To think being female and white is what meant Lucy Letby could continue her crimes?

[sociallyanxiouspartone]

Let's face it, the reality is as women we are often disadvantaged but being a woman in this case is what meant Lucy went under the radar for so long and the fact she was white combined with this and looked like the 'girl next door' is what meant more babies lost their lives than needed to.

Just imagine, a male non white nurse was in the same position he would have been called out much much earlier

Let's hope this helps people think about how harmful stereotyping can actually be.

Sorry to all the families that lost babies in all of this 💐

I'm just going to leave this here:

Stereotype accuracy: One of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. (apa.org)

I think there’s something in what you say about her being white being a factor.

I think a white man would equally have got away with it- “oh he’s so lovely, lowering himself as a male to be a nurse and work with babies - with all his manly greatness meaning he should really be a dr” etc

I'm not confused at all. Next time perhaps type what you meant to say, rather than asking for evidence for an imaginary scenario - and you might then find you make a salient point.

But yes the hospital management very much need to be held to account.

Well just the fact that it was a male non-white consultant who continually raised the alarm but had his concerns dismissed tells us a lot

I think it is possible that someone from an ethnic minority, someone who moved to work in the NHS from abroad, or a male nurse, the alarm would have been raised earlier and taken more seriously

For competence, definitely. I don’t think people would have jumped to thinking they were murdering patients because they were foreigners.

It was her warm, kind, nice demeanour, plus refusal of superiors to investigate, not the fact she is a white woman. Read somewhere that a response from someone when told of suspicions was "no, it can't be NICE Lucy!"

That was how she got away with it - refusal to admit that something was going seriously wrong in their hospital on their watch, plus her apparent niceness. A male nurse or any person of colour behaving and presenting in exactly the same way would have met exactly the same response of "not nice Xxxxx!" in my opinion. I genuinely don't think there was any unconscious bias other than towards "niceness" and possibly youth.

If on the other hand she had been a grumpy cow who rubbed other staff up the wrong way, then perhaps it would have been seen as more likely and picked up quicker.

Lots of reasons, little accountability, understaffed, recruitment issues, lack of due diligence.

But agree she seems the least likely person ever to do such a thing.

The thing I struggle most with is her level of education to CARE for those kids

It's ironic that folk are saying she doesn't seem "the type", when - to my knowledge, and from the few studies available that investigated it - when a child is murdered in the developed world, the perpetrator is far more likely to be a woman (open to evidence to the contrary, of course - there seems very little in terms of proper academic study, because very few countries register the gender of the perpetrator as a data point).

What worked in her favour, though, is that:

a) women are seen by society as more nurturing/gentle (because stereotype)
b) medical professionals are seen by society as trusted-by-default (because we have to)
c) she used different methods each time
d) nobody wants to believe that somebody's killing newborns

As always, it's a combination of factors because the world's complicated. Trying to attribute it to one thing is a massive fallacy.

I totally disagree. Dr Shipman took decades to be charged with murder img a few hundred of hid patients.
This is nothing to do with sex, simply that people trust medics not to murder people

I agree with you fully! This is not a race thing, it's a believing that people wouldn't be so evil thing

If on the other hand she had been a grumpy cow who rubbed other staff up the wrong way, then perhaps it would have been seen as more likely and picked up quicker

Definitely this as well. Ultimately I think she was a master manipulator who used every tool at her disposal- demeanor, class, education, appearance etc and this unfortunately was met with a hospital administration who didn't want to admit there was a issue, much less open themselves up to any type of grievance claim from her giving her plenty of opportunity.

Being a female definitely. Her ethnicity, not so sure. I think people are naturally inclined to be suspicious of males around children. Women are presumed to be maternal and nurturing. I think there are examples of social services backing off when people are from non white backgrounds because of a fear of how this is perceived (not just Rotherham style grooming cases but the stats on how many white children in care vs other ethnic groups). So a non-white female nurse might not have had the complaints because people would be worried about accusations of racism. The consultants may have been sacked rather than just told to apologise in that situation.

I think we all subconsciously stereotype people we meet and categorise them. On first glance I think we also categorise people as safe or unsafe. LL on first glance would be seen as a safe person by most of us.

Hear hear!

There was another thread about shocked people were that someone like Lucy Letby could do that…

I just can’t find the shock. She looked like a grown woman to me and could have been a right arsehole!

Someone even described her as ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ based on her pictures. How on earth can you tell?

I think it doesn’t help that the newspapers were plastering smiley pictures of her out with mates or holding a baby in her Nurse’s uniform. It’s obviously that added shock of “look at this nice looking lady accused of doing horrible things” for clicks, but it made the whole case very sensational (and awful for the parents).

You just have to look at the constant media and comments on here and SM platforms who all say she doesn’t look like a serial killer.

Some people are also convinced there’s been a mistake and she isn’t to blame simply because she doesn’t look like a serial killer.

Of course race isn’t an issue as most serial killers are white but it’s a known fact that white men get away with a lot more than anyone else.

If you worked in a hospital and thought that someone had murdered a baby and reported it, you would immediately look into it and make sure it didn’t happen again.

Its extremely likely that the senior staff didn’t take the reports any further because they too felt she didn’t look like a serial killer.

Just imagine, a male non white nurse was in the same position he would have been called out much much earlier

Male, maybe.

On the race aspect though I disagree. I think it's just as likely that if LL was black and this was unsual in that area, the professional, white consultants would have 'trod carefully' before raising concerns, possibly leading to an even longer delay.

You left out a minor detail - whether the woman those children were killed by was their mother or not. Men are orders of magnitude more likely to kill an unrelated child than women are.

Women are on average higher in the personality trait of agreeableness than men are. That's where the 'stereotype' of women being more nurturing comes from. It's true. I suspect it only offends people who don't understand statistics.

I completely agree!!

I also read comments from an American site where the Americans were in utter shock that the smiling picture of her was posted showing her in an almost positive light, compared to in America where you would see their mugshot and them looking scruffy and not smiling.

Well nobody dreamed that all those men in Rotherham/Rochdale/other UK towns were grooming and raping vulnerable girls did they?

Oh......hang on

I haven't seen any evidence race comes into this in reality. I think some people are jumping on the race issue to signal they are sensitive to racism (not necessarily you OP, but definitely some others). It might be a race issue but it's not good enough to throw it around as a factor when that hasn't been proven.

I think LL does look particularly angelic in some of the photos used in the press and very much has the look of the girl next door. There is a staggering contrast between her appearance and her crimes, which are so extreme compared to what most women would commit. And there are black women I am sure I would also describe as being sweet and innocent looking if it was a black woman who had done this.