James Brown was probably not thinking about criminal justice, motherhood or the killing of children when he sang that it is a man’s world. He was speaking about the enormous influence men have historically had over society, while also acknowledging that none of that influence exists independently of women. The song became a celebration of women as much as it was a declaration about men. But watching the Lindsay Clancy trial unfold in 2026, that famous line takes on a rather uncomfortable meaning. If this is a man’s world, are men and women really judged by the same standards when they do something terrible?
That is not an easy question to ask in today’s culture because any conversation about differences between men and women quickly becomes a conversation about feminism, misogyny or gender politics. But sometimes the most uncomfortable questions are worth asking precisely because they do not fit neatly into the political arguments we have become accustomed to having.
Lindsay Clancy is accused of killing her three children, five year old Cora, three year old Dawson and eight month old Callan, in their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023. She survived an apparent suicide attempt after the killings and has since maintained a defence centred on severe mental illness, particularly postpartum psychosis. The prosecution, however, has argued that she deliberately killed her children and understood the nature and wrongfulness of what she was doing. After weeks of testimony and an enormous amount of evidence, the jury is now struggling to reach a unanimous verdict.
Whatever eventually happens inside that courtroom, there is something about the public reaction to the case that deserves examination.
Would we be talking about a man in exactly the same way?
Imagine, for a moment, that the circumstances were reversed and a father had killed his three young children under broadly similar circumstances. There would certainly be a discussion about his mental health if the evidence supported it, but would the national conversation have the same emotional character? Would we spend so much time examining whether he was overwhelmed by fatherhood, whether he had received enough emotional support, whether the healthcare system had failed him and whether his intentions should be understood through the circumstances surrounding his mental state?
Perhaps we would. But history and popular culture suggest that society has generally been much more comfortable describing violent men in terms of their actions, while women who commit extraordinary violence are often discussed through the circumstances that supposedly produced those actions.
A man who kills his children is very quickly described as a monster, a murderer or a danger to society. With a woman, the language can become more complicated. We want to know what happened to her. We want to know whether she was depressed, whether she was abused, whether she was mentally ill, whether she was overwhelmed and whether someone should have noticed the warning signs earlier.
There is nothing inherently wrong with asking these questions. In fact, they are important questions whenever mental illness may have played a role in a crime. The problem begins when understanding the circumstances surrounding a crime gradually becomes more important than acknowledging the crime itself.
Three children are dead in the Lindsay Clancy case. That should remain the starting point of any serious conversation about what happened.
The strange way we treat women who commit terrible acts
Society has spent generations fighting against the idea that women are weak, irrational or incapable of making serious decisions. Women have fought to be treated as adults, professionals, leaders, politicians, artists and people capable of making their own choices. That progress is important, but it also creates an uncomfortable question about what equality actually means when the choices being discussed are horrific.
If women are equal to men, then surely equality has to include responsibility as well as opportunity.
We cannot consistently argue that women deserve to be regarded as fully capable adults and then become uncomfortable with the consequences of that adulthood when a woman commits an appalling crime. A woman’s mental health deserves consideration, just as a man’s mental health does. A woman’s circumstances deserve examination, just as a man’s circumstances do. But the standard for determining responsibility should not become softer simply because the accused is a woman.
This is where the Clancy case becomes a particularly interesting cultural conversation. Her defence is not saying that three children did not die. It is asking the justice system to consider whether the state can hold her criminally responsible for what happened given the psychiatric condition she was allegedly experiencing at the time.
That is a legitimate legal question. But it is not the same thing as saying that what happened does not matter.
Mental illness cannot become a fashionable explanation for everything
One of the problems with modern conversations about mental health is that we have become much better at naming psychological problems without necessarily becoming better at understanding them.
Mental illness has become part of popular culture. We discuss depression, anxiety, trauma, ADHD, postpartum depression and other conditions more openly than previous generations did. That is a positive development. People who once suffered silently now have language with which to describe what they are experiencing.
But there is a danger when every terrible action becomes an opportunity to construct a psychological explanation for the person who committed it.
There is a difference between saying that mental illness can profoundly affect human behaviour and saying that mental illness automatically removes responsibility. The first statement is obviously true. The second requires evidence and, in a criminal case, a legal determination.
That distinction is especially important in the Clancy case because postpartum psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition, but the existence of such a condition does not automatically answer the question of criminal responsibility. That is precisely why psychiatric evidence, witness testimony and the legal definition of responsibility have become so important during the trial.
The jury has to determine where that line falls.
The public, however, should be careful about assuming that compassion requires us to stand on one side of that line before all the evidence has been properly considered.
The children should not disappear from the story
Perhaps the greatest problem with the way cases like this are discussed is that the perpetrator can gradually become more interesting than the victims.
Lindsay Clancy has become a subject of enormous public fascination because her story contains so many elements people find difficult to reconcile. She was a mother, a nurse and someone who had apparently been dealing with serious psychological problems. Those details create a complicated portrait of a person, and complicated portraits are naturally more interesting to the media than simple ones.
But Cora, Dawson and Callan do not have the luxury of complexity.
They were children who died.
The more we discuss Clancy’s psychiatric condition, her treatment, her marriage, her motherhood and the behaviour that preceded the killings, the more important it becomes to remember that these details are relevant because they may help explain a tragedy, not because they make the victims less important.
There is a tendency in modern media to turn every tragedy into a conversation about the person at the centre of it. Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes it is even unavoidable. But there should always be a line beyond which explanation begins to sound like justification.
Would a man receive the same sympathy?
This is the question I cannot completely dismiss when looking at the Clancy case.
Men are generally expected to accept responsibility for their actions. We tell boys from an early age that they must control themselves, provide for their families, protect the people around them and accept the consequences of their choices. When a man fails spectacularly at those expectations, society is often quick to condemn him.
Women are increasingly encouraged to talk about the pressures placed on them, and rightly so. Motherhood can be exhausting. Pregnancy can be physically demanding. Childbirth can be traumatic. Raising children can place enormous pressure on relationships, careers, finances and personal identity. Women should not have to pretend that these pressures do not exist.
But acknowledging those pressures cannot mean that women are fundamentally different from men when it comes to responsibility.
If a father killed three children because he was overwhelmed, we would still ask whether he should have sought help. We would still ask whether his family should have recognised warning signs. We would still ask whether the healthcare system failed him. But there would almost certainly be a much stronger instinct to say that whatever pressures he was experiencing, three children were murdered.
That same moral clarity should not disappear when the accused is a woman.
Equality is not supposed to be comfortable
There is an idea of equality that people like because it is comfortable. It says women should have the same opportunities as men, the same respect as men and the same freedom as men. Those are principles worth defending.
But genuine equality is less comfortable because it means applying the same moral seriousness to women when they do things society would condemn a man for doing.
It does not mean ignoring the unique pressures women face. It does not mean pretending that postpartum mental illness does not exist. It does not mean refusing to acknowledge failures in healthcare. And it certainly does not mean that every woman accused of a crime should automatically be treated more harshly.
It simply means that being a woman should not, by itself, change the moral value we attach to the lives of victims.
A dead child does not become less dead because the person accused of killing him or her is a mother.
James Brown’s man’s world has changed
James Brown’s famous song belongs to another era, but its central idea still speaks to the relationship between men and women. The world he described was heavily structured around male power, but he also understood that men could not exist independently of women.
More than half a century later, society is still trying to figure out what genuine equality looks like.
We have rightly challenged the old idea that women should be protected from the consequences of their ambitions because they are women. We have rightly challenged the idea that men should be emotionally silent because they are men. We have become more willing to talk about men’s mental health and women’s mental health.
But perhaps the next stage is learning to apply those ideas consistently.
A man can be mentally ill and still be responsible for a crime.
A woman can be mentally ill and still be responsible for a crime.
A man can be a victim.
A woman can be a victim.
A man can be a villain.
A woman can be a villain.
None of these realities diminishes the other.
The Lindsay Clancy case leaves us with an uncomfortable question
The jury will eventually have to decide the legal question of Lindsay Clancy’s responsibility. As of September 4, 2026, the jury remains deadlocked and has returned to continue deliberations. The defence has argued that one juror is preventing consensus, while the judge has declined to remove that juror and has instructed the panel to continue its deliberations.
Whatever verdict eventually comes from that courtroom, the cultural conversation surrounding the case should not become a competition between sympathy for a woman and anger toward a murderer. It should be possible to recognise that mental illness is real while also recognising that three children lost their lives.
And perhaps this is where the old James Brown lyric becomes more interesting than it first appears.
It may be a man’s world. It may also be a woman’s world. But if men and women are going to share that world as equals, equality cannot simply mean equal rights when the circumstances are favourable. It must also mean equal standards when the circumstances are horrifying.
We should be able to look at a woman accused of killing her children and ask whether she was mentally ill without immediately turning her into a symbol of female suffering. We should be able to condemn the killing without pretending psychiatric illness does not exist. Most importantly, we should be able to remember that the centre of this tragedy is not the controversy surrounding Lindsay Clancy.
It is three children who will never grow up.
That is the part of this story that should never get lost.
