SOCIAL DIMENSIONS: GENDER AND CRIME

• WHY FOCUS ON GENDER?

  • Originally arose from a feminist critique of ‘malestream’ criminology: ‘Since the early 1970s, feminist perspectives have provided a critique of mainstream criminology based on two principle observations: women are generally invisible… and, when they do appear they are portrayed in ways that distort and marginalize their experiences’ (Shiner, 2005).
  • Need to acknowledge women as offenders, employees, and victims.
• WHY FOCUS ON GENDER

  • Historically, women have - at best been marginalised in criminology
  • Need to redress the balance.
  • Failure to theorise or engage in the empirical study of female offending.
  • Neglect of female victimisation - particularly male violence on women.
  • Over concentration on the incidence of male offending.
• “Criminology, mainstream and tributary, has almost nothing to say of interest or importance about women”. (Heidensohn, 1996: 111)
• IGNORING WOMEN/ ROMANTICISING MALE OFFENDING

  “The delinquent is the rogue male. His conduct may be viewed not only negatively... [but also]... positively... As the exploitation of modes of behaviour which are traditionally symbolic of untrammelled masculinity, which are renounced by middle-class culture because incompatible with its ends, but which are  not without a certain aura of glamour and romance.” 

  (Albert Cohen, Delinquent Boys, 1955: 140)
• KEY POINTS UNDERPINNING FEMINIST THEORY

  • Gender not a natural fact but a complex social, historical and cultural product
  • Gender and gender relations order social life and social institutions in fundamental ways
  • Gender relations and constructs of masculinity and femininity are based men’s superiority and social and political‐economic dominance over women
  • Systems of knowledge reflect men’s views of the natural  and social world
  • Women should be at the centre of intellectual inquiry, not peripheral, invisible, or appendages of men.
• CRITICAL ISSUES IN EXAMINING WOMEN'S OFFENDING

  • Media representations of women seem disproportionate to the amount of crime committed by women (Heidensohn, 2006)
  • Problems of ‘double deviance’ (Howe, 1994) and ‘double discrimination’ (Walklate, 2004):

  E.g. Carlen (1983) – Scottish sheriffs

  Eaton (1986) – lesbians and single mothers.
• CRITICAL ISSUES IN EXAMINING WOMENS OFFENDING

  • Recurring ‘moral panics’ about women offenders
  • E.g. ‘Mushrooming’ girl gangs in the 1990s; fears about ‘ladette’ culture & women/girls becoming ‘increasingly aggressive’ (Worrall, 2004; Alder & Worrall, 2004)
• WOMAN AS OFFENDERS: A BROAD OVERVIEW

  • Women commit less crime than men
  • E.g. In period 2012/13, women accounted for 15% of all arrests & 25% of all convictions.
  • When they do offend, it is usually less serious
  • Less likely to be ‘professional criminals’/recidivists (McIvor, 2004)
• WOMEN AS 'OFFENDERS'

  • BUT women are convicted more often for some offences
  • TV licence fee evasion (made up 64% of all women’s summary non-motoring offences in 2013, compared to less than 20% of men’s)
  • Shoplifting (accounted for 45% all women’s indictable offending, but only 22% of men’s)
  • Benefit fraud
• WOMEN IN PRISON

  • Women often overlooked in CJS provision – ‘too few to count’ (Heidensohn, 1991)
  • In prison system, women offenders’ ‘particular vulnerabilities’ (Corston, 2007) are routinely ignored
  • Only 12 female prisons in England & Wales
  • Imprisoned further from home
  • Less visits (relationship breakdown; impinges on pathways out of offending post-release)
  • Recent increases in women’s self-harm and self-inflicted death in prison
  • 11 women took their own lives between June 2015-2016 – an increase of 1,100 on previous year.  (Ministry of Justice, 2016)
• WOMEN AS VICTIMS

  Sexual violence in England & Wales:

  • Approximately 85,000 women are raped on average in England and Wales every year
  • Over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted each year
  • 1 in 5 women (aged 16-59) has experienced some form of sexual assault since the age  of 16. (Ministry of Justice, 2013)

  Sexual violence during war:

  • Growing body of data from the wars of the last decade ‘finally bringing to light “one of history’s great silences”: the sexual violation and torture of civilian women and girls during periods of armed conflict’ (Ward & Marsh, 2006)
• WOMEN AS VICTIMS

  Domestic/intimate partner violence [IPV]:

  • Between 1.1% and 4.9% of calls to the police are related to IPV
  • Police receive 570,000 calls per year in connection with domestic violence
  • 81% involve female victims
  • 8% male victims
  • 4% female victims and female perpetrators
  • 7% male victims and male perpetrators.

  (Stanko, 2001)
• WOMEN IN THE LEGAL FIELD

  • Proportion of female judges in UK (30%) among lowest in Europe (Europe-wide average = 51%) (Council of Europe, 2016)
  • In US elite law firms, there are significant disparities between the experiences of men and women lawyers at a number of levels. On average, women lawyers:
  • Bill fewer hours than men
  • Earn lower incomes than men (even after controlling for a number of factors, including fewer billed hours)
  • Are retained at lower rates
  • Are much less likely to advance to partnership 

  (Jaffe et al, 2016)
• MEN AS PERPETRATORS OF CRIME

  ‘The most significant fact about crime is that it is almost always committed by men’ (Newburn & Stanko, 1991)

  • In three-quarters (76%) of violent incidents reported to the CSEW, perpetrators were identified as male
  • Among children reporting violent victimisation, the perpetrator was most likely to be male (81% of incidents) and aged between 10 and 15 (78%) (CSEW, 2017)
  • There are approx. 80,000 men in prison across England and Wale, compared with 4,000 women
• MEN AS VICTIMS OF VIOLENT CRIME

  • Men more likely to be a victim of violent crime than women (2.2% of males reported this compared with 1.4% of females)
  • ‘stranger violence’ = the largest difference in victimisation between men and women (1.2% compared with 0.4%).
  • For young people (aged 10 to 15), the CSEW showed that boys were also more likely than girls to have experienced violent crime (7.3% compared with 4.2%).
• ROLE OF THEORIES OF MASCULINITIES IN EXPLAINING CRIME: 'JUST BOYS DOING BUSINESS?'

  • From at least 1950s onwards, studies of the cultural context of crime ‘stressed the importance of ‘toughness’, ‘excitement’, and an emphasis on male sexual prowess to the core values of those communities most usually associated with high crime rates’ (Newburn & Stanko, 1991).
• ROLE OF THEORIES OF MASCULINITIES IN EXPLAINING CRIME: 'JUST BOYS DOING BUSINESS?'

  • But much work on the theorisation of masculinity failed to explain why some men committed crime and not others, and also assumed all men exhibited the same ‘masculinity'
  • Newburn & Stanko therefore focused on ‘masculinities’ (plural), and tried to move away from biological imperatives or reductionist explanations of crime as ‘just boys doing business’ (i.e. ‘normal’ for men)
• SPECIFIC 'MASCULINITIES' CAN ALSO SHAPE THE CJS/ PENAL EXPERIENCE

  • ‘Prison is an ultramasculine world where nobody talks about masculinity’ (Sabo et al.,2001, cit. in Karp. 2010)
  • e.g. Kupers (2005) examined how particular forms of ‘toxic’ masculinities – specifically ‘the need to aggressively compete and dominate others’ -  is a particular problem in prison, as it often ‘foster[s] resistance’ to therapeutic support among incarcerated men.
  • This can increase susceptibility to serious mental health problems for men.
• HATE CRIME AGAINST THE GLOBAL TRANS COMMUNITY

  Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring project 

  • 2,343 reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people in 69 countries worldwide between 2008 and 2016.
  • 1,834 of these (78%) were reported in Central and South America (Brazil (938), Mexico (290), Colombia (115), Venezuela (111), and Honduras (89).
  • Also high = United States(160), Turkey(44) & Italy(32).
  • 64% of all murdered trans and gender-diverse people whose profession was known were sex workers. (TGEU, 2017)
• TRANSGENDER PEOPLE AS OFFENDERS

  • No clear statistics on how many transgender men and women, or non-binary individuals, go though the system each year.
  • However, clear issues when it comes to such individuals in the prison system, and much has been written about this in the United States
• TRANSGENDER PEOPLE AS OFFENDERS

  • ‘Transgender people, particularly transgender people of color, face elevated levels of negative interactions with law enforcement officers and the criminal justice system. This includes higher rates of police mistreatment, incarceration, and physical and sexual assault in jails and prisons’. (National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016). 
• UNITED STATES

  • Transgender women in all-male US prisons are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted. 58% report ‘some form of mistreatment’.
  • Due to discrimination in housing, education, employment, and family rejection, 21% of transgender women have spent time in jail or prison.
  • Non-binary respondents (71%) and transgender men (62%) more likely to report having ‘never’ or ‘only sometimes’ been treated with respect than trans women (51%) (National Center for Transgender Equality, 2011, 2016)
• UNITED KINDOM

  • Approx. 70 trans prisoners in April 2016
  • 33 of the 123 public and private prisons (27%) in England and Wales said that they had 1 or more transgender prisoners
  • Created PSI 07/2011 - Care and Management of Transsexual Prisoners, after 2 deaths in 2 months.
  • BUT ‘difficulty accommodating someone living in their acquired gender will not normally and on its own constitute grounds for transferring a prisoner to another establishment’. (Ministry of Justice, 2016)