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| Lavinia Woodward - should she be locked up? |
Woodward gained her fifteen minutes of fame after hitting and stabbing her ex-boyfriend while high on drugs and then escaping a jail sentence because the judge knew that a custodial sentence would damage her career prospects - destroy them, in fact, because she was a medical student who was expected to become a surgeon and we do not, apparently, allow people who go to jail for cutting people to later cut up other people in an operating theatre. She has suffered the usual shaming on social media and has now left Facebook.
A few things come out of this case. First, that we are an unforgiving society even if we pay lip service to idea of rehabilitation. This is a trend exacerbated rather than counteracted by the internet. Lavinia, as I will call her, can ignore social media now but the internet will forever have a record of her crime and conviction. The word on the street is that it is getting harder to rehabilitate people these days because, even if their crime has long since been erased from the official records, a quick google search will tell a potential employer that Joe Bloggs or Jane Doe served time twenty years ago and, therefore, will not be trusted with a job, even if they have turned over a new leaf and rebuilt their lives completely.
Second, having good career prospects will help you. The judge in Lavinia's case (male) may well have had a daughter of her age and thought how his little girl might have gone off the rails and deserves a second chance. This is unlikely to have been a factor in his thinking if she had been an unemployed badly qualified no-hoper. As someone who believes you should be judged by what you do with your hands rather than by what goes on in your head I cannot endorse this, although I suspect I would have felt the same way as the judge having a daughter just a little older than Lavinia. (A well-behaved, law-abiding one, I hasten to add, who needs no favours from anyone.) Even men who openly support gender equality have a tendency to be supportive of vulnerable females and have an age-old inclination to protect them from harm.
Thirdly, they are much less likely to exercise this inclination if the object of their mercy is male - and black. If Lavinia had been Laverne he would have been less likely to enjoy such leniency. The gender preference is probably stronger here than the racial one, although this is unpredictable. A young black woman might have enjoyed the same treatment as Lavinia, a white male would have been less likely to do so.
In fact, does anyone imagine that, if a man attacked a woman with a knife and gave her a cut that needed stitches, he would have escaped jail whatever his career prospects? Even if he had received the same treatment as Lavinia and been kept out of jail, you can just imagine the outcry from people who highlight domestic violence as a major scandal in our society. Instead of being considered mildly, possibly foolishly indulgent of human weakness a male judge who failed to send a man to prison for stabbing a female partner would have been condemned as complacent, misogynistic and irresponsible.
I share some of this attitude. Women do need protection from violent men and I feel instinctively that a woman behind bars is an affront in a civilised society. The title of this post comes from the chant that Donald Trump's supporters made whenever he mentioned Hilary Clinton. I hated these chants, which the Donald did nothing to discourage, knowing that they could help him get into the White House by energising his cruder supporters. Something gallant in me shudders at the idea of locking up women for having the nerve to try and serve in high office and, if the Donald is now struggling and way out of his depth in the White House, it is hard to have much sympathy with him.
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| Melania - should she be set free? |
