Tips for Writing About Violent Women in Fiction
As a forensic psychotherapist I meet women who have committed violence, for different reasons and with vastly different consequences. My book If Love Could Kill: The Myths and Truths of Women who Commit Violence focuses on 11 women I have met and treated, exploring their motivations, backgrounds, and the meaning of their crimes.
I work in prisons, outpatient clinics for the police, to evaluate, treat, and sometimes act as an expert witness for the women, going to court to testify about guilt, innocence, sanity, and how best to understand the crime—my main aim. My goal is almost always to arrive at understanding of the violence, to dispel myths that obscure the reality of female violence, and to communicate the truth as I see it. I want to humanize the women who so often are either vilified or neglected, not fitting cherished stereotypes about womanhood.
To help authors create fictional characters that are nuanced, and accurately portray violent women, both ordinary and extraordinary, I want to highlight essential points that they should know about them. As a psychologist who has spent over 30 years working with violent women, I can offer some tips to crime writers so that their characters are more nuanced and accurate.
The Backstory
Women who commit violence rarely do so in the public realm, but more often in private, in their homes, so much less is known about it. The public imagination feeds on exotic and sensational cases. Those women who do come to attention for violent crimes are often vilified or sexualized.
The roots of female violence can often be found in their early experiences of being parented and particularly in childhood trauma and neglect. While traumatic experiences like physical and sexual abuse may be easier to spot, the long-term impact of emotional neglect is less obvious and can be found in wealthy families as well as those in poverty.
Women who commit violence are not violent most of the time; in fact, they may appear very ordinary and gentle, fulfilling social expectations of womanhood. Their violence can be one off, or sustained, but occurs only a very small percentage of the time.
The way a woman looks can be deceptive. Although it is exciting to create femme fatale characters, evil women who are sexy and confident, like Villanelle in Killing Eve, some of our most notorious women offenders look like the girl next door. Think Lucy Letby, the British nurse, convicted of 14 whole life sentences for killing babies, on shift as a neonatal nurse. Women who commit violence come in all shapes and sizes and from all classes of society.
The Offense: Who Do Women Harm?
The main targets for violent women are not strangers or the public, but their children or intimate partners. This is very different from the male pattern of violence, where they are both more of a risk to the public and also more at risk from the general public.
Powerful myths about women’s innate maternal instinct, gentleness, and passivity can prevent women’s violence from being recognized, even when it is happening in plain sight. This means that women can go on for years committing acts of violence against others, including their own children or other people’s children without it being detected or believed. Because women have more access to children than men do and are usually trusted to a greater degree, they have opportunities to harm them without surveillance, and psychopathic women may find more power on the hospital floor or in the nursery than through commerce or sex.
Women’s violence can often be found in self harm. At times of crisis and stress they can inflict extreme forms of violence on their own bodies, and though this does not place others at risk it can become an addictive and dangerous form of relieving tension and anxiety, converting their mental pain into physical pain.
Women self-harm at much greater rates than men, and sometimes use brutal methods, including cutting, burning, and inserting things into their skin. In prisons women self-harm at almost five times the rates that men do and describe this as being a lifesaving way of dealing with stress, while acknowledging that it can, albeit inadvertently, lead to death.
Check out Anna Motz’s If Love Could Kill here:
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Treating Violent Women
Women’s violence is an important form of communication, making private pain public. As a response to trauma that is often hidden, public acts of violence can be a way of showing the world the truth of what they have suffered. Convincing female criminals in literature are often nuanced in this way.
Whether their underlying motive is truth telling, revenge, or a desperate need to express pain and rage, their violence is not meaningless or random—it reveals something important and has a function. Even the serial killer Aileen Wuornos was expressing the rage and pain she had suffered as a prostitute being brutalized by men. Presenting this kind of layered understanding of female violence will help engage the reader and create empathy for the character.
Finally, women’s violence can often be modified and the underlying roots traced so that they find another voice for their pain or anger. The redemptive and hopeful aspect of my work has shown me repeatedly that women who are given the support and space to reflect on their violent acts, trace their roots, and find other ways to express deep trauma can make real changes in their lives. Their violence often reflects impossible social situations including poverty, domestic abuse, and racial trauma that, in turn, has led to mental (and often physical) harm.
Once they are empowered to make fundamental internal and external changes, this violence can be modified and channeled creatively. The possibility of redemption, hope and change is real, and writers should not lose sight of this, so that their violent female characters are not seen as fundamentally evil or lost causes.
Women are relational, highly attuned to one another and to the sensitivities of others. Far more than violent men, aggressive women can use subtle forms of intimidation and cruelty. From girls in the schoolyard leaving out others, forming cliques, and establishing rigid hierarchies defining who is ‘in’ and ‘out,’ to grown prisoners, women are generally highly adept at reading other people and knowing their weak spots. Their aggression can be emotional and psychological as well as physical—with devastating effects.
Final Thoughts
Writers should ensure they capture the complex and nuanced nature of violent women. They are generally both victims and perpetrators, and their violence can often be seen as a re-enactment of past trauma, only this time they are aggressors not perpetrators. Their own bodies and those of their children are often their main targets, and while a part of them wants to stop harming these bodies, another has learned that this is the only effective way to release their pain.
It is only by learning about the traumatic roots of violence that we will be able to see these women in all their complexity, to understand what has led to destructive behavior and then to modify it. This understanding makes it possible to keep the hope of change alive.
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Jovanni Stewart