Women Who Abuse Women

When women are assumed to be nonviolent by nature and murder, rape, and other assaults are excused or not taken seriously when committed by women, men are not the only ones who suffer because of these fallacies.  Women suffer because of this too.  In spite of how relatively uncommon it is for female-on-male abuse to even be rightly identified as abuse, even though women who murder are for some reason at the same time still recognized as murderers, at least there is now a slow cultural shift towards affirming male victims of women.  Switch the genders to women on both sides, and the response often changes.  Female victims of women might be left out of people's thoughts or conversations entirely--with the sole standard exception of a mother abusing her daughter.

Women sexually or physically assaulting other women outside of this context is, in my experience, talked about even less than women assaulting men.  Many people will think of or treat violence as deeply problematic only when a man is the perpetrator and the victim is a woman, not when a woman is the perpetrator--even when her victim is another woman.  Assumptions, and false assumptions at that, about how strong, ferocious, or abusive women are not "that" dangerous do nothing but hurt the male and female victims that could otherwise be acknowledged.  When women are seen as non-threatening and intrinsically gentle beings, it is no wonder that a woman hurting another woman unjustly is ignored.  A culture that cares about men and women will not tolerate unjust violence from a woman because of her anatomy.

Whether in prisons, homes, or somewhere else, women can sexually or physically abuse other women, and it is no less important to take this seriously than it is to take male-male, female-male, or male-female violence seriously.  The idiotic stereotype that women are helpless, gentle, and incapable of harming others intentionally or of wanting to is a particularly destructive one that, like all stereotypes, can be refuted with reason alone.  No one needs actual examples to refute it, yet the examples abound for those who are willing to look for them.  One just needs to not make assumptions or cling to prejudices in order to see them as they are.

One assumption that might need to be confronted is the idea that rape requires penetration, and thus a woman could not rape a man or woman.  Lacking a penis does not make a person unable to sexually assault others even to the point of having sex or the equivalent of sex with them.  Another assumption that some people might hold to is the idea that women are just too empathetic to harm others, when empathy does not make a person just and a lack of empathy alone does not mean someone is cruel or selfish.  Women and men have no moral advantage over each other even though so many people inside and outside the church will pretend otherwise in one way or another.

Only the apathetic, sexist, or otherwise irrational people who are not eager for truth or forced to live under the worst byproducts of gender stereotypes are likely to not care about the stereotypes that protect abusive women from societal condemnation and leave female victims of abusive women unrecognized.  Unfortunately, most people fall into one of these categories, as apathy and stupidity are in no short supply.  No deep rationalist or egalitarian would ever actually think that women cannot brutally victimize women even if they did not devote much thought to the matter, and yet the problem springs from the very lack of true rationalists and egalitarians that makes their opponents able to win over cultures.