‘This is the story of crimes that grew out of passion, their perpetrators and the courtroom dramas in which they were enmeshed’. With these stirring words Lisa Appignanesi introduces her study of how the justice process invited doctors to become ‘experts’ in human passion, and how both the justice process and the medical process were affected by gender blindness. This is a road well travelled, not least by Appignanesi herself who previously published a book entitled Mad, Bad and Sad on similar themes.
In this book, she describes famous 19th-century murder trials, in which she believes gender role stereotypes played a vital part in the expert evidence. The cases nearly all involve the homicide of a family member or partner; what is sometimes bluntly called ‘domestic homicide’. She emphasises especially those French cases where the emotions could be said to have abolished culpability, and how women's perceived emotional states could be used in expert testimony against them. Appignanesi uses these cases as evidence that the criminal justice process sees crime through a masculine lens, with masculinity as the norm. Inevitably, psychiatrists who act as experts in this process have a similarly limited perspective; in fact, they may be doubly ‘blinded’ because their concepts of mental illness and irrationality are also seen through a masculine lens.
Appignanesi claims that female defendants were disadvantaged then, and are probably disadvantaged now, and there are contemporary voices from mental health and criminology who agree with her. The past 30 years have seen an expansion of psychiatric services for women offenders, that take account of women's experience of trauma; an experience that may explain their so called ‘irrationality’.
This is an engaging and well-written book, which I enjoyed reading. I was left with the question: is it really ever normal to kill someone you have loved? In a recent article for the Daily Mail, a psychiatrist took the view that it was ‘understandable’ that a man might kill a wife who had left him; but could this be the same as non-culpable? Any psychiatrist giving evidence in the criminal court should check their prejudice, as the saying goes: and it goes both ways. Just as it may be unsafe to assume a woman is mad because she has killed someone, it may be unsafe to assume a man is bad because he is violent, especially when it comes to domestic homicide.
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