justice and the female brainA recent publication, The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine (Morgan Road) highlights the absurdity of a single, male jurisdiction in the Australian judicial system, to which women participate with proxy male status on the erroneous assumption that women's and men's minds are alike.
Dr Brizendine, a psychiatrist, suggests that the brain "profoundly affects how we conceptualize the world--whether we think a person is good or bad, if we like the weather today or it makes us unhappy, or whether we're inclined to take care of the day's business".
"If chemicals acting on the brain can create different realities, what happens when two brains have different structures? There's no question that their realities will be different. Brain damage, strokes, prefrontal lobotomies, and head injuries can change what's important to a person. They can even change one's personality from aggressive to meek or from kind to grumpy."
"But it's not as if we all start out with the same brain structure. Males' and females' brains are different by nature. Think about this. What if the communication centre is bigger in one brain than in the other? What if the emotional memory centre is bigger in one than in the other? What if one brain develops a greater ability to read cues in people than does the other? In this case, you would have a person whose reality dictated that communication, connection, emotional sensitivity, and responsiveness were the primary values. This person would prize these qualities above all others and be baffled by a person with a brain that didn't grasp the importance of these qualities. In essence, you would have someone with a female brain."
Dr Brizendine explains that "[w]e, meaning doctors and scientists, used to think that gender was culturally created for humans but not for animals. When I was in medical school in the 1970s and '80s, it had already been discovered that male and female animal brains started developing differently in utero, suggesting that impulses such as mating and bearing and rearing young are hardwired into the animal brain. But we were taught that for humans sex differences mostly came from how one's parents raised one as a boy or a girl. Now we know that's not completely true, and if we go back to where it all started, the picture becomes abundantly clear."
Dr Brizendine concludes that "[w]e are born with female-type brain circuits or male-type brain circuits".
"There's a huge individual variation, of course, but that we have a predisposition to behave in a certain way."
On this evidence, to pretend that women's and men's testimony in a court of law is comparable and equivalent, is a heinous denial of justice.
Women and men, collectively, perceive the world differently.
Only with women's and men's jurisdictions can any testimony, application or outcome in a court of law be reasonably considered reliable.
The delivery of justice may only be achieved with constitutional reform providing for women's and men's legislatures presided over by an executive of elders accompanied by courts of women's and men's jurisdiction.
Until then justice lies firmly in the hands of individual citizens despite a massively funded police and judicial regime.
19 April, 2007
2mf.net
