Such meetings go down well with the justice system for reasons unclear to me. Surely they're likely to be less about repentance than ticking off the boxes in order to get a lesser prison sentence, or aim for a spot of cosy home detention, as fraudsters tend to do. So women are trustworthy, are they?
A mawkish approval system has grown up around victims who publicly pledge forgiveness towards the murder/rapist/thief/con artist/drunk driver who harmed them.
Along with this goes a statement about putting things behind you and moving on, in line with some self-help concept of denial disguised as Being Really Together.
Actually, who would want to face these people ever again? Some things - many things - are beyond forgiveness and it shouldn't be expected.
And what of Jo-Ann Quinn, who's just been sentenced to two-and-a-half years' jail for failing to provide her 82-year-old mother with the necessities of life? Maureen Quinn was found virtually melded into a sofa in her home that she didn't seem to have moved from for a very long time. She was malnourished and dehydrated, had maggot-infested leg ulcers and was wearing a nappy we'd rather not think about. Jo-Ann was her sole carer, keeping the rest of the family at bay. It has been said that she "struggled to empathise," which is a dainty way of putting it. Her mother has since died.
In the dock, as seen in media coverage, Jo-Ann reminded me of a naughty schoolgirl who wasn't going to give a headmistress the satisfaction of shame or repentance, only there was a lot more at stake here than smoking pot in the school shrubbery.
Are daughters really dutiful, then, and are women naturally kind?
I've also got it in for the two woman climbers who are currently defying what one calls "the Everest mafia," climbing Mt Everest without permission, in defiance of an effective shutdown there. I realise climbers are a breed apart, quite up to clambering over frozen bodies to reach their noble goals, but I was stunned by Sherpa Tensing son's claim this week that sherpas, the packhorses of Nepal's mountaineering, carry luxury tents and cappuccino makers up the mountain for affluent climbers.
The women's stand is less principled than they'd like us to think. Last month's deadly avalanche killed 16 sherpas preparing the well-worn pathway up Mt Everest, prompting a dispute between sherpas and the government of Nepal, which initially offered just $400 compensation for each man. Surely the decent thing was to cancel the climbing season out of respect for them and the families they left behind, but Cleo Weldich, thinking more of herself, nearly died of a cerebral haemorrhage on another Nepal climb, according to one report, and has it in for sherpas, who she claims abandoned her. Wealthy Chinese businesswoman Wang Jing sees no reason to change her plans either. She's on a kind of Around the World in Eighty Days mission, of which climbing Mt Everest is an integral part, and reportedly has a sherpa escort who she must have paid very persuasively.
Sherpas are typically paid little for carrying climbers' equipment at that altitude, and brushing those deaths aside - as other climbers reportedly plan to do - is a step too callous for me.
So women are respectful? Compassionate? Honest? Dutiful? Kind? Not really. But it's a pleasant fantasy to think we might be, on some distant planet perhaps.
Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author
