State Crime, Women and Gender by Victoria E. Collins

Author:Victoria E. Collins [Collins, Victoria E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781317690221
Google: 9QWpCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-05T05:59:36+00:00

Women as offenders: mid- and low-level offenders

Lynndie England and Abu Ghraib

Two pictures circulated of Private Lynndie England as part of the set of photographs showing United States soldiers abusing prisoners at Iraqi detention facility Abu Ghraib that were featured in an April 2004 episode of 60 minutes. The first photograph showed Lynndie, cigarette hanging from her mouth and grinning, as she pointed both her hands with her fingers extended like guns at a naked Iraqi prisoner with a bag over his head. The second was the aforementioned image of Lynndie holding a leash that was wrapped around a crawling naked detainee’s neck (Masters, 2009). Lynndie was later charged and convicted of “conspiracy to mistreat detainees and other crimes” (Masters, 2009, p. 37) and sentenced to serve three years in prison. What was interesting, however, was the socio-political construction of Lynndie England, a construction that centered on not just her behavior, but her behavior as a female soldier who came to represent “the monstrous face of an ‘all-women axis of evil’, the victimizer of the very same Iraqi savage” (Masters, 2009, p. 38).

England was one of 11 other United States soldiers who were exposed as having tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The media and political coverage of the incident did not focus on the other soldiers despite there being other female soldiers implicated in the acts; Sabrina Harman and Megan Ambulh. Rather, it was England who came to represent a female protagonist in a mythic narrative of an actor morally adrift from popular presentations of patriarchal militarism (Enloe, 2000; Kumar, 2006; Lemish, 2005) and her “feminine moorings” (Howard & Prividera, 2008). The actions and photographs of Lynndie England were not any more abhorrent than those of the other perpetrators and so it seems it was not her actions that differentiated her from the others as being more “deserving” of the media and political attention. Instead, and as argued by Masters (2009), “Lynndie England ‘looked like’ the stereotypical butch lesbian” (p. 38) as her short dark hair, androgynous body and boyish features visually violated accepted understandings of North American femininity when viewed through the heterosexist lens of gender construction. In other words, England’s characteristics were more masculine than feminine. As a result, it was not what England did that was important to the discursive and visual representations of the torture at Abu Ghraib, but what she looked like when doing it.

Lynndie violated popular understandings of gender in the United States and was easily singled out. This allowed for responsibility for the horrors of Abu Ghraib to be more readily ignored by the American public, as well as by those who sought to blame the torture on the actions of a few “ugly Un-American[s]” in Iraq (Froula, 2006). The representations of Lynndie as an individual the American public would be least likely to identify with, absolves them from any further responsibility for the continued violence, death and carnage occurring due to the United States, Occupation of Iraq. Furthermore, this allowed for the military

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