“The typical female serial killer uses poison and is motivated by greed or revenge.”
That is the standard line given in answer to the query, “What gives with those ‘rare’ female serial killers?”
Most people curious about this (supposedly outré, rare and eccentric) subject, female serial killers, receive these sound-bites with a distracted nod – feeling themselves informed by the authoritative voice of expert consensus.
But there is a problem here. “Typical” cannot tell us the whole story. Knowledge of the “typical” alone, apart from the larger context, is superficial, uninformative and hides too much. The category “typical” might not even represent a majority of cases. To settle for descriptions of the “typical” is to be settling for a sliver of fact.
Fact is, female criminality was largely ignored by crime experts before the rise of feminism-influenced criminology in the 1960s. “Patriarchal” criminologists largely saw female criminality as of marginal importance. After the 1960s it continued to be largely ignored, though feminist criminologists did look into female criminals from the perspective of incarcerated-woman-as-victim-of-society. (more...)
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