According to a study published in the British Journal of Criminology, ‘emotional’ women are frequently the key to defeating injustice.
The authors of the study, Dr Sarah Charman and Professor Steve Savage, reviewed cases of high-profile miscarriages of justice, including interviews with family members, and found that women tend to channel their anger and grief and attract public sympathy through ‘public grieving’.
Professor Savage, of the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Portsmouth, said: ‘Women’s voices, at least in campaigns against miscarriages of justice, appear to hold a special place in challenging rulings. Such campaigns have been led and fought by male relatives and friends, but women seem more likely to play a central role.’
He added: ‘A miscarriage of justice evokes grief and anger in those left behind and those who campaign are motivated by a deep sense of injustice or loss. They campaign because they feel that they or those close to them have been wronged, but the way women and men deal with and act upon this tends to be different.’
According to the study, mothers are particularly effective at confronting miscarriages of justice because they represent ‘the emotional dimension of loss’.
Professor Savage said: ‘For a campaign to win public support, the combination of a sympathetic character and one who is suffering injustice is potent. Females are typcially better placed to evoke such sentiments of sympathy than men.’
He added: ‘Successful campaigns need immense resilience – the refusal to give up, the determination to achieve goals, whether that be an acquittal, an apology, an inquiry or an investigation, the energy to persevere against the odds. Within families it is the females – the mothers, sisters, daughters, even nieces – who play a particularly significant role and exhibit precisely that resilience.’
Cases included in the study:
Michelle Diskin (pictured)
Barry George was convicted in 2001 of the murder of Jill Dando but was acquitted at a retrial in August 2008. His older sister, Michelle Diskin, ran a campaign from her home in Cork called ‘Justice for Barry George’ and argued that the evidence against him was circumstantial.
Her online campaign letter said that Barry was not positively identified in the line-up and that scientific evidence was contaminated.
She said at the time, in an interview with Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour programme; ‘I’m the one who’s been visiting him. We can tell just by talking to him that he has had nothing to do with this. Also, there is no evidence to link him to any of this. I had to stand back and look at Barry and see how he was answering the question, when somebody’s giving you full eye contact and there’s no body language to suggest he was lying. Nobody is able to say the person who I saw leaving the scene was Barry George.’
Sarah Conlan
Gerry Conlan was one of four convicted of bombings carried out by the IRA in 1970 when he was 21. His mother, a Belfast housewife, was seen as critical in confronting what was later declared one of the worst miscarriages of justice and elicited a formal apology from Tony Blair in 2005.
At the time Gerry Conlan said about his mother: ‘She was remarkable in the fact that she didn’t bear any ill-will towards the people who first arrested us and then tortured us and framed us. And while I was in prison, ever letter ended the same: “Pray for the ones who told lies against you and pray for the judge who sentenced you. It’s them who needs help as well as yourself.”‘
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