The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
and girls’ experiences as victims, offenders, and professionals in the criminal legal system (CLS) have been made invisible. Concepts such as sex, gender, feminism, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and carceral feminism were explored. In addition to including race and class along with gender in intersectional feminist criminology, sexuality is vital, as is viewing gender past a male–female binary phenomenon. This chapter discussed the importance of including LGBTQI+ individuals in assessing gender, feminism, and crime, and not assuming a monolithic experience for women, girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals, and the reasons why race, class, sexual and gender, and other variables must be considered when discussing and researching women and girls’ experiences and behaviors. Thus, in addition to Musto’s (2019) recommendation to trans gender in order to successfully transform feminist theory, research, and practice, she and many others (as cited in this chapter) stress the need to resist carceral feminism. A. P. Harris (2011) summarizes much of what this chapter attempted to introduce, that is, how an intersectional analysis is necessary and the past and current challenge of revamping our criminal legal system where justice is rarely achieved for victims or offenders:
Although destructive masculinity and its prominence in the criminal justice system have seemingly not changed much in the past decade, at least two new developments have taken place. First, scholars and activists committed to ending domestic violence and violence against sexual minorities have become increasingly disenchanted with the criminal justice system, and increasingly aware of its insidious role in the decimation of poor black and brown communities. Meanwhile, racial justice scholars have become increasingly aware of the toll that destructive masculinity takes on those communities. (p. 17)
Part II Women and Girls’ Offending
Chapter 2 Theories Part I: Positivist, Evolutionary, Strain, Differential Association, Social Control, and Women’s Emancipation Theories
Chapter 3 Theories Part II: Critical, Labeling, Cycle of Violence, Life Course, Pathways, and Masculinity Theories
Chapter 4 Accounting for Gender–Crime Patterns
Chapter 5 The Context of Women and Girls’ Offending for Specific Crimes
Chapter 6 Processing Women and Girls in the Criminal Legal System
Chapter 7 Incarcerating, Punishing, and “Treating” Offending Women and Girls
2 Theories Part I: Positivist, Evolutionary, Strain, Differential Association, Social Control, and Women’s Emancipation Theories
The academic field of criminology is implicitly colonizing … a discipline built upon penal tourism, applying a tour-bus approach to ideas on crime, casually sightseeing and piecing together snapshots of medical anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, and patriarchal conceptions of racial gender to produce an incomplete yet seemingly cohesive conception of “the criminal.”
—Saleh-Hanna (2017, pp. 698, 691)
Most criminological theories were constructed by men and about why (some) men and boys break the law (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2016; Leonard, 1982; Messerschmidt, 1993; Naffine, 1996). Criminology is not unique among academic disciplines in its historical exclusion of women and girls from most research questions (Fausto-Sterling, 1985; Allison Morris, 1987; Smart, 1976; Spender, 1981), but it is ironic given that sex/gender is one of the best predictors of criminality across time (Britton, 2000, p. 60) and age (Loeber & Farrington, 2000). There are two important implications of focusing solely on men and boys’ experiences: (1) The theories and findings are really theories and findings about boys and men’s crime, and (2) we must question the validity of any “general” theory if it does not also apply to girls/women (Allison Morris, 1987, p. 2).
Rasche (1975) offered three explanations for the historical neglect of women’s offending: (1) Women make up a small percentage of prisoners (approximately 7%, currently); (2) prison authorities are more likely to oppose research on women (than on men) prisoners; and (3) women are deemed insignificant compared to the more “deserving” offenders: men. Smart (1976) reported that when women offenders were acknowledged in criminology research, it was in terms of their deviations from the stereotypical aspects of women’s lives, such as maternal deprivation. Further, women law-breakers historically (and to some degree today) have been viewed as “abnormal” and as “worse” than male law-breakers—not only for breaking the law but also for stepping outside of prescribed gender roles of femininity and passivity.
Rasche’s (1975) and Smart’s (1976) charges still prevail to some extent, although there has been a huge increase in research on women prisoners and girl delinquents since 1975, particularly from a feminist perspective. This is due to three reasons. First, since 1980, the beginning of mass incarceration in the U.S., women’s increasing rate of incarceration even outpaced men’s (see Chapter 7 in this book). Second, the feminist movement influenced most scholars to acknowledge the significance of gender in studying crime and proposing theories. Finally, as stated previously, the feminist movement also resulted in far more women and feminist scholars studying crime.
It is impossible to discuss all theories that have been applied to offending and victimization, even in two chapters. The chapters are divided starting with some of the more sexist (and racist, classist, and heterosexist) theories, although not all of the theories in this chapter fall into this category, and some have been supported in feminist scholarship. The most sexist theories in this chapter are the positivist, evolutionary, and women’s emancipation theories. The ones that have omitted girls/women underpinnings but have been more carefully applied include strain, differential association, and social control theories.1 Finally, many of the studies reported in this and the following chapter use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data, often referred to as Add Health. These longitudinal data of nationally representative U.S. youths began in 1994 with the Wave I of questionnaires distributed to about 20,000 students in Grades 7 through 12, followed by Wave II in 1996 when almost 15,000 of the same individuals were interviewed, and to date, three more waves involving reinterviews. Wave IV, the most recently available at the time of writing this edition of this book, were when the research subjects were 24 to 32 years old.
1Some of these were or are called hypotheses instead of theories, but for simplicity, they will almost routinely be referred to as theories in this and the next chapter.
The Original and Positivist Studies
The original and positivist studies of female criminality were conducted between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century. The most prominent researchers included Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (1895/2004), W. I. Thomas (1923, 1967a, 1967b), Sigmund Freud (1933), and Otto Pollak (1950). These studies were grounded in the belief that biological determinism accounts for female criminality: Whereas men are rational, women are driven by their biological constitutions. Positivist approaches were informed by four main assumptions: (1) Individual characteristics, not society, are responsible for criminal behavior; (2) there is an identifiable biological nature inherent in all women; (3) offending women are “masculine,” which makes them incompetent as women and thus prone to break the law; and (4) the differences between male and female criminality are due to sex, not gender, differences. The classical theorists have been accused of viewing women as turning to crime because of their “perversion of or rebellion against their natural feminine roles” (Klein, 1973, p. 5).
In addition to the sexist nature of the classical studies, they also have been classist, racist, and heterosexist, focusing on wealthy, white, straight, married women as the “feminine” standard. These theorists’ works are reviewed