Punishment Of Women Research Articles

SOCIAL STIGMATIZATION AND PENALIZATION OF WOMEN IN SAADAWI’S THE FALL OF THE IMAM

This study aims to examine the social stigmatization and punishment of women in The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi, iconic Egyptian feminist writer who could not remain apathetic to the violence, exclusion and punishment methods developed by the society against women in an environment where people are afraid to speak. In conservative and authoritarian societies, it is quite common for individuals to be restricted and required to live according to strictly defined social norms. If a person acts or behaves in ways outside the boundaries and limits demanded by society, it is highly probable that they will be stigmatized and perhaps even punished by their milieu. On the other hand, the group most adversely affected by this circumstance is women because they are subjected to much more noticeable extent of coercion and oppression than men are. Patriarchal perception lies on the ground of this domination against women. The restrictive structure of patriarchy prevailing in the society is utilized as a kind of control mechanism. Referring to the atmosphere in her country, in particular for women, Saadawi expressly emphasizes that the oppression and domination in her society negatively affect women’s lives, the court system is biased against women, and religion is manipulated in favor of men. Women are victims in a male-dominated religious society, they are judged and punished by men in an unfair way, which Saadawi criticizes in her work. The systematic exposure of women to violence, sexual assault and rape, and ultimately death penalty is a stark manifestation of the corruption in society. The unfair punishment practice imposed against women is the key factor triggering this deterioration. Accordingly, Saadawi dwells on the unfair/cruel physical punishment method of stoning in the penalization of women and sheds light on the problem of violence in her novel. On the axis of violence, Saadawi severely criticizes the stereotypical religion-referenced patriarchal structure manipulated against women. By taking into consideration all these elements, in this paper, it is aimed to investigate and represent how women are stigmatized and penalized with death. Accordingly, it is concluded that the stigmatization, marginalization, and ultimately death penalty generated against women as a result of their sexes are based on the patriarchal notion enforced by religion.

Dans le secret de la juridiction domestique. Le châtiment des femmes dans la Rome antique

Cette étude s’intéresse au sort des femmes criminelles dans la Rome antique. La plupart du temps, à Rome, même lorsque la femme tombait sous le coup d’une condamnation publique, la question de l’administration de son châtiment était souvent transmise à la sphère privée, afin que la plus grande discrétion soit de mise. Le secret régnait donc en maître lorsqu’il s’agissait de crimes tels que l’adultère ou la consommation de vin : le problème était réglé au sein de la maison, par le mari, ou éventuellement des membres de la famille. L’intérêt, ici, est donc de comprendre les raisons d’un tel secret entourant le châtiment réservé à la femme criminelle et de voir si, dans certains cas, cette discrétion s’effaçait au profit d’une peine publique et si le secret pouvait parfois être rompu.

As Red as Blood: Women's Temporality and Pain in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"

As Red as Blood: Women's Temporality and Pain in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" The story begins with a young girl. She’s lanky, shy, and doesn’t know her body, a fact which becomes apparent the morning she wakes to find blood on her sheets for the first time. My adolescent years were painful, awkward, and bloody. Nonetheless, I learned how to wash the stains from my sheets and take care of my body when it was hurting. I learned that becoming a woman was something to be celebrated, but quietly. A woman’s menstrual cycle is used by society to dictate womanhood. It is difficult, however, to control something that is so persistent. Women’s pain is timeless—it is present each month whether society deems it acceptable or not. Fairy tales, too, are timeless, consistent in their punishment of women’s pain. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber reinvents the fairy tale, encouraging us to ask more of those traditional stories by allowing women’s time to expand—much like a womb—making room for pain and desire. Between countesses with a taste for blood and girls who are more wolf than woman, Carter embraces the cultural anxiety that becoming a woman is a threatening and monstrous process. My paper blends research with the fairy tale genre to offer a performative analysis of The Bloody Chamber, asking readers to reach beyond the boundaries of academic writing, much like Carter’s retellings. Here, becoming a woman is a thing to be celebrated, and loudly. Here, we are allowed to exist, blood and all.

The Ruling on Aborting the Fetus and Its Effect on Inheritance: A Comparative Study between the Four Sunni Schools, Indonesian Law and Malaysian Law

Abortion is an act of killing to life which is forbidden in Islam. Abortion gives rise to differences of view among past and contemporary scholars on its enabling and prohibition. So, this study is to examine the views of scholars and laws in Indonesia and Malaysia related to abortion and its impact on inheritance ownership. This situation affects the inheritance of property to the mother from the aborted baby. The method of this study is qualitative descriptive. The approach of this research method is descriptive of content through literature. Books, journals, newspaper clippings, and legal regulations are the premier references to this study. This study finds that there are similarities and differences between sharia law and the rules applied in Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of similarities, Islamic law and the laws in Indonesia and Malaysia provide for the prohibition of abortion. But, in certain circumstances, the fetus can be aborted for certain reasons, such as harming the mother or for medical reasons. In addition, this study found differences in punishment for women who had an abortion for no valid reason. Therefore, this study reveals the harmonization of Islamic law with the laws conducted in Indonesia and Malaysia. So, this study recommends forming a better in-depth study of efforts to harmonize the larger Islamic law to the rules regulated in Muslim countries.

Debauched, Desperate, Deranged: Women Who Killed, London 1674–1913 by Carolyn A. Conley

Conley draws from the rich resources of The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913 (ed. Tim Hitchcock et al.) to present an overview of the prosecution of women for homicide over a span of centuries. Conley begins with the premise that “changes in the types of homicides for which women were prosecuted as well as the official responses and media coverage of these crimes reflect, parallel, and occasionally challenge social, legal, and cultural changes in women’s status, opportunities, and stereotypes” (1). Working from contemporary publications that summarized proceedings at London’s central criminal court and their reports on1,408 women charged with involvement in criminal homicides, Conley argues that women who killed went from being depicted as wicked but fully morally and legally responsible agents to being portrayed most often as vulnerable victims of physiological factors beyond their control. In chapters that divide the material into four temporal blocks—1674–1753, 1754–1833, 1834–1873, and 1874–1913—Conley traces declines over time in the prosecution of women for homicides outside the home and for the killings of infants and of children. She detects more consistency in the rate of prosecution of women for spousal killings, but the emergence of far more sympathetic responses from juries and judges as time passed. Verdicts of insanity became ever-more common.The book purports to offer both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the phenomena involved in the incidence, prosecution, and punishment of women’s homicides. Much of the book consists of short summaries of accounts drawn from the published Proceedings, sometimes enriched with supplementary contemporary publications. A particularly effective passage, for example, looks at how the published description of a woman involved in a killing—Deborah Churchill, executed in 1708—changed from agent of evil in 1714 to victim of passion in 1779. The utility of the quantitative analysis is weakened, however, by the failure to provide raw numbers in all but a few cases. After stating that the data set includes 1,408 women, Conley thereafter provides only percentages and rates, which do not allow readers easily to assess the size or significance of changes or researchers to draw comparisons with the phenomena that she identifies. She writes, for example, that from 1874 to 1893, 69 percent of mothers who killed legitimate children were deemed insane, whereas only 22 percent of women who killed illegitimate children received the same verdict—interesting perhaps, but without raw numbers, just how interesting remains unknown. The nagging suspicion is that the raw numbers behind these percentages must be exceedingly small.Conley’s decision to include women charged as accessories is defensible, but, again, without raw numbers to allow some disaggregation, comparisons across time and place become more difficult. It might mislead unwary readers, too. Conley’s observation early in the book about eighteenth-century women charged for killings with swords resonates differently when she later explains that in all or most of these sword-wielding episodes, the woman was a bystander. Readers might benefit from a more detailed description of the source base and its changes during the period studied (for example, the Proceedings became an “official” publication only after 1778). Reminders that what is being counted and described are not the actual court records but summaries of the trials mediated by print (and then by digitization) might also be useful.The book conveys much of interest, but it is likely to be of limited utility to specialists. It has greater value as an engaging introduction to the riches of the Old Bailey Proceedings and to the history of women’s homicidal violence. Even for specialists, however, the reminder that both the incidence and prosecution of homicides changed over time in ways inflected by cultural and social gender norms might be salutary.

Criminalisation and the Violence(s) of the State: Criminalising Men, Punishing Women

This special issue brings together a group of international researchers at different career stages with one common interest: the extent to which recourse to the criminal law as a means of addressing men’s violence(s) serves the interests of women’s safety. It further explores Goodmark’s (2018) criminalisation thesis across different vital topics to consider how and under what conditions the criminalisation of men results in the punishment of women. In bringing together these different substantive areas of investigation (from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War to debates concerning the criminalisation of prostitution, migration and the unintended consequences of criminalising coercive control), this collection provides a deeper analysis of the meaning of both criminalisation and punishment for women whose lives become entangled in and by this recourse to law.

Altered Neural Processing of Reward and Punishment in Women With Methamphetamine Use Disorder.

It has been suggested that the altered function of reward and punishment is an important vulnerability factor leading to the development of drug use disorders. Previous studies have identified evidence of neurophysiological dysfunction in the reward process of individuals with substance use disorders. To date, only a few event-related potential (ERP) studies have examined the neural basis of reward and punishment processing in women with methamphetamine (MA) use disorders. The current ERP research aims to investigate the neurophysiological mechanisms of reward and punishment in women with MA use disorder using a monetary incentive delay task. Nineteen women with MA use disorder (MA group) and 20 healthy controls (HC group) were recruited in this study. The behavioral data showed that the reaction time (RT) was faster and the response accuracy (ACC) was higher for the potential reward and punishment conditions compared to neutral conditions. During the monetary incentive anticipation stage, the Cue-P3, and stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) were larger in the MA group than in the HC group. The SPN under the potential reward condition was larger than that under the neutral condition in the MA group but not in the HC group. During the monetary incentive consummation stage, the feedback-related negativity and feedback P3 (FB-P3) following positive feedback were significantly larger than negative feedback in the potential reward condition for the HC group, but not for the MA group. However, the FB-P3 following negative feedback was significantly larger than positive feedback in the potential punishment condition for the MA group, but not the HC group. The results suggest that women with MUD have stronger expectations of generic reward and stronger response of generic harm avoidance, which could be targeted in designing interventions for women with MA use disorder.

Local, Regional and Transnational Queer-feminist Arab, Muslim, and People of Color Insurgent-Abolitionist Horizons

How can radical queer-feminist contestations of the longstanding disciplining and punishment of women, trans peoples, and gender dissidents elucidate the blast radius of the multiple, dynamic, intersectional ‘cages’ that define the daily conditions of racialized gendered-queer life that require obliterating? I examine the notion of capitalist and authoritarian nation-state ‘cages’ that punitively condemns racialized queer-feminist lives in the decolonial context of gender-based sexual harassment in Egypt and the inspiring autonomous and lateral anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist initiative that some of my queer-feminist Egyptian and Muslim fieldwork participants incepted to combat harassment in an ongoing post-revolutionary Egyptian ‘Arab Spring/Islamist Winter.’ My participants did not rely on state-discipline and carceral punishment mechanisms nor did they seek to replicate the reproduction of patriarchal violence towards abusers. Rather, through knowledge production (al-intag al-marify) they sought a more compassionate-transformative justice approach in combatting harassment that centered on illuminating harassment as a micro-fascistic cis-heteropatriarchal by-product emergent from macro-fascistic statist and capitalist structural hierarchies and inequities that cyclically reify each other at the vertical and horizontal level. Even prior to a covet19-viral laden world, they recognized that there is nowhere left to hide (if there ever was one for innumerable disenfranchised racialized/queered/feminized/classed/disabled/debilitated lives marked and targeted by a necro-politics of death. They gesture towards a non-ideological revolutionary driven ethics and politics that demands that we must all ask how we will collectively decide how live or die. They reject playing to a statist-politics of recognition, reform and rights, or recourse to martial and emergency laws that are contingent on and reify capitalist-state paradigms that (further) strips and extinguishes our communitarian and individual agency as a species. Instead, they argue for a politics of responsibility that focuses on interconnecting the burning ashes, timbres, and fires of our intersecting local, regional, and transnational struggles through mutual aid and social solidarity towards each other and nonhuman life.

"Parirás com Dor": a violência obstétrica revisitada

Diante de um contexto social em que predominam os partos instrumentais, via cirurgia cesariana, nos hospitais particulares, e a “cascata de intervenções” nos partos vaginais dos hospitais públicos brasileiros, o movimento de mulheres marcou o início do século XXI com a nomeação da “violência obstétrica”. A compreensão da violência obstétrica abarca desde agressões físicas, psicológicas, verbais, simbólicas, sexuais até negligências nas assistências, discriminação, medicalização excessiva e inapropriada, adesão a práticas obstétricas desaconselhadas, dolorosas, prejudiciais e sem embasamento em evidências científicas,vividas no momento da gestação, parto, nascimento e pós-parto. Os aspectos dessa violência – com imposição de dor, sofrimentos e mortes evitáveis – se encontram legitimados pela ciência obstétrica eautorizados pelo Estado como assistência à saúde sexual e reprodutiva. Argumentamos que a violência obstétrica é um ato misógino de punição às mulheres, resultado de séculos de negação de sua sexualidade e capacidade de decidir. A proposta do artigo é refletir sobre como se deu tal autorização política para violentar os corpos de mulheres, assim como sua naturalização e invisibilização justificadas pela ciência e porcertas práticas obstétricas. Sendo parte de uma pesquisa mais ampla, foram privilegiadas, aqui, análises históricas de cunho feministas cujo acervo de conhecimentos permitiu rastrear o processo de elaboração doconceito e mostrar como as relações intrínsecas entre parto e políticas de Estado, via diferentes assistências – pública e privada –, coordenam a disciplina sobre os corpos expropriados das mulheres.

¿Cómo se castiga a las mujeres cuando matan? Un estudio sobre el sistema penal argentino

Estados Unidos y Europa occidental concentran un gran volumen de investigaciones sobre la forma en que el sistema penal castiga mujeres acusadas de asesinato. Aunque con matices, estos trabajos sostienen que, en líneas generales, el sistema de justicia muestra un trato paternalista hacia las mujeres. Por su parte, en Latinoamérica, las investigaciones sobre la penalización de mujeres imputadas por asesinato son ciertamente más escasas. El presente trabajo se propone como una contribución a este campo de estudios ofreciendo un análisis sobre Argentina. En primer lugar, presentaremos una breve revisión bibliográfica que permita sistematizar las investigaciones (e hipótesis) más relevantes sobre la forma en que la administración de justicia castiga mujeres acusadas de estos crímenes, prestando particular atención a las producciones para Latinoamérica y el Caribe. En segundo término, sirviéndonos de la información del último censo penitenciario del país, analizaremos y compararemos las penas fijadas para mujeres y varones condenados por asesinato en la República Argentina. Esto nos permitirá investigar si el género del acusado por estos crímenes influye en las condenas impuestas por los jueces, de qué modo lo hace y, por lo tanto, si la hipótesis paternalista puede ser útil para dar cuenta de contextos como el argentino.

Solving Her Problems? Beyond the Seductive Appeal of Specialist Problem-Solving Courts for Women Offenders in England and Wales

AbstractAt the nexus of the social and penal policy fields, problem-solving justice promises to punish offenders while working to address the complex issues that drive their law-breaking behaviour. Appealing to the left and right due to its dual focus on pragmatism and welfarism, the concept has floated in and out of political fashion for the past two decades. Recent years have heralded a renewed political interest in the approach, closely aligned to the Conservative government’s commitment to ‘transforming justice’. With a focus on empowerment and collaboration, the problem-solving model has much to offer women offenders in particular. Drawing on data from a large-scale study into the sentencing and punishment of women under the new probation arrangements, this article reveals a divergence of views on gender-specific courts among sentencers, probation officers and third sector workers. Moral concerns about up-tariffing sit alongside the practical barriers of government bureaucracy and hindering legislation. With data pertaining to effectiveness (rather than potential) still required, this article argues that specialist problem-solving courts for women present a risky strategy, however seductive their promise.

Narrowing the Liberation Agenda: Women, Corporal Punishment, and Scandal in Namibia’s Struggle for Independence

Anti-colonial campaigns that use existing patriarchal norms to shame colonial regimes can narrow the liberation agenda for women. Based on court documents and oral histories conducted in Namibia, this article examines the corporal punishment of women in Ovamboland during the period of South African colonial occupation. Centred on the 1973 flogging of four female political activists in the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), the article places the public beating of women in the broader context of histories of spousal abuse in the region. In this way, the article argues that the public flogging of women in Ovamboland demonstrated the extent to which the liberation struggle empowered women to enter spaces previously defined as masculine, thus underscoring the potential for women’s liberation through the anti-colonial upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, in the scandal that emerged in the wake of the 1973 floggings, male activists and allies sought to use the floggings to reassert patriarchal values within the liberation movement. Given this contradiction, the article explores the limitations of scandal as a mechanism for liberation, arguing that scandal’s emphasis on achieving change through appeals to established norms and group consensus worked to narrow the liberation agenda away from the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial order and towards nationalist and statist projects that have preserved structures of colonial rule.

T73. Altered Reinforcement Learning From Reward and Punishment in Women With Anorexia Nervosa

Accumulating evidence suggests anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by decreased reward reinforcement learning. Increased punishment sensitivity is also implicated in AN, suggesting that altered learning from both reward and punishment may contribute to maladaptive decision-making and decreased motivation to eat. Since little is known about punishment-based learning in AN, we examined whether AN is associated with altered learning from positive and negative outcomes.

Abortion Bans, Doctors, and the Criminalization of Patients.

January 2018, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology issued a position statement opposing the punishment of women for self-induced abortion. To those unfamiliar with emerging trends in abortion in the United States and worldwide, the need for the declaration might not be apparent. Several studies suggest that self-induced abortion is on the rise in the United States. Simultaneously, prosecutions of pregnant women for behavior thought to harm the fetus are increasing. The ACOG statement responds to both trends by urging doctors to honor the integrity and confidentiality inherent in the doctor-patient relationship. Seen in the context of the larger battle over legal abortion, the statement has far broader implications. By acknowledging the role doctors play in enforcing pregnancy-related crimes, the ACOG position statement wisely anticipates the ways in which doctors will be implicated should access to legal abortion be further restricted. To understand the need for the ACOG directive, you must first understand that the story of what will happen if abortion becomes a crime in the United States is not to be found in history books; it is staring at us across our southern border.

Attitudes of Turkish Academics Regarding Violence Against Women in the Name of Honor.

Honor is an important concept that has a vital value in Turkey and affects many women's lives and even causes death. It is of utmost importance to know and scientifically demonstrate the value judgments of the academics that lead and pioneer the society in our country where honor culture is adopted. Therefore, in Turkey, where thousands of women are exposed to violence every year, 877 academics participated in this descriptive study to determine the attitudes of academics toward violence against women in the name of honor. The data were collected using "The Scale for Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women in the Name of Honor (SAVWNH)" in the form of electronic questionnaires through email addresses of the academics working at different faculties of the university in the official website of the university in September 1 to October 1, 2015. In our study, academics' "attitudes towards violence against women in the name of honor" were found low. That is, academics had negative attitudes toward the verbal or physical violence against women in the name of honor and opposed to the punishment of women for this reason. Nevertheless, the attitudes of those who were males; those who were not professors, associate professors, and assistant professors; those who were single; those who had lived in the district/village for a long time; those who had arranged marriages; those who used any kind of violence; and those who considered violence as a solution were found somewhat more conventional. These results showed that, for some academics, the traditional beliefs of the Turkish patriarchal society continued to be valid although they were included in university academic cultures. In fact, it is revealed here that social values, traditions, and customs are very effective and important on the formation of personality in socialization process.

The dairymaid and the prince: race, memory, and the story of Benjamin Banneker’s grandmother

ABSTRACTThe list of white Englishwomen, who formed intimate relationships with African men between 1680 and 1750 in Maryland, is impressive, more so because by 1664, Maryland laws made interracial marriages between white women and African men illegal. Court records exist documenting the punishment of women both for ‘fornicating’ with men of African descent and for having children by them, though how rigorously early colonial Maryland marriage laws were enforced remains unknown. What is known and what increasingly stringent marriage laws in Maryland suggest is that after 1664 white English women continued to choose black partners (both slave and free), regardless of serious social consequences that included social exclusion, lengthened indenture service, forced servitude of their children and of their sexual partners, and public physical punishment including whipping. By 1715, it became illegal in Maryland for black women to engage in intimate relationships with men. Mixed-race women, commonly called ‘mulatto’ in early records, found themselves with few choices in their sexual partners, since legally they were not allowed to engage in intimate relationships with either white or black men. One of these women, Molly Welsh, serves as a reminder of the unusual and unique position for women during the seventeenth century as servants, slave owners, property owners, and as partners in interracial relationships.

The art of Station Time: the Aboriginal experience of pastoralism in Australia

From the 1800s to the 1970s, Australian Aboriginal people were employed to work on cattle and sheep stations across the north of the country. While historians argue over whether the relationship of these labourers was a form of indenture or slavery, artists testify to the various experiences of this long period of Australian history. Ceremonial life adapted to the arrival of new animals and stations with new song-cycles that incorporated the dancing figures of cattle and station ‘bosses’. Art that survives from the period including incised shields and drawings evidence both ceremonial life and frontier violence. Today the ex-stockman Alan Griffiths memorializes Station Time with heroic paintings of rounding up cattle, while the younger artist Dale Harding commemorates the punishment of women forced into domestic service on stations. These artists testify to the ways that Aboriginal workers experienced pastoralism, the industry that drove the invasion and settlement of the greater part of Australia. On the one hand, these artworks testify to the violence and suffering endured by workers, while on the other, they celebrate the autonomy that Aboriginal people achieved through their excellence in labour. Indeed, as Aboriginal people moved into positions as head stockmen, they themselves become the bosses of non-indigenous workers. In this way, the art history of Station Time revises the history of Aboriginal Australia as one of indenture, slavery, suffering and violence, giving rise to a more nuanced history of the Aboriginal experience of pastoralism.

Against the “Prison/Psychiatric State”: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s

The article examines the grassroots organizing efforts of the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence, a broad-based alliance of prisoners’ rights, mental patients’ rights, and feminist groups in Greater Boston that opposed the expansion and medicalization of maximum-security units for women in Massachusetts’s prisons and state mental hospitals in the 1970s. The case of the coalition, it argues, illustrates how grassroots feminist opposition to incarceration produced an epistemology of “violence against women” that complicated and contested liberal feminist demands for more aggressive criminalization and law enforcement of sexual and domestic violence during this period. The coalition forged an understanding of institutional violence that linked the politics of mental health to the repressive punishment of women prisoners’ agency, and the expansion of medicalized incarceration to hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The article explores how activists’ critique of what they termed the “prison/ psychiatric state” engendered alternative conceptions of health, safety, and justice that, in turn, suggest the need for a more capacious understanding of opposition to gendered violence in the feminist 1970s.

Theorizing the intersectionality of victimization, criminalization, and punishment of women

Theorizing the intersectionality of victimization, criminalization, and punishment of women

Female sexuality in Hamlet and The Revenger's Tragedy

Revenge tragedy, a subdivision of Renaissance tragedy of blood, expresses a dominantly male perspective. In Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, not only Hamlet but Vindice, as the chief moral spokesman in each play, tells us more about his own needs to set right a world out of joint and epitomizes the aesthetic revenger. The fundamental motive for the tragic action in both plays is revenge according to the masculine code of male domination, yet the revenge motif would be yielded to a psychological development and a detailed study of female sexuality. Shakespeare and Tourneur make explicit the preoccupation with the uncontrollability of female sexuality in their works, for female erotic mobility threatens the power base of patriarchy. The table of incest, adultery, suspicion, hate, and violence explores the boundaries of human corruption in which desire and vengeance have become complicatedly entangled. Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy effectively demonstrate that women cannot function properly outside of the patriarchal structure, and reinforce the patriarchal notion that women cannot survive without men to govern them. Though each woman is presented as a sexual subject in both plays, questions of chastity, references to chastity, adultery, cuckoldry, incest, and misogyny are submerged in the overpowering issue on her life itself. In both plays each woman is the emotional focus in the play’s cultural construction of the guilt, so that she seems determined to take guilt upon herself. The women who cause the male characters’ anguish or break the rules of female conduct are verbally assaulted by men, or destroyed by the masculine code of the punishment of women. Despite a moral difference between Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy the woman’s suffering or death is as much an outcome of the tragic hero’s strategy of the actual vengeance, for his frustration or frenzy in the action of revenge is reflected in an attack on female sexuality as a kind of a defense against his vulnerability, specifically against the femininity.