Thursday, July 31, 2008

 

Playing man-hating politics with murder law

The proposed changes in the law on murder are overtly 'gender politics' with
all the hallmarks of Harriet Harperson's visceral hatred of men. A man who
kills in a jealous rage will have no defence to a charge of murder, whereas
a woman who kills her sleeping husband in some supposed release of
bottled-up rage will do.

This flies in the face of the science. There is very well researched sex
difference in jealousy: which in men is aroused by a single act of sexual
infidelity (an evolved response because a woman having extra-pair sex can
return bearing a child, whereas a man cannot) but in women by emotional
infidelity (because this heralds a man's desertion). Women are far less
concerned with a partner simply 'playing away' sexually if that is all it
is. This is why men much more than women kill a rival or a partner in an
uncontrollable rage upon discovering infidelity.

There is no sex difference that has ever been found in scientific research
in bottling up rage for it to explode at a much later time, as is supposed
to explain the predilection for women to murder their sleeping partners. It
is this scenario that is behind the proposals. Both sexes have very real
fears in a serious domestic violence situation, but the attempt is to try to
tease out one more pertaining to women: 'fear of violence' (though in fact
research now comprehensively shows that there is if anything more violence
domestically by women than by men). This can then be used to supposedly
justify a pre-emptive lethal attack on an incapacitated male partner when of
course there is no justification to do other than simply leave.

It is welcome that Harriet Harperson's sex-hate fascism will now be the
subject of parliamentary scrutiny. It is hard to see how even the stupidity
of MPs could ever let through nonsense as profound as these proposals.


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