Women, Crime , & Justice

You can propose a project that draws on skills you’ve developed in and out of class that will demonstrate what you’ve learned during the term. write a biography about an important figure, make a short graphic novel, recreate a crime scene from a famous case, make a needlepoint depicting a witch trial – all your ideas are welcome. You’ll also turn in a 3-page written description of your project and reflection on what you learned from completing the project when you hand in your final work, plus a bibliography of sources used. You need to use at least 2 scholarly sources. You may need to also use some non-academic sources.

ANSWER

Women, Crime and Justice

Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Wuornos was born in February 1956. She was an American serial killer. She shot and robbed 7 of her clients while working as a prostitute along highways in Florida. According to Wuornos, they had tried to rape her or raped her, and she killed all the seven men out of self-defense. She was sentenced to death for six out of the seven murders she committed and was executed by lethal injection on October 9^th, 2002.

Early Life

Diane Wuornos, Aileen’s mother, was 14 years old when she married her father, Leo Dale Pittman. They gave birth to Aileen’s brother Keith and later, Aileen was born. By the time Aileen was born, her mother had filed for divorce. She had given birth to Aileen at 16 years. She never got to meet her father as he had been incarcerated at the time of her birth. Her father was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was also convicted of raping a 7-year-old girl and later committed suicide by hanging himself in prison (Biography Newsletter, 2017). When Aileen was 4 years old, her mother abandoned her, and Aileen and her brother were adopted by their maternal grandparents, who were alcoholics. By the time she was 11, Aileen had started engaging in sexual activity in school for food, cigarettes, and drugs. She had also engaged in sexual activities with her brother. According to Aileen Wuornos, her grandfather sexually assaulted her and beat her. At the age of 14, she became pregnant, having been sexually assaulted by her grandfather’s friend (Biography Newsletter, 2017). she gave birth and gave the baby up for adoption father, and her grandfather kicked her out of his home. She started prostitution to fend for herself and dropped out of school.

Criminal Life

The first time Aileen was arrested was when she was 18 years old. In Jefferson County, Colorado, she was arrested for driving under the influence, disorderly conduct, and firing a weapon from a moving vehicle. She failed to appear for her charges and was charged with failing to appear. She went to Florida, where she got married to a 69-year-old yacht club president. Their marriage was short-lived as she continued with prostitution and hit the man with a stick which prompted him to get a restraining order. Their marriage was later annulled after 9 weeks. In July, her brother died of cancer, and Aileen got life insurance worth 10000 dollars (Biography Newsletter, 2017). She was later charged with drunk driving and paid a fine of $105. She wasted the money from her brother’s life insurance and ended back in the same life. Between the age of 14 and 22, she had attempted suicide 6 times. Aileen murdered 7 men within a period of 12 months.

Execution and Death

For her last meal, Wuornos opted for a cup of coffee, and her last words were that she would be back like independence day. She was the second woman in Florida to be executed since the supreme court’s decision to restore capital punishment (Biography Newsletter, 2017). She was the 10th woman in the US. Her body was created, and the ashes were scattered beneath a tree in native Michigan by her childhood friend Dawn Botkins.

Description of the Project

Instead of choosing an important person, I decided to go with the biography of a woman serial killer. I arrived at this decision as I have learned a lot about women, crime and justice, and the situations that push women towards crime. The biography does not wholly cover the life of Aileen, but it covers the parts of her life that led to her criminal life. Aileen was born to a young mother who abandoned her and an absent father charged with rape, schizophrenic, and who killed himself in jail. To make matters worse for her, she was adopted by alcoholic grandparents who abused her. Her life was filled with so much bitterness as, from her biography, she did not have much of a childhood. She started selling her body for food and drugs at age eleven. This is the age when most children are learning new things about their bodies, but by then, she was already fending for herself using her body, and she was also dealing with her abusive grandfather.

At 15 years old, she was a prostitute and alone. She must have been through so much and so much abuse that she developed a hate for men. It is this hate that drove her to kill the seven men. Aileen Wuornos was a victim of her circumstances, which led to her death. Some of the things I have learned from this activity is that her experience with men made her despise men is much that she did not feel any remorse for killing them. There is also the fact that the justice system did not favor her despite having such a rough childhood. Her father was schizophrenic, and thus there was a possibility that she had schizophrenic episodes where she thought that the men she killed were trying to hurt her. She also grew up being abused by the people who were supposed to protect her. This explains her insecurity and hatred for men and the reason she could have committed 7 murders within a year. Reading her biography, I felt that she did not get the justice she deserved. Despite killing all those men, she deserved a chance to be heard.

According to the psychological theory of crime, it is a result of failures in psychological development, learned behaviors of aggression and violence, and the relationship of criminality to mental illness (Robert, 2018). From this theory, one can tell that Wuornos was psychologically unfit to make any of the decisions that the court let her make. She was mentally unfit as she was constantly abused since her childhood. All she knew was abuse, and thus she had a deeply rooted hatred for men. She was abused by the only male figure who came close to being a father figure. She also had sexual relations with her brother, who eventually died. According to the psychological theory of crime, the crimes committed by Aileen are rooted in the trauma she existence as a child, and her issues with men came from the experience she had with her grandfather.

Nothing can justify the murders she committed, but she also deserved some justice. Society failed this woman, she was asexually abused from a very young age, and there was nobody to fight for her. Once she got the chance to fight for herself, she did it without thinking about the consequences. She killed those men because she genuinely thought that they were trying to rape her, and she genuinely believed that she did it out of self-defense.

References

Biography Newsletter. (2017). Aileen Wuornos Biography. https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/aileen-wuornos

Robert, A. (2018). Stability and change in crime over the life course: A strain theory explanation. In Developmental theories of crime and delinquency (pp. 101-132). Routledge.