gender and crime essay question

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Gender and Crime

Introduction, introductory works.

• General Overviews
• Historical Context
• Gender Differences in Crime
• Gendered Crime Pathways
• Gender and Desistance
• Gendered Crime Rates: Convergence or Divergence
• Early Feminist Critiques of Criminological Theory
• Criminological Theory and Gender
• Victimization
• Debates and Controversies

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Gender and Crime by Sally S. Simpson LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 14 December 2009 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396607-0052

In Western cultures, gender and crime, as a subject of intellectual curiosity, did not gain much attention until the late 1960s and the 1970s. Previously, female offenders were an object of curiosity, often understood and treated as an aberration to their sex. As a consequence of the women’s movement, female offenders and, in particular, female victims of male violence, moved front-and-center in the field of criminology. Feminists played a key role in this emergence, launching critical assessments of the field’s neglect, both in terms of empirical research and theoretical developments. These efforts produced a solid body of scholarship that led nonfeminist researchers to acknowledge that gender is a critical factor (some argue “the” critical variable) that distinguishes who participates in crime and who does not. Over time, scholarship shifted away from “women” as a category in favor of intersectional approaches (i.e., gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality), a focus on gender differences, and postmodern theorizing (e.g., discourse analysis, rejection of structure, sexed bodies). Nonetheless, debates about how best to study gender (positivism versus other epistemological approaches), whether males and females have distinct pathways into crime (including violence and the potential link between early victimization and the risk of later criminality and victimization), and the impact of crime prevention policies such as mandatory arrest on female victims remain unresolved.

The field of criminology and criminal justice, like that of other social science disciplines, has been dramatically affected by ideas and challenges brought about by the women’s movement. Scholars classify these influences in terms of “waves” linked to women’s suffrage (first wave), the social movements of the 1960s (second wave), and dissentions and discord within the movement itself (third wave). Distinct types of research are closely associated with these broad historical categories. Contemporary research, beginning in the second wave, emphasized women as research and theoretical subjects ( Heidensohn 1968 ) out of which two distinct conceptualizations emerged ( Daly and Maher 1998 ): real women (women offenders and victims as active agents in their own lives) and women of discourse (the ways in which women are constructed as discursive subjects—see Smart 1992 ). During the third wave, scholars adopted a more heterogeneous perspective by recognizing intersectional differences ( Burgess-Proctor 2006 ) and “gendered” relations ( Heimer and Kruttschnitt 2006 ).

Burgess-Proctor, Amanda. 2006. Intersections of race, class, gender, and crime: Future directions for feminist criminology. Feminist Criminology 1.1: 27–47.

DOI: 10.1177/1557085105282899

Reviews the emergence and importance of “multiracial” feminist criminology, especially with regard to theoretical, methodological, and praxis-related developments.

Daly, Kathleen, and Lisa Maher, eds. 1998. Criminology at the crossroads: Feminist readings in crime and justice . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Multifaceted compilation of feminist work organized around emergent themes, including discourse analysis, victimization and criminalization, masculinities and violence, and gender, politics, and justice. A helpful introductory chapter by Daly and Maher navigates the history of feminist criminology.

Heidensohn, Frances. 1968. The deviance of women: A critique and an enquiry. British Journal of Sociology 19.2: 160–175.

DOI: 10.2307/588692

In this classic article, Heidensohn assesses the absence of women from studies of deviance and challenges scholars to study female deviance “as an aspect of the female sex role and its relationship to the social structure.”

Heimer, Karen, and Candace Kruttschnitt, eds. 2006. Gender and crime: Patterns of victimization and offending . New York: New York Univ. Press.

A collection of original empirical and conceptual papers that address some of the current gaps in the gender and crime/victimization literature. Compares feminist constructs with more traditional criminological approaches and integrates criminological knowledge about victimization more generally into violence against women specifically. Examines the role of agency in offending, the link between offending and victimization, and the debate surrounding quantitative versus qualitative approaches to knowledge. Also includes cross-national comparisons. Appropriate for graduate students and academics.

Smart, Carol. 1992. The woman of legal discourse. Social and Legal Studies 1.1:29–44.

DOI: 10.1177/096466399200100103

Explores the ways in which law is gendered, how law is a gendering strategy, and the challenges faced by feminist socio-legal studies. Uses examples from Great Britain.

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6 Feminist Criminologies’ Contribution to Understandings of Sex, Gender, and Crime

Kerry Carrington is Professor of Law in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology.

Jodi Death is a Lecturer in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology.

• Published: 01 July 2014
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This essay provides an overview of the contribution of feminist criminologies to an intersectional analysis of sex, gender, and crime. Dozens of scholars have participated in these debates over the past four decades. This essay draws on interviews with ten internationally distinguished scholars to reflect upon the distinctive contributions of feminism to our knowledge about sex, gender, and crime. The essay concludes that feminist work within criminology continues to face a number of lingering challenges in a world where concerns about gender inequality are marginalized; where tensions around the best strategies for change remain contentious; where hard questions about the female capacity to commit violence are avoided; and where a backlash, antifeminist politics distorts the responsibility of feminism for female violence. This essay critically reviews these lingering challenges—locating feminist approaches at the center and not the periphery of advancing knowledge about gender, sex, and crime.

6.1. Introduction

Over the past few decades, feminist criminology has done much to advance our knowledge about the complex intersections among gender, sex, and crime. Early feminist critiques of criminology regarded the discipline’s main problem as its neglect of the female sex; the proposed remedy to the problem was to add “women” to the criminological knowledge bank. However, a subsequent wave of feminist work argued that this was no solution to the male-centric bias of criminology, a discipline that generalized theories of crime from observations of mostly male prisoners and offenders. In the 1990s feminist theorists called for knowledge about women, gender, and crime to be generated from outside what they saw as the hopelessly phallocentric discipline of criminology. In its turn, this approach too was subject to strident internal feminist critique and discredited as woman-centric and essentialist in its concepts and approach to knowledge. A theory based singularly on sex or gender, it was argued, was insufficient to explain the abundance of women of color, indigenous women, and women from impoverished backgrounds who were susceptible to policing, criminalization, and imprisonment. Only by incorporating the tapestry of interconnections among social position, race, ethnicity, location, and gender could the overrepresentation of particular groups of women in the criminal justice system be understood.

Dozens of scholars and activists have participated in these debates over the past four decades. This contribution to this handbook involves interviews with ten distinguished scholars whose contributions to this debate are recognized internationally. Through the commentary provided by these scholars, this essay examines some of the distinctive contributions of feminism to knowledge about sex, gender, and crime, as well as some of the challenges it continues to face in the field of criminology.

Feminist work is characterized by its focus on producing transformative research to improve or reform the criminal justice system; it has led to significant reforms and policies in the criminal justice field, especially in how the victim is treated by that system. This essay reviews a sample of work at the forefront of making these sustained and important contributions. More recently, and within the past decade especially, research on gender and crime has faced a political antifeminist backlash as rising rates of women and girls as perpetrators of crime are recorded internationally. Feminism has been mistakenly blamed by some for these seismic historical changes. Although contested by some, the recorded rise in criminal activity by girls and women provides a number of challenges to feminist criminology in understanding, deconstructing, and explaining why this has occurred. One view is that the narrowing of the gender gap for recorded crimes, especially those relating to interpersonal violence, is an artifact of new forms of policing of and social control over young women in particular. Another view is that young women may indeed have altered their cultural and social behavior and are becoming more violent. A middle option argues that the reasons for the recorded rises in female crime in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia are variable and uncertain but probably include a combination of cultural, social, behavioral, and policy responses. This unresolved debate is explored in the last section of the essay.

Feminist work within criminology continues to face a number of lingering challenges, most notably in relation to the struggle to maintain relevance in a world where concerns about gender inequality are marginalized and considered as historical relics, not contemporary issues; where there are ongoing tensions around the best strategies for change as well as difficulties in challenging distorted representations of female crime and violence; and where a backlash, antifeminist politics seeks to discredit explanations that draw a link between sex, gender, and crime. This essay critically reviews these lingering challenges—locating feminist approaches (of which there are many) at the center and not the periphery of advancing knowledge about gender, sex, and crime.

6.2. Methodology

This essay incorporates data gathered from ten internationally renowned scholars in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Australia. All have strong records of publication and research, held key editorial roles on world-leading criminology journals, received distinguished scholarly awards, and served as editors of prestigious international collections. Each scholar received an e-mail information sheet, consent form, and list of questions. Ten participants responded: Frances Heidensohn (London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom), a pioneer in the study of gender and crime in the 1960s and general editor of the British Journal of Sociology ; Sandra Walklate (Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom), editor of the Routledge Handbook on Victimology and arguably the world’s leading authority in this field; Loraine Gelsthorpe (Cambridge University, United Kingdom), past president of the British Society of Criminology, book review editor for the Howard Journal , and a member of the editorial board of Criminology and Criminal Justice ; Jo Phoenix (Durham University, United Kingdom), director of the Centre for Studies in Sex and Sexuality and book review editor for the British Journal of Criminology; Nicole Rafter (Northeastern University, United States), awarded the American Society of Criminology’s Sutherland Prize for her contribution to gender and justice debates; Molly Dragiewicz (University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada), recipient of the 2009 New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime and the 2012 Young Critical Criminology Scholar Award for her contributions to the study of violence against women; Nancy Wonders (Northern Arizona University, United States), past chair of the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime, a member of the editorial board of Feminist Criminology , and a leading author and activist; Ngaire Naffine (University of Adelaide, Australia), professor of law and author of several seminal texts on feminist theory, gender, criminology, and law; Kathy Daly (Griffith University, Australia), former president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology who, over the past twenty years, has undertaken important research into the intersections among gender, race, and justice both in Australian and US jurisdictions; and Judith Bessant (Queensland University of Technology, Australia), adjunct professor and author of a number of widely read articles and books on the sociology of youth and leading expert on youth justice in Australia. Participants were asked to reflect on a range of issues, including significant developments in feminist and critical criminology, key challenges for feminist criminology, and the highlights of their careers.

Interestingly, few respondents identified themselves as “feminist,” and most had qualms about the label, wanting to avoid the chasm of identity politics. Identity politics and knowledge construction have been thoroughly problematized by post-structuralist theory in particular, so this is hardly surprising. Most preferred their contributions be interpreted in relation to a wider field of scholarship, one that explores the connections among crime, victimization, gender, globalization, and justice and in which gender is an important but not a singular focus. Other participants actively identified with feminist approaches and linked this specifically to an “activist” aspect of their career. These scholars also stressed the links between injustices that affect women as victims or offenders and other harms and social injustices, such as poverty and gendered violence. Nine participants returned their answers to the research questions in writing, via e-mail, and one provided a voice recording that was later transcribed. Responses were thematically analyzed by both authors of this essay (independently and then collectively) and used to inform the analysis in this essay. The aim of this essay is to draw on these considered responses to reflect on the achievements and limitations of feminist criminologies in advancing understanding of sex, gender, and crime.

6.3. Gendering the Study of Crime and Deviance

In a now famous article, Heidensohn (1968 , p. 171) describes the study of gender, women, and deviance “as lonely uncharted seas of human behaviour.” Despite the ubiquitous sex differential apparent in recorded crime and imprisonment rates, she notes how entire bodies of research either persistently overlooked sex differences or marginalized women’s deviance as sexual deviance. These neglects of sex differences, Heidensohn (p. 171) muses, are “particularly interesting to the sociologist of sociology,” a premonition of what later became a preoccupation of feminist criminology: the gender-blindness of criminology. As Miller (2010 , p. 134) points out in her review of this 1968 article, this was one of the first calls for an examination of the “gendered sociology of knowledge.” In response to our survey, Heidensohn elaborates on the context in which she wrote that pioneering article:

When I published my first article in 1968 there was no recognition of gender issues, no attention paid to the sex crime ratio, very little research on women and girls, what there was—was stereotyped and marginal. Familial violence was largely ignored, its gendered nature not considered. All that has altered, thanks to the effects of feminism and the efforts of feminist scholars.

In 1976 Smart undertook the first book-length critique of theories of female crime and deviance. Her painstaking critique of the ideological misrepresentations of sex and gender embedded in biological, psychological, and sociological theories of crime and deviance spawned a new generation of researchers who were more attentive to, and critical of, the gender blindness of deviance theory in both sociology and criminology ( Heidensohn 1985 ). This first wave of feminist scholarship took issue with two main aspects of criminology: first, its omission of women and second, when it did attend to women, its misrepresentation of female offenders as doubly deviant ( Heidensohn 1968 ; Bertrand 1969 ; Klein 1973 ; Adler 1975 ). As Nicole Rafter sums up in response to our questions, “Women were ignored as victims, offenders, and prisoners. The challenge was sexism.” To correct this sexism and gender blindness, these pioneering feminist scholars argued for the inclusion of women in studies of crime and punishment ( Naffine 1987 ; Rafter 2000 ; Mason and Stubbs 2010 ). While this new research aided our understanding of the complexity and patterns of female crime and deviance, it also had notable limitations, as Nancy Wonders points out:

Importantly, early feminists urged a focus on women and girls, drawing attention to their invisibility within the field of criminology. This lead to important research on girls and women, but much of it tended to simply “add women and stir.”

Although they added sex to the analysis of crime and deviance, the early pioneering studies of girls, women, and crime left unchallenged the core assumptions and methodologies of mainstream criminology ( Naffine 1997 ). Feminist research had to do more than just add women to existing criminological frameworks if its objective was to create more sophisticated understandings about gender, sex, and crime. The feminist project had to broaden to include a critique of criminology’s state-based definitions of crime that excluded manifold socially invisible harms to women (such as rape in marriage and domestic violence), of criminology’s inherent phallocentricism in generalizing theories of crime based on observations of men, and of the positivist methodologies that produced this uncritical knowledge ( Allen 1989 ; Cain 1990 ; Young 1992 ; Caulfield and Wonders 1993 ; Green 1993 ; Heidensohn and Rafter 1995 ; Naffine 1997 ).

These 1990s feminist perspectives drew on a deeper skepticism about the phallocentricism engendered by disciplines such as history, the natural sciences, sociology, and criminology. This theoretically informed body of feminist scholarship rejected the positivist research methods and their claims of neutrality that dominated mainstream criminology. Epistemological debates about the relationship between politics and knowledge were and remain topics of dispute in feminist criminology. The main distinctions are drawn between empiricist, standpoint, and poststructuralist feminisms. Feminist empiricism aims to correct the masculine bias of the methodologies of the human sciences but accepts its claims that knowledge can be causal and universal. Standpoint feminist approaches reject outright traditional research methodologies as masculinist and aim to construct feminist ways of knowing through women’s experience ( Stanley and Wise 1983 ), while postmodern and poststructuralist feminisms reject the epistemological assumptions that truth can be impartial, ahistorical, singular, or universal. Consequently, there is no unified feminist perspective but rather a collage of theoretical and methodological influences that draw on sociology, sociolegal studies, cultural studies, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and neo-Marxism and that have inspired a body of disparate work on gender and crime ( Gelsthorpe 1989 ; Carrington 1994 ; Young 1996 ; Naffine 1997 ). Lorraine Gelsthorpe summarizes the twin intellectual aspirations of feminist criminology in the following way:

I think that there have been two major feminist projects. The first [is] a substantive project which has raised awareness of discrimination, awareness of the complexities of victimhood, and awareness of the distinctive needs of women offenders and victims. The second project is a methodological and epistemological one; here feminist contributions have been to question methodological traditions by focusing on methodological plurality and the importance of deconstructionist approaches.

Feminist standpoint perspectives rejected androcentric and male-centric production of knowledge and sought out methods that allowed alternate voices, women’s voices, to be heard. As such, the primary objectives of standpoint feminisms were to recognize women’s contributions to knowledge development and to facilitate further contributions ( Harding 1986 ). While feminist standpoint perspectives advanced understandings of crime and deviance beyond the gender-neutral or gender-blind boundaries of the criminological canon, they ran into their own conceptual difficulties. This particular feminist methodology, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, tended to universalize women as the “other,” conflate sex with gender, and essentialize understandings of the relationship between sex, gender, and crime ( Rice 1990 ). By solely focusing on the experiences of the female sex—whether as victims or offenders—the historical, cultural, and material diversity of women’s offending and victimization was overlooked ( Gelsthorpe 1989 ). It was too confidently assumed that commonalities shared among the female sex made it possible to analyze women as a singular unitary subject of history ( Allen 1990 ), despite their rich social diversity. That indigenous women, women of color, and women from visible ethnic minorities were persistently overrepresented in prison and before the courts as offenders in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia ( Carlen 1983 ; Carrington 1993 ; Rice 1990 ; Daly 1994 ) exposed the folly of feminist standpoint perspectives for fully comprehending the links between gender and crime and the need to develop more complex understandings of identity, for reasons Nancy Wonders explains:

Over the last decade, in particular, many feminists have argued that a focus on gender alone is overly reductionist. Identities intersect in complex ways and the salience of particular identity categories may change over time. As a result of this reality, feminists emphasize the need to consider gender AND race AND ethnicity AND social class AND nationality AND sexual orientation—and to be open to new and emerging identities and forces that shape gendered realities. Within criminology, this has been particularly important given the very different experiences with the justice system, for example, of poor Black women compared with rich white women.

More sophisticated analyses of gender, social identity, and crime meant, as Smart (1990 , p. 83) puts it that, “[f]‌eminism had to abandon its early frame-work and to start to look for other ways to think which did not subjugate other subjectivities.” Post-structuralist and deconstructionist frameworks emerged that did not insist on a singular set of relationships among gender, sex, deviance, or crime and instead sought to locate their analysis more concretely in the field of power relations. Sex, as a biological category, was no longer conflated with gender, a social construction. The aim of these particular feminist analyses was to deconstruct both the power relations underpinning the truth claims of law and the state’s criminal justice institutions and to expose how social constructions of gender and power shape experiences and responses to crime and deviance ( Smart 1990 ). A rich body of feminist scholarship on intra- and intersexed experiences took root drawing on social constructionist theories of gender and power ( Tauchert 2002 ). Nancy Wonders summarizes the profound significance of these concepts:

Perhaps the most significant contribution feminism has made to criminology and victimology is the addition of the concept of “gender” to our analytic tool kit....The concept of “gender” draws needed attention to broader forces of social stratification, arguing that “gender” is not a natural fact; instead, it is a social construction that exists primarily to privilege one group (men) over another (women).

Feminist criminologies were no longer restricted to the sex-specific “Woman Question.” Their objects of analysis varied widely and began to include social constructions of masculinities, femininities, sexualities, and crime ( Smart 1990 ; Wonders 1996 ; Young 1996 ; Phoenix 2001 ; Phoenix and Oerton 2005 ) and the interaction of sex with other social dimensions such as migration ( Segrave, Milivojevic, and Pickering 2009 ). As Ngaire Naffine highlights in response to our questions, feminist research on gender and crime became an intellectual space for

identifying both “the man question” and “the woman question”: revealing that the main theories of crime and associated research are really about male behaviour and so tend not to be scientifically rigorous, and that interesting and informative features of female behaviour, which have much to tell us about the nature of crime and conformity, have been neglected.

This broad eclectic approach spawned an array of studies on sexual difference, morality, law, language, and the positioning of the “other” ( Threadgold 1993 ; Wonders 2006 ; Hayes, Carpenter, and Dwyer 2011 ) and on intersections among gender, ethnicity, and criminalization ( Daly 1994 ; Maher 1997 ). Nevertheless, considerable challenges to understanding gender, sex, and crime persist, with much contemporary criminological research still just adding the variable sex as an antidote to historical wrongs.

6.4. Gendering the Victim

The past three decades have seen an unprecedented rise in interest in the victim. Feminist research on the invisibility of women’s victimization has required politicians and policymakers to rethink the role and status of the victim in the criminal justice system ( Bessant and Cook 1997 ; Zedner 2003 ; Rock 2005 ; Booth and Carrington 2007 ; Walklate 2007 a , 2007 b ). The feminist activist imperative to create not only awareness of but a better response to victims of gendered crime drove the research agenda of feminist victimology in particular. Molly Dragiewicz, who has undertaken a considerable body of primary research in Canada and the United States on violence against women, argues that

[o]‌ne of the most important contributions of feminist scholarship to criminology has been in the production of a large, interdisciplinary research literature on violence against women and other forms of gendered violence. This research has been important theoretically and empirically because it has expanded the scope of criminology to include some of the most prevalent and damaging forms of crime. Feminist work in this area has been an essential correction to earlier misogynist and victim blaming studies as well as the lack of attention to women and crime and the gendered nature of crime.

A constellation of quite distinct feminist intellectual legacies and political work began to emerge in the 1970s with the rise of radical feminism, the women’s refuge movement, and demands to make violence a public not a private matter ( Carmody and Carrington 2000 ). Significant and influential works include Dobash and Dobash’s (1979) study of family violence and Russell’s (1975) and Brownmiller’s (1975) provocative analyses of rape. These were followed by Stanko’s (1990) work on everyday violence and Walklate’s (2007 a , 2007 b ) major and ongoing contributions in the United Kingdom, and the work of scholars like DeKeseredy (2011) and Dragiewicz (2009) in Canada and the United States. This research challenged the hidden and privatized nature of violence against women ( Gelsthorpe and Morris 1990 ). Sandra Walklate, a pioneer in this field, describes the contribution of feminist research to understanding the link between gender and victimization as “without question widening the criminological gaze to problematize what counts as crime and where crime occurs.”

Reflecting on the changes observed over her distinguished career, Frances Heidensohn recalls, “It is a huge, radical, game changing move and it is hard now to recall those pre-feminist days.” The game that changed was not only in the academe, which expanded the legitimate concerns for the disciplines of criminology and victimology to include gendered crime, but also in state and community services provided to victims of gendered crime. Feminists as researchers and activists involved on a day-to-day basis with victim advocacy services, community-based movements, and campaigns tended to be impatient for social change, a key ingredient of feminist scholarship as Nancy Wonders highlights:

A common feminist contribution, regardless of perspective, has been the commitment to social change. Using the motto that “the personal is political,” feminists have been important advocates for social change. Change must happen, not just within formal institutions, such as the justice system, but also within our everyday lives...Feminist criminologists typically believe that research should be linked to changes in policy and practice.

Importantly, this meant that feminist criminology and activism tended to cut across the antistatism that characterizes other radical critiques of criminology ( Carrington and Hogg 2012 ). For feminist criminologists, major problems stemmed from the failure to police effectively male violence and not the repressive arm of the state. Hence a great deal of feminist scholarship and activity over the past several decades focused on making violence against women a public and not a private matter, insisting the state amend or implement laws and policies to assist the victims of violence while remaining critical of overreliance on state-based punishment of offenders ( Snider 1998 ; Carmody and Carrington 2000 ). This is, and remains, a rich and varied field of international scholarship that has given criminology (of all varieties) cause to rethink key domain assumptions about the discipline’s gender blindness and cultivated the development of victimology—a relatively new field for research and theorizing about gender and crime ( Booth and Carrington 2007 ).

6.5. Key Challenges

Thus far this essay has considered the contributions of feminist research to developing understanding of the links among gender, sex, and crime. However, key challenges remain. The most important challenges identified by our respondents include strategies for social change; the difficulty of remaining relevant in the face of ingrained widespread cultural skepticism about the power of gender to shape everyday reality—inflamed by a feminist backlash politics—and ongoing misrepresentations of female crime and violence in policy, culture, and media.

6.5.1. To Do or Not to Do: Tensions between Praxis and Theoreticism

Feminist criminologies have many roots: the historical traditions of intellectual radicalism inspired by the rise of the New Left and the counterculture; the Vietnam war moratorium; antiracist and anticolonial struggles; second-wave feminism; anti-institutional movements around prisons, psychiatry and other social control institutions; and the renaissance of Marxism and radical social theory during the 1960s and 1970s ( Cohen 1998 , p. 115). According to Frances Heidensohn, “Of all the critical perspectives whose roots lie in the cultural, political and socio-economic shifts of the 1960s, feminism has made the most enduring contribution to the study of crime and criminal justice.” However, one of the ongoing challenges for feminist and other radical critiques of criminology is whether to produce knowledge with the aim of improving the conditions of the present or to retreat to an abstract theoreticism replacing praxis with a faith in revolutionary transcendence. For Lorraine Gelsthorpe, this remains one of the key challenges for feminist criminology:

I think that one of the major challenges has been to achieve impact on policy and practice. Armchair feminist theorising has its uses in making us think, but this rather abandons women offenders/victims to their fate. What is needed is feminist praxis...I think I had always imagined feminist scholarship in criminology as a stepping stone to a new kind of humanist criminology but elements of feminist scholarship do not seem to have moved in that direction.

While praiseworthy of feminist achievements, Jo Phoenix is likewise wary about the ongoing contributions of feminism to understanding the complexity of the links between the gendering of crime and victimization and points to theoretical cul-de-sacs:

As far as I see it, feminist scholarship had a fantastic run of about 15 years where feminist scholars deconstructed almost anything that moved...Feminists also produced a rich seam of work that explored the lived realities connected with gender. My concern is that this work ultimately led to a bit of a cul de sac, some of which has been framed by the very nature of feminist scholarship and the fact that there are really only two concepts that have been developed under the heading “feminism”: patriarchy and gender (or rather one particular reading of the concept of gender). Of course, both of these concepts have, in turn, been subject to deconstruction and many of the “certainties” that framed their use have fallen, well, out of favour. The cul de sac then becomes how to make what was, in effect, a politic project relevant to the production of knowledge now whilst remaining robust in that task (i.e., not conflating the two).

The conceptual problem that plagued feminist intellectual work, simply put, is that feminist knowledge based on binary constructions of gender had a tendency to assign men to the category of perpetrator and women to perpetual victim status. So while essentializing discourses were productive in the political agenda of impacting policy, they presented a challenge to more sophisticated levels of knowledge production. This is especially so where constructions of gender have diversified significantly since early feminist challenges to criminology and criminal justice policy. Dualisms—based on the conflation of sex and gender—have provided plenty of ammunition for an antifeminist backlash politics ( Dragiewicz 2012 ).

6.5.2. Antifeminist Backlash and the Degendering of Crime and Violence

The backlash against feminist criminology has been a recurrent issue, which Molly Dragiewicz highlights in her response:

There has always been resistance to feminist knowledge, knowledge produced by female scholars, and scholars who place women at the centre of the inquiry. Similarly, there is resistance to looking critically at masculinity.

Antifeminist backlash tactics include blaming feminism for rises in female crime and girls’ violence ( Pasko and Chesney-Lind 2012 ), attacking the legitimacy of feminist research, decontextualizing gendered violence, reversing hard-won gains such as in family law, claiming that women are just as violent as men, and neutralizing the concept of gender by denying its significance for a rigorous analysis ( DeKeseredy 2011 , p. 44). Recognizing the impact of resistance to feminist knowledge on scholarship, Kathy Daly states:

I feel disappointed that there are not more, younger scholars coming along that want to get more engaged with feminist ideas. I find it shocking, it’s not disappointing, it’s shocking. I don’t understand how they can be doing a topic on domestic violence or on sexual violence and not be dealing with feminist work, but they are not....It’s very much like they’re working with a post-feminist mindset and they just don’t get it. So not only now do men not get it but younger women don’t get it either and that worries me a lot.

Yet it was feminists who challenged radical feminist orthodoxies that assumed women were always victims, while men were always their victimizers. The intellectual work of second-wave feminism created a space for greater attention to the diversity of women’s experiences of victimization and crime. These perspectives understood that gender is not universal or unidimensional and took into account how the social constructs of gender, class, culture, place, and sexuality have an impact on those experiences ( Daly and Maher 1998 ; Daly 2010 ). For example, the increasing complexity of knowledge is particularly evident in the study of domestic violence where there has been significant debate around constructions of women’s violence against men, the diverse forms domestic violence takes, and relevant policy implications ( Hoyle 2007 ; Mann 2008 ). Such work continues to demonstrate that women persist as victims of violence but utilize their agency in responding to, resisting, and surviving such violence in complex ways ( Johnson 2011 ; Maier and Bergen 2011 ). This research also continues the feminist tradition of taking seriously the translation of research and theory into policy ( Phillips 2006 ; Frieze 2008 ). And it challenges the antifeminist backlash by demonstrating the ongoing relevance of a gendered analysis to issues such as domestic violence and by critiquing an analysis that simplifies women’s use of violence through reductionist statements such as “women are as violent as men” ( DeKeseredy 2011 ).

There are significant critiques of crime victim surveys as imprecise instruments that neglect context when counting acts of violence in intimate relationships ( DeKeseredy 2011 ). Although feminist perspectives have made some headway in understanding these issues more comprehensively, there remains a focus on traditional, masculinist ways of generating data and constructing knowledge. As Sandra Walklate stresses in her response to our questions:

There is still much to do however in terms of conceptual understanding and development within victimology. Positivism and masculine conceptualization are deeply rooted here. This is largely reflected in the dominance (still) of the way in which criminal victimisation surveys and their findings are used. Surveys can be feminist informed and conceptually nuanced, but the drive towards surveys can also override meaning/understanding.

Judith Bessant also recognizes that limiting methodological frameworks remain a common issue, commenting, “Die-hard prejudices about women and girls (as submissive, victim, dependent) still haunt the academe.” The challenge for feminist scholars in this field is how to continue the legacy of making women and children visible as victims of gendered crime without confining them to a unidimensional victim or survivor status. Walklate’s (2011) current work on resilience is one such example. This research continues a tradition of challenging the gender-neutral construction of victims of crime while theorizing the social and individual factors that may enhance their resilience. The link with ways of knowing appears in the feminist focus on the inclusion of qualitative methods for gathering “rich data” that complement, and at times challenge, more abstract ways of understanding the gendered nature of violence ( O’Connor 2001 ).

6.5.3. Moral Panics and Gendered Shifts in Patterns of Female Crime and Violence

Frances Heidensohn replied the following to one of our questions: “The media still produce distorted stories about female offenders.” Several other respondents highlighted the misrepresentations of female crime and violence as an ongoing challenge for understanding the gendered patterns of crime and the historical shifts that document a significant narrowing of the gender gap over the past half century.

These rises are not simply the product of moral panics. While males still dominate crime statistics as offenders and prisoners, a body of international and national trend data points to consistent narrowing of the gender gap for officially reported crime and violence for countries like the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. For example, in the United States, crime trend data from 2000 to 2009 show nearly an 18 percent increase in arrests of females under the age of eighteen for assaults compared to just a 0.2 percent increase for similarly aged males ( United States Department of Justice 2010 ). There are significantly higher increases in arrests of young females for drug abuse violations and driving under the influence compared to males. Arrests of females under the age of eighteen for disorderly conduct increased by 8 percent while the arrests of males in this age group decreased by 8 percent. A study commissioned by the US Department of Justice in 1996 concluded unequivocally on its front cover that “female violent crime arrest rates have increased” ( Poe-Yamagata and Butts 1996 ). It also noted, “Violent Crime Index offences between 1989 and 1993 increased by 55% for females compared to 33% for males” (p. 8). For the offense of aggravated assault, the increase was double for girls compared to boys over the same time frame (p. 2).

In England and Wales, a major study of juvenile female offending found that “the number of young female offenders has risen by approximately 18% over the past five financial years,” and the number of violent offenses for juvenile females more than doubled over the same time frame ( Arnull and Eagle 2009 , pp. 40, 47). In Australia, boys still far outnumber girls among those drawn into the juvenile justice system, but from 1960 to 2007 the gender gap narrowed significantly from around one in thirteen to around one in four females to males ( Carrington and Pereira 2009 , p. 71). During this time frame there were dramatic increases in the proportion of young women appearing before the courts charged with violence-related offenses. There was also a decrease in the rate of young men appearing before the Children’s Courts, which accounts in part for the narrowing of the gender gap, from the 1980s through to the 1990s. However, the rise in officially recorded arrests for female violence has been most apparent in the past decade.

Recently the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics released an analysis of the increase in female offending based on police statistics of persons of interest for a ten-year period ending in June 2009. The study reports that the number of females who came to police attention over that period “increased by 15 per cent, whereas the number of males remained stable” ( Holmes 2010 , p. 2). For juvenile female offenders the increase was even larger. The number of female juvenile female offenders increased by 36 percent, compared to an 8 percent rise in male juvenile offenders over the same ten-year time-frame (p. 6). Among the top ten offenses for girls, shoplifting was the most common, accounting for 21 percent of offenses that attracted police attention. The second most common offense recorded by police was nondomestic violent assault, accounting for 11 percent of juvenile female offenders compared to 7 percent of male juvenile offenders ( Holmes 2010 , p. 6).

Explanations for the rising rates of female violence are underresearched, remain highly contentious, and raise a number of questions ( Alder and Worrall 2004 ; Carrington and Pereira 2009 ). There is ongoing debate about whether statistical increases in female offenses are generated by less serious offenses being brought into the system, by decreases in male offending, or because young women really are becoming more violent ( Muncer et al. 2001 ; Acoca 2004 ; Alder and Worrall 2004 ; Carrington 2006 ; Brown, Chesney-Lind, and Stein 2007 ; Arnull and Eagle 2009 ). Are these patterns the product of new forms of social control, scrutiny, and governance; changing methods of recording and reporting information; changes in styles of policing and policy; or changes in attitudes to female offending? Certainly the idea of the new female violent offender captivates the public imagination and is partly an effect of moral panics and attention-grabbing media shock jocks. One argument is that young women are not becoming more violent but rather social and regulatory responses to their violent behavior are changing, leading to a net-widening of offenses defined as violent ( Alder and Worrall 2004 ; Chesney-Lind and Shelden 2004 ; Steffensmeier et al. 2005 ).

The debate about the growth of girls’ crime and violence is evident in two contrasting papers published in Criminology . While official reports of crime indicate that the gender gap has narrowed over the past two decades, Steffensmeier and colleagues (2005) argue that this is due largely to several net-widening policy shifts that led to increases in the arrest of girls for behavior that in the past was either not policed or overlooked. In contrast, Lauritsen, Heimer, and Lynch (2009) argue that the narrowing of the gender gap is real and not an artifact. Their longitudinal analysis—covering the period from 1973 to 2005—compares patterns in National Crime Victimization Survey data, based on self-reports, with those in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) that are based on police arrest data. They find that “female-to-male offending rate ratios for aggravated assault, robbery, and simple assault have increased over time and that the narrowing of the gender gaps is very similar to patterns in UCR arrest data” (p. 361). While the narrowing of the gender gap, especially during the 1990s, was due largely to decreases in male offending rates, rather than large increases in female offending rates, they conclude that the issue is real and warrants “serious attention in future research” (p. 361).

Yet rising rates of female crime and violence have tended to be met with widespread skepticism from feminist scholars ( Alder and Worrall 2004 ; Chesney-Lind and Irwin 2008 ), who are understandably defensive given myths that simplistically blame equal opportunity, girl power, or the rise of feminism as the primary cause. The origins of this myth-making began in the 1970s with the controversial “sisters in crime” thesis that argued that as women became more equal to men, so would the frequency and character of women’s crime, violence, and aggression ( Adler 1975 ; Simon 1975 ). During the 1980s the argument was refined to suggest that young women were increasingly displaying overt aggression, partly because women’s liberation had allowed them greater economic and sexual freedom and dismantled some of the limitations and informal social controls on traditional sex roles ( Campbell 1981 ). In the 1990s scholars argued that young women were increasingly engaged in drug-related violence as a result of their increased involvement in the illicit drug economy ( Maher 1997 ). Feminists also maintained that girls would come to the attention of police in the same way as boys for their increased participation in delinquent youth subcultures ( McRobbie and Garber 1991 ).

Feminist scholars have been reluctant to “own the problem of women’s use of violence” ( Renzetti 1999 , p. 51), preferring to reposition female violence in a context of less serious social and relational aggression that occurs mostly in the context of girls negotiating peer networks ( Chesney-Lind and Irwin 2008 ). The statistical rises in girls’ violence are then attributed variously to shifts in methods of recording and policing and to net-widening policies that result in the criminalization of less serious forms of “disorder,” such as girls who occupy public space, express their sexuality, are boisterous or rebellious, or are defined as a threat to morality ( Alder and Worrall 2004 ; Pasko and Chesney-Lind 2012 ).

Consequently, female offenders who are actually willful participants in acts of violence, especially against other young women, tend to be absent from feminist analysis; instead, they are described as media beat-ups, social constructs, or victims of patriarchy and net-widening policies that criminalize girls’ behavior. We fully appreciate that girls’ and women’s choices to be violent are not just simple acts of agency but rather responses to their lived experiences of victimization, economic vulnerability, gender inequality, loss and dislocation, degradation, and social exclusion that create the contexts for their violence ( Wesely 2006 ). However, there is something troubling about rationalizing away all female violence as the product of vulnerability or victimization of some kind. Such conceptualizations of female violence appear to stem from a refusal to allow the female sex to appear morally or personally culpable ( Allen 1998 ). The problem is that violent women cut across social expectations as well as the idealism of feminism that constructs men only as having that capacity. Feminist research has had a tendency therefore to reposition the violent girl’s or woman’s actions within a context of diminished responsibility—as something to be explained as out of character for the female sex. This discourse of diminished responsibility denies the female violent offender agency by undermining her capacity to act dangerously, consciously and intentionally ( Allen 1998 ).

While it is likely that violent girls or women may have experienced violent victimization and social or economic disadvantages, the characterization of these sex-specific vulnerabilities eschews consideration of the possibility that violent men may also have experienced social or personal victimization, or that women can simultaneously be victims and victimizers ( Peter 2006 ). The denial of the existence of “real” female violent offenders is the product of outdated gender essentialism ( Allen 1998 ). What is still missing from the feminist analysis of sex, gender, and crime, as Renzetti (1999 , p. 51) argued over a decade ago, is a sophisticated feminist theory of female violence.

6.6. Conclusion

It is indisputable that men’s crime and violence far outweigh that for which women and girls are responsible. Bringing about awareness of this gendered context of crime and violence has historically been one of the key achievements of feminist criminologies, as Jo Pheonix notes: “[it] seems to be fact that it is not as possible to remain stubbornly gender blind anymore.” Hence, gendering the disciplines of criminology and victimology has been a considerable achievement for which feminist criminologies can be proud. However, feminist scholars in this field still have particular difficulty coming to grips with shifts in gendered patterns of crime, violence, and especially the narrowing of the gender gap evident in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. When considering women’s criminality and their use of violence in particular, what continues to emerge is a complex picture wherein women and girls are engaging in more criminal activities, but this increase is not universally consistent across types of crime or location. Reported instances of women’s use of violence, for example, have increased, but there remains a large gender gap when considered against men’s use of violence ( Schwartz, Steffensmeier, and Feldmeyer 2009 ). As such, feminist criminologies continue to be faced with the challenge of explaining increases in crime among women. Feminism was, and still is, wrongly scapegoated for these increases, a tendency fuelled by antifeminist backlash politics. Nevertheless, a central challenge for future feminist research on gender, sex, and violence is how to more convincingly explain the historical shifts in gendered patterns of crime, rather than simply deny, rationalize, or erase them.

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Handbook of the Sociology of Gender pp 449–457 Cite as

Gender, Race, and Crime: The Evolution of a Feminist Research Agenda

• Kenly Brown 5 &
• Nikki Jones 5  
• First Online: 06 June 2018

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2 Citations

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Over the last several decades, feminist scholars have advanced our understanding of the relationship between race, gender and crime. This body of work illustrates how gender inequality makes women more vulnerable to incarceration and punishment. Feminist criminologists who examine crime and victimization through the lens of intersectionality, especially women of color, have also worked to shift the scholarly focus from intersections of gender, race, and crime, which often focus on offending, to a consideration of the intersection of gender, race, and justice , which critically interrogates not only disparities in the distribution of justice, but also the ways that structural violence shapes the vulnerability of women of color to various forms of violence and punitive sanctions. New research and theorizations in this area, including Black feminist and intersectional research and writings, encourage us to move beyond gender binaries to examine the interrelationship between institutions (e.g., police, prisons, etc.) and gendered vulnerabilities to punishment and violence.

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Brown, K., Jones, N. (2018). Gender, Race, and Crime: The Evolution of a Feminist Research Agenda. In: Risman, B., Froyum, C., Scarborough, W. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Gender. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76333-0_32

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Criminology News

How does gender affect criminology and criminal justice?

Missouri State’s department reflects on their role instructing students about women in the field and about female offenders.

August 26, 2019 by Casey Struble

It’s the 99 th anniversary of the 19 th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. In a conversation with Paula Rector, criminology senior instructor, we look at the status of gender in her field.

Criminology has grown in both gender equality and opportunity. More women are entering the field, and how we prosecute and prevent crimes by and against women has changed.

“I haven’t walked into a gender-dominated class in a while.”

Rector specializes in gender and victimization

As the female population in criminology grows, Rector teaches “classes that touch students and what they’ve experienced.”

Rector was one of three criminology graduates at SMSU during her studies. During college, she laid the foundation for future social work she does now. Rector serves on the Greene County Domestic Violence Task Force and on the board of Harmony House, an emergency shelter for people escaping domestic violence.

Women may offend differently than men

The last decade has seen an 800% increase in conviction of female offenders. This outpaces the rate of growth of male offenders.

Two thirds of female offenders are nonviolent and have been involved in crimes such as theft, public disorder and drug offenses. Many of these offenders have histories of being victims themselves. Issues of self-esteem, sexual abuse and dislocation are common.

Rector specializes in studies and preventative measures that may be the key to lowering those rates of offensive.

For example, look at investigation work. By acknowledging trauma and having policies that address it, criminal justice professionals can more efficiently and ethically relate to victims.

More women are entering the field of criminology

The field of criminology at large is expanding for women.

The journal Feminist Criminology, looking at race, ethnicity and gender diversity, is soaring in its readership and ranked credibility. The American Society of Criminology, or ASC, Division on Women and Crime has the largest representations in the ASC.

“ Feminist Criminology [a research journal] provides a venue for articles that place women in the center of the research question, answering different questions than the mainstream approach of controlling for sex.” – Dr. Sheetal Ranjan, Chair of the Division on Women and Crime, American Society of Criminology

The Division on Women and Crime has hosted events with the World Society of Victimology, the International Sociological Association and Criminologists without Borders. This collaboration brought about the 63rd Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York City.

And while there are areas of low representation (such as police forces being only about 13-18% female), there’s room for optimism. All areas are growing in diversity, and the majority of first-year law students are female.

MSU’s diverse criminology growth is fostered because our relationships are fostered

Missouri State has a diverse student body that wants to study criminology.

When diverse students get the opportunity to explore and create knowledge, more demographics can be served by their knowledge.

Our criminology student body continues to grow and change. Rector notes this is due to the mentorship and relations the criminology department fosters. The department can share with you the amazing careers in criminology students can access.

Stay informed and be a part of progress by joining the ASC and DWC.

Contact senior instructor Paula Rector for class and volunteer opportunities in this dynamic area of criminology.