The pendulum has swung from Lady to Ladette, and kept going. And it ain’t just handbags at dawn! Solicitor-Advocate and legal commentator, Alan Muir, risks the slings and arrows, or should that be slingbacks and GHD straighteners(?), to consider a worrying, and growing, trend.

When Rudyard Kipling penned,” The female of the species is more deadly than the male”, he was not revealing some long hidden secret nor submitting an application for The Misogynist League. Before I go any further, please read this caveat :-

I, as many know, cannot hack New Labour “touchy feely” PC favoured by the “weave your own bread” brigade. That said, I detest hypocrisy and any forms of abuse, violent or otherwise.

I have written on behalf of, and continue to support, the aims and work of Zero Tolerance and similar organizations, but, it is surely time to address one of the darker realities of modern society. One is the misuse of “sexual equality” on a pick but don’t mix basis.
Society’s do-gooders cannot continue to proffer the argument that equality is all progress and willfully ignore the obvious. Rates of pay advances, greater opportunity tremendous, but, the bad came with the good. It was just conveniently ignored and grew like a societal cancer.

The concept of “the violent femme” is, as I have written here before, nothing new. The days of the knife, or more recently, gun, was only in my handbag for my boyfriend are long gone. Boudicca, the Amazons etc. made way for those like Jessie Mougan ( the 19th century Stockbridge baby farmer), Beverley Allett, Karen Matthews and more recently the two, very possibly three, female sexual abusers of children, the very children left in their care. Society, as so often, has been slow to recognize an inconvenient truth. Those of us at the sharp end sit back bemused by the shock/horror press coverage. Frankly folks, ‘T was ever thus!

Even as I write this morning, Colorado “mother” Mayumi Heene has been shown to have been an integral part of the second form of abuse of her son. The “balloon hoax” family” have been burst, deflated and popped by a six year old child’s honesty, or, by his failure to stick to the script.  Any parent who names a wean Falcon has set in motion a path to County lock up, frequent visits to A & E or childhood celebrity- i.e. the room in “We’ll sort it for you (at a price!) Rehab’ & Retreat” is already reserved!

A good friend prosecuted a murder in Aberdeen some years ago and it took days, much cajoling from those of us who had attended “normal schools” and many replays of a self- incriminatory prison ‘phone call tape, for him to accept that, actually, the female accused had tortured and killed another teen female all by herself, no man involved, then had no problem spending the poor lassie’s savings. Evil is, my friends, to use a P.C. term “non-gender specific”.

Female crime and violence, often drink fuelled will, as with most problems, only be made worse by those looking for a dominant male to blame or the creation of socio-friendly excuses. Get real people, equality, even by definition, means in all things. There are higher rates of female alcoholism these days - hardly a shock, of aggression in town centres, of girl gangs happy to inflict horrendous injuries on a poor lassie accused by the mob(ette) of “trying tae steal ma boyfriend”. The two worst cases of sustained kidnap and torture of a girl I saw professionally, involved that backdrop.

It is time to stop looking for excuses and to investigate then address the reasons. Between 1998 and 2007, there was an 81% increase in reported violent female crime in England and Wales. How bad does it have to get before we, as a society, wake up? How about we jail the real female criminals rather than the drug dependant shoplifters and couriers, those who should be in care programmes rather than custody, the legions who have seen the Cornton Vale revolving door. Avoidance can, and will, only make the situation worse.

Before you decide to lynch me, I refer you to the caveat above.

In one of Freshers’ Day addresses I gave for Edinburgh Uni’ Law School, I mentioned that I really couldn’t hack hearing “woman lawyer”, and, before I could go any further, I was pilloried for this. I went onto say that progress would be real only when the term was “a good (or bad )lawyer” not qualified by the surprise rider, “and you know, the lawyer’s a woman!”

Some years later, our first female Lord Advocate said that she was looking forward to the time when lawyers were simply referred to by the professional term not then qualified by mention of gender (!) Somehow, she always reminds of the late, lamented and multi-talented Sir Clement Freud’s interview on the day of Thatcher’s first election win. The smug presenter stated “Well Sir Clement, you must be disappointed that a woman has been elected Prime Minister . The reply was as crushing as it was well observed.

“Oh no, you seem to be mistaken, I have no problem with a woman being elected – just NOT that woman!!”