Female villains: women who kill and what feminist criminology reveals
The science of crime was built by looking at men. What we miss when the villain is a woman, and the women in the archive who break the stereotype.
For more than a century, criminology studied crime in the masculine. Theories were validated on samples of men, and women’s offending was explained through gender clichés: Lombroso pictured the “born female criminal” as a biological anomaly, and Otto Pollak argued that female crime is underestimated because it is hard to suspect a woman. Feminist criminology (Carol Smart, Frances Heidensohn) dismantled that blind spot.
Its thesis has two sides. One: dangerous women are under-detected because they don’t fit the image of the predator (the system’s “chivalry” and gender roles act as camouflage). The other: when they are seen, they are misread, reduced to “mad, not bad” or explained solely through their relationships. Female psychopathy, in fact, is underdiagnosed and often relabeled as borderline personality disorder.
Neither romanticizing nor demonizing: as throughout the archive, these characters are amplified illustrations, not diagnoses. But each one sheds light on an angle that science, written in the masculine, kept in the dark.
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Read “Feminist criminology” →Frequently asked questions
What is feminist criminology?
A school of thought that exposes how criminology was built by studying men and applying gender clichés to women. It analyzes how gender cuts across crime, victimization and the penal system itself, and why female crime is detected and explained in biased ways.
Do women offend less, or are they detected less?
Both, to different degrees. Women commit fewer violent crimes, but their offending is also under-detected: the “chivalry thesis” suggests that the system (and society) suspects them less, which skews both the figures and the penal response.
Does female psychopathy exist?
Yes, although it was studied late and less. It shows up more through relational and verbal aggression than physical aggression, which makes it harder to recognize; it is often relabeled as borderline personality disorder. The tools, calibrated on men, measure it less well.
Do these characters represent real women?
No. They are fictional villains, amplified for the story. Here they serve to expose the blind spots of a science built in the masculine, not to claim anything about real women.
Sources · further reading
- Smart, C. (1976). Women, Crime and Criminology. Routledge.
- Heidensohn, F. (1985). Women and Crime. Macmillan.
- Pollak, O. (1950). The Criminality of Women. University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Forouzan, E. & Cooke, D. J. (2005). “Figuring Out la Femme Fatale: Psychopathy in Females”. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 23(6).