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Right to the Point: Women Killers — a misunderstood factor

OpinionRight to the Point: Women Killers -- a misunderstood factor

I am very much concerned at the level of ignorance our society has about mental health issues and the impact it has on crime in our country. For some reason when Belizeans think about mental health … what comes to mind is the word “crazy,” which connotes severe madness. However, mental instability ranges from the seemingly sublime such as depression to psychosis to outright insanity.

Two recent incidents have brought home the issue of how much we do not appreciate the mental state of a person that leads them into committing a crime. I must confess before reading much, becoming exposed and learning the legal definition of “insanity,” I too was ignorant and could not appreciate how a person could claim battered women syndrome yet seem to be normal.

As part of my studies I eventually did some psychology and forensic science and now have a greater appreciation. I am no expert in the field but I am surely far more enlightened now. My understanding grew as I read textbook cases at law school such as R v Thornton [1996] 1 WLR 1174 and R v Ahluwalia (1992) 4 AER 889 and so many others. It was the first time I had heard about battered women syndrome as a term, but it was not the first time I had known of what it entailed.

I want to share a bit on this topic in light of several recent media reports, from the Felicia Chen and Lavern Longsworth murder trials, Nathalia Wade beating, to the recent Anabel Cumul because I believe our society lacks the appreciation of the evolving social problems of domestic violence and abuse and its impact on our legal system.

Origins of battered women syndrome defense

Thus I find it most important to give a brief of one of the first known British cases in which the court had to take into account and accept that living a life of abuse will not make you react the same way to a situation as a person who is not abused. In the fairer sex, it has an even more seemingly unexpected reaction, which causes much more judgment against a woman, who is seen as docile and not capable of such heinous crimes. But what one needs to appreciate is that in our law there is a defense called “diminished responsibility,” which simply means that for a moment or period of time, the mind is not operating as “normal,” as the circumstance of years of abuse of recent abuse makes one lose one’s full faculties and do something or act in a way that is least expected. And believe me this can happen to anyone who is under severe pressure. So the person is not insane or permanently out of their mind: they are temporarily diminished in their capacity to take full responsibility as they would have in circumstances where there are not extenuating events depriving their mind of functioning as “normal”.

As the legal jargon states it, the person would be “suffering from such abnormality of mind, whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent causes or induced by disease or injury, as to substantially impair his mental responsibility” for his killing. It is a defense available only in homicide cases.

In brief: Kiranjit Ahluwalia, an educated Asian woman, suffered violence and abuse from the onset of her 10-year marriage to Deepak. Her husband was physically a big man and she was slight. Her complaints of violence were supported by entries in her doctor’s notes. She discovered he was having an affair; he refused to talk about it and threatened her with a hot iron. He also demanded £200 the next morning or he would beat her. The beating had become a normal occurrence in her home.

So that night in May 1989, she went to bed about midnight, was unable to sleep and brooded on his refusal to speak to her and threat to beat her in the morning. She had bought a can of petrol and had put it in the lean-to outside the house. At some time after 2:30 a.m., she got up, went downstairs, poured about two pints of petrol into a bucket to make it easier to throw, lit a candle and carried them upstairs, taking an oven glove for protection and a stick. She went to the bedroom, threw in some petrol, lit the stick from the candle and threw it into the room. She was charged with murder and imprisoned for life. But a legal team reviewed her case and got an appeal court to order a retrial, because evidence had not been admitted before of her abuse and medical evidence of her depression as a result of the abuse had not been produced to support a defense of diminished responsibility which had not been put forward in her first trial.

The re-trial that was ordered never took place because in September 1992, the Crown accepted her plea of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility and she was sentenced to three years and four months imprisonment, exactly the time she had already served. Kiranjit therefore walked out of court a free woman.

The Belize scenario

Now anyone who has not been battered or who is in denial of being battered or who has been coping with the battery may refuse to accept that being abused is an “excuse” for killing… but what many will not appreciate is that an abused person may already be acting out that abuse, by being abusive to others, especially their children, or has not been faced with the situation to reach boiling point, or that last straw that “breaks the camel’s back” has not yet been placed yet on the camel’s back. Or some just don’t want to even consider the factor of abuse in murder… but I am sure there are sufficient people reading this that can appreciate that undue pressure or circumstance can make the mind be temporarily lost and a person act in such violent way that she would not have otherwise acted.

When we look at the case of Lavern Longsworth, anyone who lives in Belize city will know she has suffered years of abuse from her childhood to her adult life in a relationship and one day her mind just cracked and she did something her mind did not even have time to rationalize that could be the worst case scenario… the person in such circumstances just does not have the mental ability to take a rational control over the situation. If you can picture yourself in those situations you are not able to predict your response at the time… big talkers would say I will walk away… but what happens to a battered person is that years of abuse, or repeated events of abuse, have a cumulative effect. That is why, in these circumstances judge the person not by the standard of a rational normal person in the circumstances but of a battered person in those circumstances.

In Ahluwalia, her first defense was provocation and the judge directed the jury to consider whether, if she did lose her self-control, a reasonable person having the characteristics of a well-educated married Asian woman living in England would have lost her self-control given her husband’s provocation. On appeal, it was argued that he should have directed the jury to consider a reasonable person suffering from “battered woman syndrome.” Think about it, readers!

The Felicia Chen case

Now sadly, there are some mean things that have been said about Felicia Chen and the sentence she received and I worry about how that poor woman would survive once released back into our cruel society. I pray that by the time she is out, a larger portion of our population would appreciate that no person, especially a mother, possessed of her full faculties of mind, in her right mind would have drowned her children. So I ask that she be judged a young 22-year-old mother, with four children at such young age, having no means to financially support her children and having to live at the mercy of relatives, escaping from an abusive relationship. And I must add abuse is not just a beating, but also emotional, psychological, verbal and financial.

Felicia Chen had to have been pregnant from age 15 to be able to have a six-year-old daughter and by age 17 had another and by age 18 another and by 20 another…. Ask any woman, and this alone is not easy to cope with, add to that an abusive, unstable relationship and having to become dependent on all to help support herself and her children. Financial abuse occurs in relationships where men to punish a woman, to humiliate her, or to compel her to have sex with them, withhold maintenance of her and children to subject her to his control. Many women do not know that family law changes now recognize financial abuse as many women remain in a relationship because only by being there the men will agree to give them some pittance of money for their children. And her children being her priority she subjects herself, because in her mind it’s for her children’s survival…. This state of mind then overcomes any rational thinking beyond that… many times because a woman cannot imagine a life beyond that. Ask any woman who has left an abusive relationship…. I, for one, can speak from personal experience!

Many may not know the extent of sexual abuse she endured and that on that day she heard voices and that she in her own “twisted” and/or “damaged” state of mind saw her children’s death and hers as a way out. Now read this in the context of a battered woman thinking and not as you, a normal reader, with all your faculties and strength of character. The full story of Felicia should be known, because many of our young women are suffering like her and while some have not killed, the damage being left behind will or is being manifested in our society already and the cycle of abuse MUST be stopped!

While sentencing of a person is to punish them, it cannot be that it does not take into account other factors, which in Felicia’s case there are many to mitigate her sentence. But for a person in Felicia’s case imprisonment alone may be the mildest sentence, because one needs to take into account that even when she is not behind bars, she has to live and cope and work through the reality that she killed her three children and that in itself is sufficient punishment. When she did it she was not in her full senses, but now that she can appreciate what she did, it is a torment she has to live through. Further, another punishment she will have to live with is the pointing fingers and sneering eyes of the public whispering that she is a child-killer.

I say… don’t be mean… Felicia has suffered, is suffering and may continue to suffer… her sentence was not light, and life circumstances just before were not any lighter!

The mid-way situation

Our society should become concerned as we see a growing number of women killing their spouses or associated with violent crimes. Not because I am a woman, I say that women are not by nature violent: they are nurturers and so when they stray into the realm of severe violence there is reason to take note. I think the recent case of Natalie Wade and Keith Staine shows what happens when a woman reacts against her abuser mid-way the path, because given the circumstances this too could have ended with murder. Ironically, when Keith Staine went to the media to tell how his wife handcuffed him and beat him up, he claimed she was “mental” and needed help. And like me, many readers wondered how she could do it, and what pushed her to do it. But as we all know there are many sides to a story and when Nathalia spoke, we realized or I realized she is a battered woman suffering at the hands of a schizophrenic husband who needs his medication to function normally.

For the one year of marriage, this is how she described her life: “But during the time, I noh do no talking to him or nothing; I let him do all the talking. He whap mi up, noh allow me to come outside; seal up all my windows with zinc. …Sometime I don’t get through to him and I try to ask for help. I do know that he is sick and I was willing to assist him with his mom. She always asking me to let him take his medication because whenever he takes his medication, he is fine. He is thirty-nine years old. I just want to say that I didn’t want this to come all this way. I was trying…why we can’t try without God? We need to do our part as well. I just want to say that I want the domestic violence to stop… I plan to take whatever hurt I need because I believe that as women we should not go through things like this. Everybody don’t know what happens behind closed doors.”

This is a very dangerous situation because if Mr. Staine, while under one of his schizophrenic episodes, kills his wife, he too has the defense of diminished responsibility, as she would under the battered woman syndrome. They are crying out for help and I pray they receive it.

Most recent murder

As if we are not sufficiently bombarded by the above situations we now hear on the news about Anabell Cumul, the 38-year-old mother of two, who allegedly stabbed her husband to death. While the circumstances surrounding their life situation are unknown, it would be interesting to learn what her living conditions were and what prompted her to take this fatal step.

Unlike provocation which is a temporary and sudden loss of self-control, without time to cool off from the one event that enraged you or the series of events that culminated in the provocation, battered women usually suffer over a period of time from repeated abuse that wears down their self-esteem, confidence and subjects them to accepting situations which would not be deemed normal in society.

Repeated cheating by men, putting down of their women because of being obese, “ugly”, “stupid”; taking away of their freedoms, money, children and even alienating them from the friends and family; refusing to give them money for the home and children, controlling how they dress, what they eat, etc., are only few of the things that constitute abuse. Thus, I say, if you are in an abusive relationship seek help and get out…. Don’t say you stay for your children, because it is for your children you should leave, as children are what they see and learn what they see and if you show your children it’s okay to be abused, then what will you expect them to become?… either an abuser or an abused… think about it!

God bless Belize!

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