BLOOD ON HER HANDS – Women Behind Bars
Carla van der Spuy, R159
Lapa
For those without personal experience, the process of arresting and charging a person for a criminal act may resemble an overdramatised scene involving CSI’s Horatio Caine, but those living the reality beyond being “taken away” tell a different tale.
Extremes vary as journalist Carla van der Spuy gets up close with the picture that society would rather not be in touch with – getting personal accounts from women in prison.
In this slightly different departure from her Man or Monster book, Van der Spuy takes a look at the fairer sex to pinpoint the life-altering events that lead women to committing crime.
The first thing a reader will get to realise with Blood on Her Hands is that the notion of the woman as the nurturer and model of patience and support can quickly get eroded to leave a lasting impression of a dangerous attacker.
Through one-on-one interviews in prisons across the country, Van der Spuy sees the common thread of lives marked by poverty, child abandonment, rape and more. From this angle, the irony is that to a large extent, the women are in a way, victims. Victims of circumstance. Along with this is the debunking of the myth of prison as a “five-star hotel”.
These scars, however, are not visible as Van der Spuy, who, while dealing with murder cases, seems to be on the search for the archetype of a killer or “monster”. All women are given pseudonyms in the book, even so, she discovers that not one of them fits the mould à la Charlize Theron/Aileen Wournos in the movie Monster, so to speak.
Expert opinion at the end of each inmate’s story puts things into perspective, but this is by no means absolution. This, Van der Spuy ponders, may serve to shed some light that most of these women had, leading to their offences, reached the “enough is enough” point of no return.
– Denzil Moyaga