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From time immemorial, there have been crimes committed by women who were driven to pursue their own power. These transgressive crimes center on the tearing down of established systems. They make it possible for us to reflect upon the meaning of the offenders, sacrifice in Euripides's Bacchae: offenders who, beyond their frantic alienation, rise, as Medea did, through a reflective process that leads to a destruction that does not horrify them and that few of them repent.
As in Euripides's Medea and Bacchae, women today are at the bottom of a justice system that is overwhelmed by evidence of gender violence. Calling this violence “femicide” brings it home in a way that continues to root it in an idea of female “otherness.” In the language used by contemporary criminologists, gender violence, in all its range of meaning, can erroneously lead to the oppression of all humans. Offenders are transformed into the victims of patriarchal systems who are deceived and abandoned. Transformed into victims, the offenders become absolved of all responsibility for their actions. They illustrate a perspective of femininity in its poorest and most precarious state.
Reflecting upon this clearly ambiguous situation leads us to think about the “feminization of crime” with greater conceptual complexity than victims or offenders, control or lack of control, or patriarchy or feminization might suggest. The empowerment of women over the last hundred years has led to a dilution of these kind of limits — but these limits were already being exposed and denounced over a thousand years ago. The control of an otherness that comes out of itself and is attributed to femininity is evident in the Greek tragedies of Bacchae and Medea.
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