The Criminal

by Havelock Ellis

In many persons the impulses of childhood persist in a more or less subdued form in adult age. The impulses are not yielded to so readily, or at all, but they are still felt. The examples have often been quoted of the distinguished alienist, Morel, who, as he narrates himself, seeing a workman leaning over one of the Seine bridges, felt so strong an impulse to throw the man into the river, that he had to rush away from the spot; and of Humboldt’s nurse, who, at the sight and touch of the new-born child’s rosy flesh, felt the temptation to kill it, and was obliged to entrust it to some one else. These morbid impulses are perhaps more closely related to insanity than to criminality, but it is on a borderland that is common to both. Both child and criminal are subject to such impulses.

In the criminal, we may often take it, there is an arrest of development. The criminal is an individual who, to some extent, remains a child his life long—a child of larger growth and with greater capacity for evil. This is part of the atavism of criminals. Mental acuteness is often observed among criminal children; it is rare among criminal adults. There is evidently arrest of development at a very early age, probably a precocious union of the cranial bones. Among savages, also, the young children are bright, but development stops at a very early age. All who have come very intimately in contact with criminals have noted their resemblance to children. Thus that profound and sympathetic observer, Dostoieffsky, in his Recollections of the Dead-House, summing up some of the light-hearted, easy-going characters of the convicts, says: “In one word they were children, true children, even at forty years of age.” And elsewhere he quotes a saying concerning the exile: “The convict is a child; he throws himself on everything that he sees.”

(c) It is interesting to consider the sexual variations of criminality. Women are everywhere less criminal than men. The proportion varies, however, greatly in different countries. In France it is usually about 4 to 1; in the United States it is about 12 to 1; in Italy and Spain the proportion of women is very small. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the proportion of criminal women is, except during the last year or two (owing probably to changes in police regulations), extremely large, especially for the greater crimes. There has indeed been on the whole a steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England; in 1834 they were less than 1 in 5; of recent years they have been more than 1 in 4. The greater tendency to recidivism in women has everywhere been noted, and is extremely well marked in England, where it is rapidly increasing, and is associated, it seems, with growing habits of alcoholism. Of incorrigible recidivists a very large proportion in Great Britain are women; and 40 per cent. of the women committed to prison during 1888 had been previously committed more than ten times.[82] Even among the juvenile offenders discharged from reformatory and industrial schools as incorrigible, it appears that the proportion of girls is double that of boys.

While men criminals are everywhere in a more or less marked majority, there are certain crimes which both sexes commit about equally, and these are usually the most serious. Thus, as Quetelet remarked, nearly as many women are poisoners as men, and of parricides 50 per cent. are women. The crimes of women are essentially domestic, against fathers and husbands and children. A very large proportion are, directly or indirectly, of a sexual character. It is curious in this connection to note that Marro finds marked physical resemblances between women criminals generally and the class of male criminals guilty of sexual offences; such are less length of arms and hands, less cranial capacity and greater extension of the transverse curve of the head.

It is worth while to enumerate briefly the probable causes of the sexual variation in criminality. There are perhaps five special causes acting on women: (1) physical weakness, (2) sexual selection, (3) domestic seclusion, (4) prostitution, (5) maternity.

There are firstly the physical and psychical traditions of the race embodied in the organisation of men and women. The extreme but rather spasmodic energy of men favours outbursts of violence, while the activities of women are at a lower but more even level, and their avocations have tended to develop the conservative rather than the destructive instincts. Apart from this, even if women were trained in violence, the superior strength of men would still make crimes of violence in women very hazardous and dangerous. Under existing circumstances, when a woman wants a crime committed, she can usually find a man to do it for her.

I have already frequently had occasion to note the approximation of criminal women in physical character to ordinary men. This has always been more or less carefully recorded, both in popular proverbs and in the records of criminal trials. Thus Sarah Chesham, a notorious wholesale poisoner, who killed several children, including her own, as well as her husband, was described as “a woman of masculine proportions;” and a girl called Bouhours, who was executed at Paris at the age of twenty-two, for murdering and robbing several men who had been her lovers, is described as of agreeable appearance, and of sweet and feminine manners, but of remarkable muscular strength; she dressed as a man; her chief pleasure was to wrestle with men, and her favourite weapon was the hammer.

Marro has recently suggested that sexual selection has exerted a marked influence in diminishing the criminality of women. Masculine, unsexed, ugly, abnormal women—the women, that is, most strongly marked with the signs of degeneration, and therefore the tendency to criminality—would be to a large extent passed by in the choice of a mate, and would tend to be eliminated. It seems likely that this selection may have, at all events to some extent, existed, and exerted influence; it is, however, not universally accepted.

The domestic seclusion of women is an undoubted factor in the determination of the amount of women’s criminality. In the Baltic provinces of Russia, where the women share the occupations of the men, the level of feminine criminality is very high. In Spain, the most backward of the large countries of Europe, where the education of women is at a very low level, and the women lead a very domesticated life, the level of feminine criminality is extremely low; the same is true, to a less extent, of Italy. In England, on the other hand, which has taken the lead in enlarging the sphere of women’s work, the level of feminine criminality has for half a century been rising. Reference may perhaps also here be made to the fact that there is much more criminality among Irishwomen in England than among Irishwomen at home who lead a more domestic life. It is a very significant fact that Marro found among his women criminals, in marked contrast to the men, a very large proportion (35 out of 41) who possessed some more or less honourable occupation; a large proportion of the women also were possessed of some property. It may not be out of place to observe that the growing criminality of women is but the inevitable accident of a beneficial transition. Criminality, we must remember, is a natural element of life, regulated by natural laws, and as women come to touch life at more various points and to feel more of its stress, they will naturally develop the same tendency to criminality as exists among men, just as they are developing the same diseases, such as general paralysis. Our efforts must be directed, not to the vain attempt to repress the energies of women, but to the larger task of improving the conditions of life, and so diminishing the tendency to criminality among both sexes alike.

Prostitution exerts an undoubted influence in diminishing the criminality of women, in spite of the fact that the prostitute generally lives on the borderland of crime. If, however, it were not for prostitution there would be no alternative but crime for the large numbers of women who are always falling out of the social ranks. As it is, in those families in which the brothers become criminals, the sisters with considerable regularity join the less outcast class of prostitutes; sometimes in league with their criminal brothers, but yet possessing a more recognised means of livelihood. There will be something more to say on this point a little later on.