性别避风港: 容易被忽视的女性犯罪

Still, when you look at penalty statistics, it seems undeniable that our justice system remains warped by some measure of gender bias. In 1987, the year the Massachusetts State Police ruled that the death of Seth Bishop was an accident, twenty-two per cent of people arrested for “serious crimes” in the United States were women. But women were only ten per cent of those convicted of such crimes—and only five per cent of those imprisoned. A recent law-review article described the persistence of certain “chivalric norms,” which might explain the disproportionately low number of women who receive the death penalty in this country. (Only twelve women have been executed in the United States since 1976, as opposed to thirteen hundred and eight men.)
事实上，查阅刑事犯罪数据时不难发现，性别差异依然存在。1987年，当马塞诸塞州警方认定赛斯·毕晓普死于意外的那一年，因为严重犯罪行为被逮捕的嫌犯有22%为女性，然而只有其中的10%被定罪，服刑的女性更是只占有5%。最近的某篇法律报道认为，这个国家中女性犯罪者被处以死刑的概率过低的原因，或许是某种对于骑士精神的贯彻。（1976年以来，美国共有1308男性被处以死刑，而女性仅为12人）。

If a bias in favor of women is statistically obvious in the prosecution of crimes, there is likely a similar bias in the investigation of wrongdoing. This claim is harder to substantiate, of course—there is no way to accurately quantify the number of potential crimes and suspects that law enforcement opts not to pursue. But one useful counterfactual exercise would be to consider the events surrounding the death of Seth Bishop, on December 6, 1986, and wonder how things might have played out had the perpetrator been his brother rather than his sister. Would the police have accepted the notion that the shooting was an accident due to incompetence with a gun? If a young man had fled the scene of a shooting, brandished a shotgun in an effort to commandeer a vehicle, then ended up in an armed standoff with two police officers, would the cops have been so quick to release him without charges? Would officials have believed the explanation, which the Bishop parents still maintain, that this behavior was simply the product of “shock”? MacFarquhar points out that one feminist critique of gender bias in the treatment of violence is that it can “infantilize” women: “In supposing that a woman can’t be truly responsible for her violent acts, we are treating her as if she was a child.”
如果在案件起诉方面有如此明显的对女性的偏袒，那么我们有理由相信在案件调查的过程中也或多或少存在着这种不公。当然这种说法很难证实——因为我们无法去计算有多少潜在犯罪没有收到法律追究。但是1986年12月6日的赛斯·毕晓普之死也许能够说明一点问题——如果当时被怀疑的是赛斯的哥哥，而不是她的姐姐艾米·毕晓普，事情究竟会怎样？警察们是否仍然认为这只是一个没有资格使用枪支的小孩的一次走火？如果挥舞着枪支从枪杀的现场逃离，并试图劫持一辆交通工具逃跑，最后被两个全副武装的警察截住的是个年轻男孩，那么警察还会那么快就放弃指控并将他释放吗？那些官员，包括毕晓普的父母，是否依旧坚持把这些行为解释为“过于震惊而做出的”呢？麦克法夸尔之处这种性别主义的表现之一就是女性“婴儿化”，“女性不需要对她们的暴力行为承担太多责任，我们一直在把她们当做孩子看待”。

Of course, Amy Bishop was not just a woman—she was also an academic, and a related question is whether warning signs were overlooked because some degree of eccentricity is accepted, even nurtured, in a university setting. “Academe is often home to oddballs,” an article about the case in the Chronicle of Higher Education conceded. “Choosing to spend your life in a library or a laboratory is, by definition, out of the ordinary.” There is a fine line between eccentricity and instability—a line that is sometimes indiscernible. And in our rush to pre?mpt future mass shootings, we don’t want to start involuntarily committing any university professor who is given to erratic behavior.
诚然，艾米·毕晓普不仅仅是一名女性——她还是一名学者。所以我们总是把那些危险的信号解读为学者的怪癖而不予重视。某篇高等教育编年史的文章中有这样的句子：“学术是怪胎的摇篮。当你选择把余生献给图书馆或者实验室的时候，你的人生已经与常人不同。”然怪胎与疯子只有一墙之隔，这个界限极易被忽视。当可怕的枪击案件发生时，我们谁也不会下意识地把犯罪和某个大学教授的奇怪行为联系起来。

But according to a lawsuit filed by the families of two of Bishop’s victims, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, Vistasp Karbhari, the provost of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, was well aware of Bishop’s “dangerous instability,” yet did nothing to intervene. “Bishop had a history of severe, observable mental instability and violence dating back more than 20 years,” the suit alleges. According to court filings, the university had procedures in place to report potentially dangerous people on campus to the police and to get them into therapy—procedures of a sort that were instituted at universities across the country in the aftermath of shooting incidents at other educational institutions, like Virginia Tech.
毕晓普案的两名受害者家属说，亚拉巴马大学汉茨维尔分校的督学卡布哈里已经对毕晓普的危险倾向有所觉察，却没有作为。他们说“毕晓普的精神病史和暴力倾向可追溯至二十年前。”该案发生后，大学已经采取措施，将校园中一些潜在危险人员名单报送警方，并敦促他们接受治疗。美国的其他学校，例如弗吉尼亚理工大学，也采取了类似措施。

In something of a bombshell development, the Huntsville Times reported earlier this month that Amy Bishop herself wrote an affidavit from prison in which she described watching Karbhari flee the administration building along with David Williams, who was president of the university at the time, and an armed escort—because they believed that she was coming to see them. This is a damning image: if Karbhari was so concerned about his own safety, how could he not warn Bishop’s students or her colleagues? But a university spokesperson has dismissed the claim, pointing out that in the same affidavit Bishop mentions that she “sees dead people.” (Bishop told me that she has heard “voices” and suffered from “hallucinations” since shortly after her brother’s death.)
随着案件进展，汉茨维尔时报本月早些时候披露了艾米·毕晓普的监狱口供，她说亲眼看到了督学卡布哈里和校长大卫·威廉姆斯在武装保护下逃离了行政楼。这就是一个可恶的事实了，如果卡布哈里如此关心自己的安危，那么他为什么不警告毕晓普的学生和同事呢？但是学校的发言人随后否认了这一说法，并指出毕晓普的口供中还说到她会“看到死去的人”。（作者注：毕晓普说她在弟弟死后的一段时间里饱受幻觉的折磨，并且常常会听到杂音。）

Bishop is also not exactly an objective source on the subject of Karbhari: her parents expressed confusion to me about her decision to shoot her fellow-professors, some of whom were friends of hers, when it was Karbhari whom she perceived as her greatest antagonist. I’m not suggesting that Bishop would lie in her affidavit simply to assist in a lawsuit against the provost, but there do seem to be grounds for assessing her story with a skeptical eye.
毕晓普并不是卡布哈里事件的唯一信息来源。毕晓普的父母也说，女儿一直视卡布哈里为最大的敌人。所以她枪杀了自己的同事甚至朋友，却没有杀卡布哈里的行为令人费解。我并不是否认毕晓普为了构陷这位督学而伪造口供的可能性，但是我们可以带着一种怀疑的目光看待她的故事。

Another person named in the lawsuit is Amy Bishop’s husband, Jim Anderson. If anyone was in a position to spot red flags, it would presumably be her spouse, with whom she often collaborated in her research, and who drove her to campus on the day that she shot her colleagues. According to the lawsuit, Anderson “had direct knowledge of his wife’s impairment, her history of violence, her anger and threats toward colleagues over the denial of tenure, and her acquisition and use of a firearm shortly before the massacre.”
另一个证词来自毕晓普的丈夫，吉姆·安德森。整个案件中最能意识到毕晓普危险行为的人莫过于他了。因为他经常对毕晓普的研究给予协助，并且在案发当天也载着毕晓普到学校。案宗显示，安德森“对她妻子的所有危险信号——包括她过去的暴力经历，她在终生教授申请失败后的愤怒和对同事的恐吓，以及她在案件发生前使用火枪的情况——均知之甚详”。

“He, too, knew of her dangerous propensities,” Allen Brinkley, an attorney representing the Davis and Johnson families, said in 2011. “He more than anybody.”
“他什么都知道。”毕晓普案受害人的律师说。

Anderson’s role is one of the most unsettling features of the whole affair, because either he grasped that his wife was dangerous and did nothing or he, too, was oblivious to the warning signs. While it might be tempting, even comforting, to conclude that the family members of a killer would be the first to register tremors of danger, it may actually be the case that those closest to an unstable person have too much invested, emotionally, to take a dispassionate view. Perhaps the closer you are to someone the more blinded you become to what they are capable of. Even after Waneta Hoyt confessed to smothering all five of his children, her husband, Tim, continued to assert that she was innocent. He insisted that Waneta’s confession was coerced even as she was tried, convicted, and sent to prison, and close friends and neighbors of the family agreed—as did Waneta and Tim’s one surviving child, who was adopted.
安德森的存在是整个事件中唯一的变数。或许他注意到了妻子的行为却没有制止，又或者他司空见惯以致没有注意。凶手的家人能够第一时间发现凶手的危险倾向并制止，这固然是令人欣慰的，然而事实上有时候正因为是最亲近的人，所以对那些危险信号视而不见。开篇提到的霍伊特案中，即使在华内塔承认自己杀害婴儿的罪行之后，她的丈夫蒂姆，依然坚持认为他的妻子是无罪的。即使是在华内塔在监狱服刑的期间，他的丈夫蒂姆，依然认定华内塔的认罪是出于强迫。她的挚友和家人同样这样认为，他们还收养了华内塔和蒂姆唯一幸存孩子。

This raises a chilling question: If the killer’s own family and neighbors miss the red flags, what hope do the rest of us have?
这就带来了一个令人心寒的问题：如果凶手的家人和朋友都无法注意到那些潜在的危险信号，那么我们还能指望谁来阻止暴行呢？

 

 

译者：Lizzzzz