obsessed, male paedophile, neither were they the coerced accomplices of predatory men. Some women out of the 30 she interviewed did claim they were coerced by males to take part in sexual abuse, and did not consider themselves sex offenders. Matravers concluded that society’s inability to acknowledge women as ‘real’ sex offenders may actually stop these women from developing a sense of responsibility for their crimes.

Conclusion

The case studies analysed in this chapter have demonstrated the tendency of British mainstream media to depict female criminals in terms of a few standard narrative frameworks. Those revolve mainly around the ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ categories that emphasize either irrationality, plain wickedness or a lack of human agency. Although women who are violent and/or (sexually) abusive are generally ostracized in mainstream media discourses, which clearly state that they have committed ‘evil’ acts, this does not mean that they are presented as agentive. We have shown that the human agency of the women in our case studies is denied by portraying them either as mythic, evil and inhuman monsters or impotent victims.

The visual analysis has suggested that newspaper formatting, particularly the juxtaposition of images with the headlines and text, can lead to representations which encourage the reader to draw misleading conclusions about (female) offenders and limit critical enquiry of the story through which they are presented. Graphic, explicit and personalized accounts of violent women function as entertainment, particularly in the popular press, providing not only human drama and emotion, but sexualized drama and emotion. Female criminals, it appears, are not only ‘doubly deviant and doubly damned’, they also hold a ‘double fascination’ for the public, as they horrify and titillate at the same time. Even more measured and critical media accounts, which acknowledge female criminality, such as the one provided in the Times above, still resort to Lombrosian-type descriptions of female offenders’ physical attributes.