Killers are usually men. What drives a woman to be a killer?

Ninety percent of murders are committed by a man but a very small proportion of violent crime worldwide is carried out by women. A good portion of that amount is because of greed or the result of self-defence, when fending off an abusive partner results in loss of self-control. A woman can also be turned into a killer by mental and physical abuse from a male partner who makes her help out with the murder as an accomplice. It is very rare for a woman to kill someone who is a perfect stranger. The usual victims are family members like children or a spouse and typically, the method of killing is poison which makes women killers harder to catch than their male counterparts, who use more physical methods like stabbing, strangling or shooting. Female killers are more likely than men to suffer from serious mental illness, while male killers more typically suffer from personality disorders, and are often sociopaths. who are unable to empathize with their victims. But what makes a woman become a serial killer, a rare occurrence, which is normally carried out by men? Women only behave in really brutal and destructive ways if they have been brutalised or are the victims of sexual trauma as a child. They have pathological needs for attention, as a result, and want to have control or to express their anger. Then, there’s the woman who kills her children. How could a mother take the lives of her own babies? Most of the cases where this happens, the mother is suffering from acute depression as a result of domestic problems with a partner and the stress is so intense that it drives her over the edge. The only way out is to commit suicide and take the children with her, possibly thinking they will be together forever after death. Another theory is that it is done to punish the abusive partner. Some of the most deadly women murderers throughout history are: Belle Sorenson Gunness (1859-1908) who killed over 40 people while living in Chicago, which earned her the name the Black Widow. Jane Toppan (1857-1938) a Boston-based nurse who drugged her patients in order to rape them, a game she soon made more extreme by bringing her victims to the point of near death in order to satisfy her own sexual needs. Aileen Wuornos (1956-2002) who experienced incest and gave birth to a child at age 13. After being kicked out of her grandmother’s home, two years later, she became a prostitute to pay the bills before reaching a point in her life when she started killing eight men who were about to pay her for sexual services. Karla Homolka (1970-present) a Canadian who was married to a serial killer, Paul Bernardo, who inspired her to take part in the killings. She even drugged and killed her own sister, one of the three people she killed in total. Andrea Yates (1964-present) who killed all five of her own kids in the bathtub and then called 911 to turn herself in. She claimed that her kids were forced to perish due to not being “righteous.” Beverly Allitt (1968-present) a nurse who became known as the Angel of Death after she spent a two week period attacking and killing four children, in a hospital ward where she worked, by injecting drugs like insulin into their bodies which caused cardiac arrest.