INTRODUCTION
Women are made of 'sugar and spice and everything nice.’ Well, this is how women have sometimes been perceived. Women are the homemakers, subservient and more passive; to think a woman could commit a violent crime was beyond what traditional criminologists could imagine. Historically, the field has excluded women from its studies and discourse. Theories developed by male criminologists like Cesare Lombroso and Edwin Sutherland were biased because they were formulated based on the research of males only. Though women and men typically commit different types of crimes and have different pathways to criminality, male dominated theories provided explanations of the criminal behavior of men, not women. It's not that these older theories can't be applied to female offending. However, a more tailored study of women may have produced different ways of explaining criminality for women.
MEANING AND SCOPE OF FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
Feminist criminology seeks to address this limitation by enhancing our understanding of both male and female offending as well as criminal justice system responses to their crimes. Feminist criminologists seek to place gender at the center of the discourse, bringing women’s ways of understanding the world into the scholarship on crime, criminality, and responses to crime. Feminist sociology is a conflict theory and theoretical perspective which observes gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within a social structure at large. Focuses include sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality. This focus on criminology attempts to explain criminal behaviour as it pertains to women. It includes a broad range of issues that women face within the criminal justice system and society. Women, according to research up to this point, do not commit crimes as frequently as men do, nor do they commit violent crimes in large numbers as their male counterparts. However, understanding their paths to offending is just as important. Legislators sometimes pass laws based on theoretical explanations of criminal behaviour, which is why theories tailored to both genders is important.
ORIGIN OF FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
The first Australian feminist criminological monograph, Female Crime: The Construction of Women in Criminology, articulated core concerns of the subfield. In particular, Naffine (1987) drew attention to how criminology’s preoccupation with the delinquent “rogue male” prompted a narrow understanding of women; that is, it mainly provided insight into women and their experiences vis-à-vis their relationships to men. For example, using data from the first national survey of crime victims in Australia, researchers were able to provide one of the first general pictures of women’s victimisation, explicitly inviting feminist scholars to conduct further and more nuanced analyses. Early feminist criminological scholarship thus made some important inroads: it moved aspects of women’s encounters with crime and violence into mainstream and public discourses, particularly in relation to victimisation.
A. GENDER EQUALITY ARGUMENT
According to these scholars, the role of gender had been largely ignored, other than noting that males committed more crime. Two important books were published in the early 1970s, derived from second-wave liberal feminism’s focus on gender equality: (1) Sisters in Crime and (2) Women and Crime. Although they focused on different aspects of the issue and reached somewhat different conclusions, both argued that the mid-20th-century women’s movement changed both female participation in crime and perceptions of female participation in crime. Indeed, the central thesis of these two works was that women would engage in more crime as a result of women’s liberation. Also, with the focus on equal treatment, the criminal justice response to female offending would become harsher and less “chivalrous.”
B. INFLUENCE OF CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY
With intellectual roots grounded in conflict and Marxist theory, these perspectives viewed crime as the result of oppression, especially gender, race, and class oppression. In the United States and much of the Western world, this was an era of rapid social change and political unrest. Existing ideologies and power structures were challenged, and social movements emerged, including the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. Feminist criminology began instead focusing on the ways in which a patriarchal society enabled the abuse of women. Radical feminism, with its focus on the consequences of patriarchy, contributed to the burgeoning body of feminist criminological scholarship.
C. RADICAL FEMINISM AND FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
Prior to the revision of policies and laws, rape victims were often blamed for their victimization. Two seminal works during the mid-1970s brought the victimization of women by men into the forefront of feminist criminology and were extremely influential in the development of feminist criminological thought. The contribution of radical feminism to the development of feminist criminology is important for two reasons. First, in collaboration with community activists, radical feminist scholars were able to effect social change. Violence against women became a matter of public concern. Shelters for battered women began emerging throughout the country, and rape laws were reformulated to protect the victims from undue scrutiny. Second, the feminist scholarship on rape and intimate violence impacted mainstream criminology. This has led to a revised understanding of the complexities of victimization. Statistics support the feminist position that women’s victimization is intrinsically and fundamentally different than that of men. For example, women are far more likely to be victimized by someone close to them. From the radical feminist perspective, this is because social institutions and norms facilitate the victimization of women.
FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS OF FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
The consequences of sexism and the unequal gender-based distribution of power have affected fundamental aspects of social roles and personal expectations at all levels. Daly and Chesney-Lind identified five key elements of feminist thought:
• Gender is not a natural fact but a complex social, historical, and cultural product that is related to, not simply derived from, biological sex differences and reproductive capacities.
• Gender and gender relations order social life and social institutions in fundamental ways.
• Gender relations and constructs of masculinity and femininity are not symmetrical but are based on an organizing principle of men's superiority and their social, political, and economic dominance over women.
• Systems of knowledge reflect men's views of the natural and social world; the production of knowledge is gendered.
• Women should be at the center, not the periphery, of intellectual inquiry; they should not be invisible or treated as appendages to men.
To address these issues, Chesney-Lind developed a feminist model for female delinquency. She argued that American society is patriarchal, meaning that it is dominated by males and that females are relegated to second-class status. This patriarchy subjects females to a powerless situation where they have an increased likelihood of victimization, both sexual and physical. This victimization and powerlessness in the context of a patriarchal society leads girls into delinquency, particularly as their coping mechanisms for their victimizations are criminalized. For example, running away from an abuser is a status offense, which is often punished by periods of incarceration for juvenile females. Indeed, it is a system that is aimed at subjecting females to further oppression by limiting their reactions to patriarchal authority (Chesney-Lind, 1989).
THEORIES OF FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
A. MAINSTREAM THEORIES AND FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
The “add women and stir” approach of mainstream criminology has meant that gender, if considered at all, has frequently been used only as a control variable. Although this has provided confirmation that males are indeed more criminal than females, virtually no information about female criminality can be garnered through this type of research. There are two unspoken assumptions inherent in this approach with which feminist criminologists take issue. First is the tacit assumption that, because males are far more likely than females to engage in criminal behavior, females are somehow unimportant to the field. Second, mainstream criminology assumes that males and females are alike and that what works to explain male criminality will work equally well to explain female criminality.
B. FEMINIST PATHWAYS THEORIES
Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in feminist criminological theory and research has come by means of the feminist pathways model. In the effort to demonstrate how female crime is inextricably linked to the life experiences of women and girls, this theory focuses on the ways in which women’s place in society leads them into criminal lifestyles. Meda Chesney-Lind has laid out how childhood abuse and a patriarchal juvenile justice system shape the opportunities of girls, ultimately forcing them into criminal lifestyles. She argues that, unlike boys, girls’ initial encounters with the juvenile justice system are largely the result of status offences, such as running away or engaging in sexual activity. Instead of intervening in the lives of abused girls, society has reacted with a double standard that labels these girls as incorrigible and/or immoral. Feminist pathways theory seeks to illuminate the connections between the abuse and exploitation of young females and their subsequent offending. It is arguably the dominant approach in contemporary feminist criminology.
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
There are areas in criminology into which feminists have only marginally ventured or in which their contributions have been of little consequence. In their review of feminist criminology, Daly and Chesney-Lind discuss the problems that feminists have had building and developing theories of female crime. It is not coincidental that the areas targeted for further research in this paper (e.g., race and crime, elite crime, and deterrence) all focus on this problematic area. Until we can better deal with the empirical complexities of criminal offending, it will be too easy for our critics to dismiss feminist contributions to the study of crime as facile, rhetorical, and/or atheoretical.
👍👍
ReplyDelete