Female Perpetrators: Ordinary or Extra-ordinary Women?

Only a very small percentage of the perpetrators convicted by international criminal courts and tribunals are women. This raises the question as to whether women are less evil than men. Within the literature it is generally assumed that the genocide in Rwanda was unprecedented in relation to the role played by women, and that it is the first and only period of mass violence in which many women were involved. This explorative study however, shows that women have played a much larger role than we have generally assumed so far and that women can be just as evil as men - although it indeed seems true that generally far less women than men are involved in mass atrocities. There is a clear gender bias in the portrayal of female perpetrators as sadists, abnormal or lacking agency, but it can be questioned whether female perpetrators are less ordinary than male perpetrators.