You cannot demand equality when women succeed and exceptional treatment when women commit the same horrors society condemns in men.
There is a particularly uncomfortable question emerging from the extraordinary public reaction to the Lindsay Clancy case:
What happens when the cultural image of women as naturally nurturing, peaceful and incapable of extreme violence collides with the reality that women, like men, are capable of committing horrific crimes?
The answer should be simple.
We judge the conduct.
We examine the evidence.
We consider mental illness where it is relevant.
We protect the victims.
And we apply the law fairly.
But increasingly, the public conversation seems to be producing something else: a strange mixture of empathy, gender politics and selective accountability.
That deserves scrutiny.
The “women would end wars” fantasy
For years, popular culture has repeated some version of the same proposition:
If women ran the world, there would be fewer wars.
It sounds beautiful.
It is also far too simplistic.
There is no serious basis for assuming that women are inherently incapable of aggression simply because they are women.
Historical evidence makes that clear.
Indira Gandhi led India during the 1971 war with Pakistan.
Golda Meir led Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Margaret Thatcher ordered British forces into the Falklands War in 1982.
Scholars studying female leadership and military behaviour have repeatedly cautioned against treating women as a naturally pacifist political category. One empirical review found that available evidence does not establish a simple “women are more peaceful” relationship, while research examining women leaders including Gandhi, Meir and Thatcher demonstrates how complicated the relationship between gender and military policy actually is.
Women can be compassionate.
Women can be courageous.
Women can be excellent leaders.
Women can also be ruthless.
So can men.
Gender is not a moral character certificate.
And that matters in criminal justice too
The same principle should apply when the issue is not war but violence against children.
A mother killing her child is horrifying.
A father killing his child is horrifying.
A stranger killing a child is horrifying.
The gender of the perpetrator should not determine whether society regards the victim as less important.
This is where the reaction surrounding Lindsay Clancy becomes so uncomfortable.
Clancy's lawyers acknowledge that she killed her three children but argue that she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and therefore was not criminally responsible. Prosecutors have presented a substantially different account of her mental state and actions.
That is exactly what a courtroom is supposed to determine.
But outside the courtroom, something else has happened.
Hundreds of women rallied in support of Clancy.
Some supporters wore pink.
Some social-media users have posted videos saying “Me too, Lindsay.”
Others have raised substantial sums of money for her family.
The public reaction has become a movement of its own.
There is nothing wrong with discussing postpartum psychosis.
There is nothing wrong with demanding better maternal healthcare.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that a woman can become catastrophically mentally ill.
But there is a line between understanding how someone arrived at a horrific act and erasing the horror of the act itself.
That line matters.
Compassion cannot become moral blindness
Mental illness is real.
Postpartum psychosis is real.
And it can be devastating.
Experts describe postnatal psychosis as a rare but serious condition that can involve hallucinations, delusions and paranoia and requires urgent treatment.
Therefore, society should absolutely invest more in maternal mental healthcare.
Women who experience frightening intrusive thoughts should be able to seek help without shame.
Families should know the warning signs.
Doctors should take suicidal or homicidal thoughts seriously.
And women experiencing psychiatric emergencies should receive immediate protection and treatment.
None of that requires pretending that a child who was murdered does not matter.
In fact, it requires the opposite.
The child must remain at the centre of the conversation.
The tragedy is not merely that a mother became mentally ill.
The tragedy is that children died.
Both truths can exist simultaneously.
The most dangerous argument is that accountability is somehow anti-woman
There is an emerging tendency in some conversations about female perpetrators to treat criticism of a woman as evidence of misogyny.
That is a mistake.
Holding a woman accountable does not mean hating women.
Demanding punishment where the evidence and law require punishment does not mean opposing women's rights.
Questioning an insanity defence does not mean denying mental illness.
And refusing to romanticise a female perpetrator does not make someone anti-woman.
Indeed, there is something deeply patronising about the opposite argument.
If women are supposedly equal to men, then they must also be recognised as moral agents capable of making terrible decisions.
Women should not need a permanent cultural presumption of innocence simply because society associates femininity with motherhood and nurturing.
Equality means women are human beings — not angels.
The victims deserve the same empathy
This is perhaps the most uncomfortable part.
When the accused becomes the emotional centre of a story, the victims can disappear.
In the Clancy case, three children died:
Cora, Dawson and Callan.
They cannot give interviews.
They cannot explain what happened.
They cannot defend themselves.
They cannot participate in the debate over postpartum psychosis.
Their father cannot bring them back.
Their lives ended before they had the opportunity to become adults.
Whatever the jury eventually decides about Lindsay Clancy's criminal responsibility, those children remain dead.
And their deaths should never become merely the backdrop to a larger cultural argument about women's healthcare.
The children deserve empathy too.
But there is an even bigger problem with the “women are peaceful” narrative
The belief that women are naturally peaceful can actually become another form of sexism.
It assumes women must be morally different from men.
It places women on a pedestal rather than treating them as full human beings.
And once women are placed on that pedestal, society struggles to understand what happens when one of them commits an extraordinary act of violence.
We suddenly begin searching for explanations that would not necessarily receive the same cultural attention if the perpetrator were male.
The problem is not that explanations are sought.
The problem is selective explanation.
A man's childhood.
His mental health.
His medication.
His family circumstances.
His trauma.
His social environment.
His relationship.
These can all be examined.
But the same standards must apply when the perpetrator is a woman.
Otherwise, the criminal justice system becomes gendered in precisely the way equality advocates claim to oppose.
And no, this does not mean women should “leave traditionally male roles”
There is one part of the argument circulating online that deserves rejection.
The answer to female criminality cannot be:
“Women who fail should vacate traditionally male roles.”
That simply reproduces the same gender stereotypes we should be trying to eliminate.
Women do not need to prove that they are morally perfect before they are allowed to lead.
Men do not need to prove that they are morally perfect before they are allowed to lead either.
The standard should be competence, integrity and accountability.
Not chromosomes.
A woman who becomes a president should be judged as a president.
A woman who becomes a soldier should be judged as a soldier.
A woman who becomes a police officer should be judged as a police officer.
A woman who commits a crime should be judged as a defendant.
The same standard should apply to everyone.
The “women are peaceful” argument also fails historically
If women automatically produced peace, history would look very different.
Research examining female rulers has found that women leaders have participated in wars and military crises. One historical study of European monarchs found that women rulers were, under certain conditions, more likely than male rulers to participate in war — challenging the popular assumption that female leadership naturally produces pacifism.
That does not mean women are more violent than men.
It means something much more important:
Human behaviour cannot be reduced to sex.
Political institutions matter.
Ideology matters.
Personal beliefs matter.
Security threats matter.
Power matters.
Personality matters.
And individual psychology matters.
The same is true of criminal behaviour.
Equality without accountability is not equality
If society genuinely believes women should occupy positions historically dominated by men, then it must also accept something uncomfortable:
Women will sometimes fail.
Women will sometimes abuse power.
Women will sometimes commit crimes.
Women will sometimes make catastrophic decisions.
And when that happens, the appropriate response cannot be:
“But she is a woman.”
That is not equality.
It is infantilisation.
If a man kills a child, we do not normally organise a movement around the proposition that his suffering should eclipse the child.
If a woman kills a child, we should not automatically do so either.
Mental illness can alter criminal responsibility.
It must be investigated.
It can be medically devastating.
It deserves treatment.
But the question of criminal responsibility belongs to evidence and law — not to social-media sympathy.
The child should never become collateral damage in a gender debate
Perhaps the most important lesson from the Clancy controversy is that society needs to hold two thoughts simultaneously.
We can say:
Women experiencing postpartum mental illness need much better support.
And:
Children murdered by their mothers deserve justice and remembrance.
We can say:
The healthcare system may have failed a mother.
And:
A child's life still matters.
We can say:
Mental illness may have influenced a person's actions.
And:
The law must determine whether that illness removes criminal responsibility.
There is no contradiction.
That is what mature justice looks like.
Stop asking whether women are naturally peaceful
The better question is:
Are we willing to apply the same moral and legal standards to everyone?
If the answer is yes, then women do not need to be treated as inherently peaceful.
They need to be treated as human beings.
Human beings capable of extraordinary kindness.
Human beings capable of extraordinary courage.
Human beings capable of leadership.
And, in some cases, human beings capable of extraordinary cruelty.
That is not an attack on women.
It is an acknowledgement of human nature.
The real insult to women is the belief that they are too fragile to be held accountable.
And the real injustice is when sympathy for an adult overwhelms compassion for the child who cannot speak.
Equality does not mean giving women a harsher standard.
It means refusing to give them a softer one.
And if we are serious about equality, the principle should be brutally simple:
Same crime. Same evidence. Same scrutiny. Same standard.
Not because women are men.
But because the life of a child should not become less valuable depending on the sex of the person who killed them.
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