Critical feminist theory cuts both ways. On the one hand, people are less likely to believe that women have committed a violent crime. On the other hand, when there is indisputable evidence that a woman has committed a violent crime, she is more likely to get a severe sentence than a man who has committed as similar crime. The most dramatic examples of this occur when parents kill their children. Just about every day in this country a father kills his child. While tragic, those crimes do not register on the national radar. In contrast, when a woman kills her child, it goes against that inherent connectedness to others that women are supposed to have. Therefore, there is a national uproar about those incidents. As a result, women who kill their children receive heavier penalties for their crimes, even though men are much more likely to kill their children.

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