Turning Women into Witches

So rare is it for women to kill men out of possessiveness, the use of a husband's affairs by defence barristers is almost non-existent. When men kill their partners, courts hear every detail of the a woman's life. Such was the case when businessman, James Ramage, pleaded provocation, after strangling his estranged wife in their Balwyn home, in July 2003. The provocation defence has always been the domain of men. Even when women have explored a provocation defence it is more often a case of self-preservation or self-defence. For a range of cultural and biological reasons, women are unable to kill in the manner indicative of a loss of control.

Victorian woman, Heather Osland, who in 1996 was famously sentenced to fifteen years for the murder of her husband, Frank, had first drugged him, before asking her son to smash his head with a pipe. Osland argued that years of physical and sexual abuse had left her fearful and that she had him killed because he was about to run amok. In the eyes of the crown the drugging and the passage of time since her husband's last act of violence proved that it was nothing more than premeditated murder. In a separate trial, her son, who admitted killing his stepfather, was found not guilty.

Notwithstanding the chorus of male defence barristers singing the praises of the criminal justice system, cases such as R v Osland, and the raft of the provocation defences used by men tell another story. In her book Joe Cinque's Consolation, published in 2004, the celebrated Australian author Helen Garner appeared to join the chorus of male voices. Joe Cinque died as a result of a cocktail of drugs administered by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, in Canberra in 1997. A self-centred young lawyer in a whirl of drugs and manipulation, Singh drugged Cinque with Rophypnol before injecting him with heroin. What followed were hours of mayhem and ultimately a trial in which Justice Crispin found her guilty only of manslaughter. As there was no jury in this case the decision belonged exclusively with the judge.

It was the second time Garner had turned her considerable writing talents to what she believes is the villainous behaviour of young, middle class women. Few critics or commentators drew any link between her revisionist book The First Stone and her impassioned attack on Singh. In The First Stone she lambasted a group of women at Melbourne University's Ormond College for bringing misconduct charges against the master of the college in the mid 90s. Many feminists were up in arms and the debate raged in the media. Morag Fraser, editor of the magazine Eureka Street, said the book was 'premised on the belief that truth is more important than feminist party solidarity'. Journalist and ABC broadcaster, Terry Lane, compared the case to the Salem witch-hunts. Some wondered whether he meant that Garner had turned the girls into witches.

If it was Garner's intention to prove that the problems of a bunch of privileged girls at Ormond College paled into insignificance with the murder of women I'd have been on her side. That, however, didn't seem to be the premise of the book. For reasons best known to Garner she hasn't ever written about murdered women or how the justice system fails them. Does she see the critique of family violence as the domain of the same 'victim-feminists' who always want to blame men? Maybe. I'd suggest that if she looks more carefully at the Ormond College case she might see it as a metaphor for the failings of the criminal justice system. It might not rank with violence and murder, but the way the college authorities turned their back on the women was emblematic of what the courts do in provocation cases.

It came as no surprise that Terry Lane would describe the Singh case as 'a counter balance to the notion that laws that excuse murders always favour men'. Lane's passionate defence of free speech, and the public broadcaster's role in protecting it, is only matched by his contempt for women's organisations that claim family violence is endemic. The law of provocation is ridiculous and should be abolished, but women aren't the only victims of the justice system, says Lane.

Joe Cinque's Consolation is a passionate and challenging book, in which the characters are brought to life with great skill and an artist's eye. It's just that the book bristles with questionable offerings. When she writes 'I didn't want to hear her (Singh's) academic views on the patriarchal nature of sentencing' Garner shows her hand. If any of the wife killers currently doing time had taken up reading and fallen upon this paragraph about her own taste of a man's fist they'd have surely smiled:

You don't think she might have goaded him until he snapped? I once did it myself to a bloke, when I was a student. I treated him so cruelly and hurtfully that he hit me across the face. It was only an open hand but it knocked me to the ground. I never felt badly towards him for it, though. I was ashamed. Because I knew he wasn't that sort of guy. I knew I'd driven him to it. I pushed him past the limit.

The Anu Singh that Helen Garner turns into a witch is not a good person. And there can be no doubt that she was lucky to beat the charge of murder. However, the verdict had everything to do the legal issue of 'diminished responsibility' and her addiction to drugs and nothing to do with Singh's gender or insensitivity to the victim. Anu Singh was found guilty of manslaughter, because, in Judge Crispin's words 'she was pretty ill psychiatrically'. Unlike the average wife killer, she did not besmirch the victim's character. Although Singh had told a counsellor she was 'terrified' of her boyfriend, this allegation played no major role in the case and there was no evidence led to suggest Cinque was to blame for anything. 'Joe Cinque's character was never raised in Singh's case because it was irrelevant to any issue in the case,' says defence barrister, Jack Pappas.

My misgivings with Garner's book centre on its capacity to assert a patriarchal hegemony over gender relations. Even when she describes her foray into a throng of grieving relatives at a Victims of Crime rally outside the Victorian parliament she finds a female culprit. The majority of people at such rallies have lost someone to the violence of men. Yet the one person whose tale Garner hears has a different story. The poor woman, says Garner, lost her brother in 1945 at the conclusion of the Second World War, when someone he'd met in the city appeared from the crowd, yelled 'watch out' and pushed him off the wharf. The person was never charged. Of course, she was a woman. Was this mysterious woman on the waterfront a metaphor for the Anu Singh Garner describes as 'the figure of what a woman most fears in herself - the damaged infant, vain, frantic, destructive, out of control'?

The killings of Joe Cinque and Julie Garrett were senseless and tragic. Each brought a crisis of faith and unimaginable pain for a grieving family. Yet for all her sins, Anu Singh is not typical of spouse murderers. And whilst it wasn't atypical of how women kill, it is rare for women to murder at all. Such murders are very much the preside of men. For every Anu Singh there are a dozen men who 'assassinate' simply because they regard a woman's departure as an insult to their honour. This was the story of R v Ramage and the murder of my sister in 1987.

To avoid a verdict of murder, James Ramage had to convince a jury that his dead wife was a manipulative Anu Singh. His barrister obliged by painting a picture of her as 'vain, destructive and out of control'. A love affair during the marriage and another, only weeks after leaving the family home, 'proved' she was vain and destructive. And of course Julie was pre-menstrual when her husband killed her. That surely proved she was out of control. It's the story of every provocation defence.

'What Anu Singh had done was called murder (and) not a spontaneous stroke of revenge for cruelty or betrayal or abuse, but a carefully planned revenge killing'. Would Garner have us belive that a spontaneous act of revenge is not murder? This is exactly what every wife killer argues under the law of provocation. It saved Ramage. It's time Helen Garner cast an eye over the killing of women. If you want to see injustice at work you need look no further than the killing of a woman by the bloke in her life.