Women also receive significantly longer sentences for acting in self-defense (whether they killed someone or not) than men do for outright violent rape, assault and murder.
To give you an idea, Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a single warning shot in an attempt to scare her horribly abusive husband off when she feared for her life. Only a massive public campaign brought her sentence down to two years of house arrest.
Meanwhile, a man in California literally ran his ex-wife down with his pickup truck and ran her over until she was dead, and he was also sentenced to 20 years in prison.
This pattern persists throughout our criminal justice system: women who commit less violent and less outrageous offenses are routinely sentenced for much longer than men who commit significantly more violent and more outrageous offenses.
Another comparison: This Las Vegas man stalked his ex-wife and then shot her in the head and also injured her boyfriend in front of all five of their children, and was sentenced to 31 years in prison.
Meanwhile, a woman from Oviedo, Florida shot her husband in self-defense literally WHILE HE WAS RAPING HER and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Similarly, woman murderers are held in much greater contempt throughout society than male murderers are. Men routinely murder their children – children under five are more likely to be killed by their father than their mother, and in the murders of children who are murdered by someone other than their parent, men commit over 80% of murders [source] – and yet, when you hear about the murder of children, you always hear about women murdering their children. Andrea Yates in particular is always mentioned, despite being an obvious case of an abused and severely mentally ill woman who was ignored by everyone around her and whose manipulative, abusive husband intentionally left her alone with her children after her doctors expressly told him not to. She is and has been the poster-woman for child murder, despite being a poor, abused, mentally ill woman. And because of this, the mental image everyone gets when they think of a child murderer is a woman, even though men are more likely to murder children than women are.
So maybe, just maybe we should rethink this whole idea that women are given “easy sentences” compared to men, because not only are they sentenced more often and for much longer, but they are held in much, much, much more contempt by the general public as well as the criminal justice system when they do commit crimes, even when they are acting in self-defense.
