The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
as a potential cause of female crime is rather remarkable (Klein, 1973). His later work, however, acknowledged that women were property of men, and he departed from social Darwinism to examine the complexity of the interaction between society and the individual (Klein 1973). The impact of “promiscuity” being attributed almost solely to girls and women has had a lasting impact on their criminalization, as will be seen later in this book.
Founder of psychoanalysis, Austrian Sigmund Freud, centered his explanations of female behavior around the belief that women are anatomically inferior to men—hence, Freud’s infamous “penis envy” approach to explaining female behavior. To Freud, the healthy woman experiences heterosexual sex as a receptor, where sexual pleasure consists of pain, while the sexually healthy man is heterosexual and aggressive and inflicts pain (Klein, 1973). Included in this analysis is a glorification of women’s duties as wives and mothers and, in turn, the view that medical treatment of deviant women involves “helping” them adjust to their “proper” traditional gender roles (Klein, 1973, p. 5). In addition to the obvious sexism, Freud’s theories are fraught with racism, classism, and heterosexism, whereby “only upper- and middle-class women could possibly enjoy lives as sheltered darlings” (Klein, 1973, p. 18).
Pollak’s (1950) book The Criminality of Women, published more than a half century after Lombroso and Ferrero’s work, is intricately linked with their approach. Like Thomas, Pollak believed both biological and sociological factors affect crime. But like Thomas, Lombroso and Ferrero, Pollak portrayed biology and physiology as the fundamental influences on female criminality, repeating many of their assumptions and prejudices (Smart, 1976). Pollak purported that there are no real gender differences in offending, but rather, relative to boys and men, girls and women “mask” (hide) their crimes. In addition, girls and women receive more chivalrous (lenient) treatment in the criminal legal system, making it appear that they are less criminal. His supporting evidence for girls and women’s “deceitful” nature is their ability to hide their menstruation and orgasms and their inactive roles during sexual intercourse. One wonders what happened to girls and women who did not hide that they were menstruating, especially in that era. Additionally, Pollak failed to consider that women’s inactive role during heterosexual sex (where it existed or exists) may be culturally, rather than biologically, determined. Further, women’s training in acquiescence to men, particularly during sex, could account for the fact that women were not hiding orgasms but rather were not experiencing them. Smart compares Pollak’s deceitful woman analysis to Eve’s deceit with Adam (in the Bible), where women are viewed as evil and cunning: “It is Pollak’s contention that women are the masterminds behind criminal organizations; that they are the instigators of crime rather than the perpetrators; that they can and in fact do manipulate men into committing offenses whilst remaining immune from arrest themselves” (Smart, 1976, p. 47).
The Legacies of the Positivist Theorists From the 1960s and 1970s
The enduring effects of the positivists can be viewed in the research on female criminality that was published in the 1960s and 1970s. Similar to Pollak, Konopka’s (1966) book, The Adolescent Girl in Conflict, and Vedder and Somerville’s (1970) The Delinquent Girl identify girls as criminal instigators. Konopka views girls’ crime as a result of emotional and sexuality problems, whereas Vedder and Sommerville view it as a result of girls’ inability to adjust to the “normal” female role (Klein, 1973). Most disquieting, Vedder and Sommerville attribute high rates of delinquency among African American girls to “their lack of ‘healthy’ feminine narcissism”—an explanation with racist overtones (Klein, 1973, p. 25). Both books ignore economic and social explanations at the expense of explaining female criminality through physiology and psychology. Following this logic, they see psychotherapy as the solution to girls’ delinquency and ignore the need to address the potentially criminogenic social and economic constraints in which many delinquent girls were (and still are) enmeshed. Finally, in their book Delinquency in Girls, Cowie, Cowie, and Slater (1968) rely on masculinity, femininity, and chromosomes to explain girls’ criminality. “In this perspective, the female offender is different physiologically and psychologically from the ‘normal’ girl,” in that the delinquent girl is too masculine and is rebelling against her femininity (Klein, 1973, p. 27).
Taken together, the positivists failed to see sexism in access to power, nor how this could intersect with race, class, and other characteristics. Thus, in the positivist school, even when some professed that social and economic factors could also play a role, women and girls’ criminal (and some other) behaviors were believed to be largely biologically determined and often tied to their sexuality. The complexity of their criminal behavior was reduced to a challenge of the traditional gender role—a role not rooted in nature (biology), but rather societally specified. The positivists assumed that the girl or woman who defied the prescribed gender role had a problem, and thus the positivists were blind to the possibility that there was a problem with gender prescribed roles, regardless of girls and women’s resources or situations, individually or collectively. They failed to recognize the racist and classist aspects of patriarchy whereby the prescribed societal gender roles often vary across race and class, with different (racist and classist) implications among women and girls (Rice, 1990). As we will see in the following three chapters, women and girls’ offending is often still interpreted through a positivist lens, and the responses to offending girls and women are too often practiced with vestiges of the traditional or positivist approach, fraught with sexism, racism, and classism, and sex-negativity, including a hypervigilance about women and girls’ sexuality.
Biosocial and Evolutionary (Psychological) Theories (BSETs)
One could argue that the primary legacy of the positivists from the 1990s are the researchers promoting the biosocial and evolutionary theories (BSETs). Since the 1990s, BSET theorists have gained increasing recognition for their claims that we cannot ignore biology in the commission of crimes or even blaming victims (at least in part, responsible for their victimizations). Biology as the “driver” is troublingly reminiscent of the early positivist theories. Notably, Saleh-Hanna (2017) compares the Global North’s current “biosocial evolutionary perspective with criminology’s positivism, witnessing how this alliance infects and colonizes mainstream conceptions of crime and justice” (p. 691).
A 2009 article, “What Biosocial Criminology Offers Criminology,” while making a strong plug for the theory, only very briefly addresses gender and then does so in sexist contexts. Wright and Boisvert (2009) claim that men are more violent than women because women’s mating preferences are for the biologically competitive men (who will provide for them and their future children). However, it is unclear, and indeed counterintuitive, why women would prefer violent men and why they would be better providers and fathers. A large BSET study using U.S. federal sentencing data found that both men and women committed less physical aggression during property offending if they were parents (as opposed to nonparents) (Boothroyd & Cross, 2016). Although the authors did not have access to the individuals’ testosterone levels, they concluded that parental status was related to physical aggression due to lowered testosterone levels because other studies have reported lower testosterone levels during parenthood (which seems like a bit of a scientific leap to make).
L. Ellis (2004, p. 144) believes that the Y-chromosome and testosterone predispose most males to criminality in the form of nonplayful competition and victimizing behaviors around the onset of puberty “as they start their reproductive careers,” although other research insists “there is no evidence of an increase in aggression coinciding with puberty” (Archer, 2009, p. 259). Another study “proving” the link between male sex hormones and crime was a study of college students’ self-reported criminality and “androgen-promoted” physical traits, such as body hair, body strength, and penis size; as predicted, the men who reported the largest penises, most body hair, and so on, reported the most violent criminality (L. Ellis, Das, & Buker, 2008). L. Ellis et al. (2008) do not seem concerned that the men “doing gender” as hypermasculinity might also exaggerate their strength, body hair, and penis sizes. Alternatively, Archer (2009) believes that “physical aggression occurs as an innate pattern of behavior [by age two in both sexes] that is subsequently inhibited by social learning, to different extents in boys