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"But what happens when evil has a different face? When it disguises itself as soft and vulnerable? As female, or even more confusingly perhaps, as a beautiful young girl? Women are the more vulnerable gender. As such, (along with children) they are the very ones that it is society's primary role to protect. When they are suspected of turning predatory, it confounds all our expectations. We feel our instinctive responses have failed us, and that we are out of our depth."

As a result, as perpetrators of abuse, exploitation and violence, men and women are treated differently. When they abuse and damage, men violate acceptable social boundaries because, our intuition tells us, they have succumbed to their baser, animal selves. It's wrong, of course. But in some primal way, we believe it to be not entirely out of accord with nature. Not so for women.

Women who behave the same way are not considered to be simply brutish, or base, or damaged. For them to cause harm to other women or even to children crosses into a whole new territory of taboo. They cannot be understood according to our sense of the natural order of things, so they have to be seen as freaks. This is clearly apparent in the way in which the media, and the public, cast women like Matthews, Knox and the unnamed Roscommon mother as stock villains, as emblems of evil. As a gut response, this is understandable. But it is also irrational, reductive, and through its lack of concession to reason, harmful to the cause of properly understanding the complexity of these acts."

(Jepe: mijn nadruk)

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