There is overwhelming sadness in the story of David Jackson, the retired army officer who, during the third lockdown, was repeatedly stabbed by his wife. He died in the attack hours after a family Zoom dinner, probably aware in his last moments that his wife of 24 years was refusing a 999 operator’s instructions to help him or even throw him a towel, and joking that she hoped they’d be too late and that she thought she “would get his heart, well he hasn’t got one”.
Mr Jackson, at 78, was 12 years older than his assailant, newly back from a hospital operation after chemotherapy for two cancers. Even as he called 999 for help after the first attack he was stabbed again twice. Later the wife told the court: “It was that face.”
You wouldn’t treat an old dog like that, even if it had bitten you, but Penelope Jackson’s defence was drawn from the newly recognised legal mitigations of “domestic abuse, coercive control and ultimately entrapment”. Such abuse, her QC argued, “is not physical all of the time”.
Hoping for a mild manslaughter sentence at worst, in court Jackson used phrases she will have learnt from famous cases (and indeed a celebrated Radio 4 Archers plot) in which wifely suffering and fear was unarguable. She claimed to have been “petrified”, “walking on eggshells”, fearing his moods, constantly “belittled”.
Citing “MeToo” and a “cycle” of anger and violence, she drew freely from the lexicon of feminist outrage. A useful and necessary lexicon, of course, but one to be used with circumspection.
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For while nobody can see inside a marriage, evidence from other family members and acquaintances (and indeed the killer’s own taunting video, following him round the house nagging about a remote control) does not really stand this up.
Some persistent “belittling” in public is reported as coming from her side. Both were drinkers capable of aggression, but the only physical violence by Mr Jackson which was witnessed by others occurred 22 years earlier. Apparently after his son from a early marriage killed himself, this newish third wife scoffed that suicide was “stupid”, and he went for her. Mr Jackson’s daughter says that he then sought help for his anger and distress.
It is not necessary to portray him as either a long-suffering victim or an arrogant bully. The unargued facts are that she picked up a knife and he did not, and that she used it once and — when he phoned for help — struck again.
All in all, it was a relief when a jury (eight women and four men) ruled it murder, and the judge acidly pointed out the killer’s apparent lack of remorse and her determination to portray as a monster a husband who now couldn’t reply. The recordings of the call and arrest are unbearable to listen to when you remember that an old man, whatever his faults, was dying nearby.
Our current — and useful — awareness of male violence in homes and streets should never blind us to the fact that a woman can be not only a nag and a bully but a killer.
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Of course ten times more men than women kill, but their victims are far more likely to be other men, and in the home that gap narrows. In a quarter of domestic abuse crimes and a fifth of partner-killings, men are recorded as the victims. More startlingly, ten years of FBI data from the US late last century found that for every 100 wives killed there were 75 husbands. In several cities (Chicago, Detroit, Houston, St Louis) wives were actually more likely to kill. So it isn’t unheard of. And in an age of fierce and often justifiable feminist anger, horrible cases like the Jacksons’ should be looked at steadily.
Even as we accept the imbalance of physical strength, the problems of predatory macho loutishness and the awful toll of casual femicide, we must accept that women are not saints. We are not universally kind, tolerant or sensible. Nor — and this is important — are we the helpless chattels who were victims in past ages. In the West at least, we have equal legal rights: we earn money, hold property, are heard in public affairs and give orders. We can freely judge, choose and discard partners, set up homes or dismantle them.
It is irrational, bordering on dishonest, to suggest that “the patriarchy” is solely responsible for the world’s ills today, and that men and boys are snakes in a gentle female Eden. It is absurd to talk of affluent professional women in possession of all their faculties — women like Jackson or that Archers character — being “trapped” in unhappy marriages by their loving helplessness, cowering victims so easy to dominate emotionally that they lose all self-will. Men can feel bullied too, and ashamed to admit it because of an equally dated legacy idea of manhood. It is rarely cited as an excuse for violence.
At the news of the verdict two feelings arose. One was simply sadness in thinking about all ageing couples — my own generation — who cannot or will not learn to spend the last decades of partnership in amused tolerance, shared memory and companionship. The other was a bracing relief in the court’s assertion that adult female equality involves responsibility for your actions.
Women are not fragile flotsam tossed by weird hormonal waves: we have strength, we have agency and, except in the extremest insanity or persecution, a duty of self-control. We are free. We cannot be “belittled” or piqued into helplessness (hence guiltlessness). It’s simple: you don’t raise a knife or club against a fellow-being just because you’re upset and life is unfair. Whatever your gender, you have human free will. You do not harm, you do not kill.