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My review copy of Playing with Dynamite arrived in timely fashion in the week following the then Justice Minister, Kenneth Clarke's ill-advised remarks about rape sentencing in a radio interview. Clarke proposed halving sentences for those entering guilty pleas early in the court process, thereby, in his view, sparing additional trauma to victims and costs to the criminal justice system. This proposed policy was challenged by rape victims, and the ensuing public outcry reflected the continuing conflict in the public mind between its capacity for humanity and understanding and its demand for justice and revenge (The Guardian, ).
In recent years there have been more high profile cases involving women as perpetrators of violence; ‘Baby P’, a 17 month-old boy, died in 2007 in the London Borough of Haringey following a history of injuries and abuse by those caring for him. His mother, Tracey Connelly, was deemed, according to the tabloids, ‘a sex-obsessed slob’ and was convicted of actions contributing to the death of her infant son. Vanessa George, a nursery worker deemed first ‘an angel’, ‘a second mother’ until convicted with Angela Allen of multiple sexual assaults on babies and children in her care, when she became ‘an evil monster’. The Head of the Crown Prosecution Service stated that: ‘No one who heard what was said in court can begin to understand why these two women committed such shocking acts of child abuse’. She commented that: ‘They acted in a way that ordinary people will find impossible to understand’ (CPS, ).