Female criminals can be just as deadly and dangerous as males

FORGET the “gentler” sex — women criminals are just as devious, dangerous and deadly as men, and the long-term trend is they are committing more crime.

What makes female criminals tick?

WOMEN who kill their own children are motivated by something very different than men who commit the same terrible crime.

There were often similarities in cases where children are slain by their own parents — but the twisted logic of their murderers varies depending on the gender of the killer, said Professor Ken Polk a criminologist at the University of Melbourne,

He has written a book about child victims of crime and noticed the differences in the cases he researched.

Male killers often target their own children.

“When it is a male perpetrator, it is usually a de facto relationship. The difference usually was the victims weren’t their natural children.”

But most telling was the reason behind such shocking murders. For men it could be a way of getting back at their partner, and often part of a bitter custody battle.

Professor Polk said mothers who became killers had the belief they were saving them from some form of pain.

Katherine Knight was the first Australian woman jailed without chance of parole.

Judy Moran leaves the Supreme Court after she is found guilty of murder.

“There is always some form of stress, a stressful event that causes them to act like this and [committing murder] is their way of dealing with it. And from their point of view they think by removing the children will be taking them away from whatever the stressful event is. In that way they see it almost as an altruistic thing.”

Because whatever the “stress event” was, it’s unusually personal - even those closest to the mother were unaware of it. And that meant when the unthinkable happened it came as a complete shock.

An average of 27 children are killed by their parents each year in Australia. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that between July 1997 and June 2008 there were 291 victims of filicide.

A breakdown of these cases reveals 90 per cent were killed by one parent while 17 per cent of cases also involved the suicide of the parent.

A conference that looked at the scourge of sexual predators in Brisbane last month drew delegates from all around the world — and the hot topic was the rise of female paedophiles.

“We are certainly seeing an increase in our arrests for female sexual offenders,” he said.

Valmae Beck (aka Fay Cramb). She was convicted for her part in the rape, torture and murder of Sian Kingi in 1987.

Storm Brooke murdered another inmate with a fork during a jailhouse brawl.

“In 12 months we arrested 172 sex offenders — three have been female. The proportion is very different, we are interested in what drives this to happen,” said Detective Inspector Jon Rouse, from Taskforce Argos, the Queensland Police unit responsible for hunting down sexual predators.

Studies show that female sex offenders are likely to be known to the victim and male coercion can be an important part of their offending. Detective Rouse said as in all cases, there is no typical profile of a sex offender.

Of those cases 24 mothers and 16 fathers killed themselves after the murder of their children.

Dr Claire Ferguson, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, told news.com.au women could certainly be “violent and scary”.

“The statistics show men do commit more violent crime, but one thing to think about: there’s ingrained bias ... to attribute or blame men more than women, so they probably are committing more offences but there are things that cause women to be under-represented in violent crime stats.”

An example of that was if a female hit her partner but didn’t inflict an injury, or if it wasn’t reported to police.

Rebecca Butterfield in prison. She is regarded as NSW’s most violent inmate by authorities.

Kathleen Folbigg is a serial child killer. She killed four of her children over a 10 year period.

Dr Ferguson said when women were violent, people often looked at what could have triggered the event — whereas it was sometimes dismissed if men did the same thing as “boys will be boys”.

“It’s almost as if that is more acceptable to society.”

Certain crimes though — like killing children or allowing them to be sexually assaulted — repulsed the community.

“Those things really rub people up the wrong way.”

In terms of total crime committed in Australia, despite steady rates of offending in recent years, women are still lagging men by rate of four-to-one, according to Australian Institute of Criminology figures.

Kristi Anne Abrahams pleaded guilty murdering her daughter Kiesha Weippeart.

Since 2011, the increase in the number of women being jailed has risen 21 times faster than that of men, according to national figures and there have been sharp increases in certain types of offending, in several parts of Australia. In NSW, for example, there had been dramatic increases in possession of drugs, trafficking and threatening behaviour.

Dr Ferguson said there was debate and research underway about what was driving that increase, which had been observed over 20 years.

“Men are still hugely over representing but they are evening out to a certain extent.”

What was fuelling it was a mystery.

“There is no reason for them to be [suddenly] become more violent — but you can’t rule it out either so it’s a bit of a mystery what’s going on there.

Originally published as Female criminals can be just as deadly and dangerous as males