The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
(2010) findings in the context of the findings from ethnographic studies of young people of Color in disadvantaged neighborhoods, however, helps to inform on the generalized victimization and violence, racial profiling, and more extreme school interventions these young people face on a daily basis, what it takes to live in such raced and classed disenfranchisement, and what young people need to maintain respect (e.g., N. Jones, 2008; Rios, 2011).
Sexuality and Gender Identity
Schaffner (1999) stresses the need to examine girls’ delinquency by contextualizing their experiences as a means of understanding the decisions girls make. Specifically, she describes how the social, political, and economic sexualizing of female adolescence can result in girls’ harmful framings of their sexuality and role expectations, and she notes how some girls “solve” school, peer, and family problems through sex. Schaffner identifies four ways that the sexualization of girls’ lives can be manifested in delinquency or perceptions of delinquency: (1) girls who are oppositional, resistant, or angry about the stereotypically prescribed gender roles; (2) girls whose empty family lives (abandonment or neglect by parents) result in them ending up with (much) older boyfriends; (3) girls who get “caught” in a homophobic system for exploring lesbian desire; and (4) girls with sexual injury in the form of abuse that results in anger, running away, drug use, and so on.
As previously noted, sexual minority status (SMS) is the term most often used in scholarly studies to refer to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (abbreviated “trans”), queer, or intersex. Conover-Williams’s (2014) extensive study using Add Health data found that both SMS youths and males were overrepresented in self-reported nonviolent offending, and males disproportionately self-reported violent offending (vis-à-vis females), but the SMS was not always significant in the overall violent offending models. Research on sexual identity and crime is fairly recent and tends to find that SMS (lesbian, gay, bisexual) girls are more likely to be labeled delinquents or arrested than either SMS boys or non-SMS girls, and this is particularly true for SMS girls of Color (Belknap, Holsinger, et al., 2012; Conover-Williams, 2014; Himmelstein & Brückner, 2011). In the only study examining the impact of gender identity on offending, in a sample of 843 college women, Dolliver (2019) found that in comparison to women with feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated gender identities, the women with masculine identity (18% of the women) were more likely to engage in offending, in general (i.e., academic cheating, minor drug use, and vandalism), and aggression, specifically.
Panfil and Peterson (2015) argue that gang research always assumes “a heterosexual male subject as a starting and reference point…. However, gangs and their members are much more diverse than some might assume” (p. 208). But they also note that even male gang scholars publishing in the 1960s reported that some members (7% of African American and 14% of white) “had participated in ‘homosexuality’” (p. 218). Unfortunately, most of the research on gay and bisexual gang members is on boys, and very little is known about gay and bisexual female gang members. An exception is D. E. Johnson’s (2014) work on lesbians forming or becoming members of gangs “both preemptively and in retaliation to [homophobic] harassment” (p. 104). She also notes how “young lesbians of color have always navigated life in the borderlands” and stresses that their resistance to sexual harassment is viewed as an “assault” on the masculinity of the male harassers, whose threats pay “into the fear of the lesbian body[,] specifically the male lesbian body” (p. 107).
Serious Mental Illness (SMI)
In the past decade there has been a growing recognition of the strong overlap between offending and serious mental illness (SMI). In 2009, in a study of 822 women and men in five jails in New York and Maryland, Steadman, Osher, Robbins, and Case published their results that women (31.0%) were twice as likely as men (14.5%) to be SMI. A multisite study in the United States confirmed this with findings that 32% of the women met the criteria for SMI (S. M. Lynch et al., 2014). Furthermore, this study found that one quarter of women in the jails met the criteria for SMI, posttraumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorder (S. M. Lynch et al., 2014). Among these jailed women, many of the women met these three criteria for the previous 12 months, and SMI and trauma were associated with the onset of crime. Moreover, the women with SMI were more likely to have experienced trauma, to have run away from home as girls, to have had an earlier onset of substance use disorder, and to be repeat offenders (S. M. Lynch et al., 2014).
Notably, one recent study of girls, comparing the behavior problems, family and peer relations, and academic performance of serious (felony) violent offenders, serious nonviolent offenders, and nondelinquent girls, found no differences among the violent and nonviolent delinquent girls, but the nondelinquent girls reported far fewer of these problems (Borduin & Ronis, 2012). Similarly, a study of incarcerated women found their cumulative victimizations negatively affected their psychosocial functioning and not only increased their likelihood of committing violent crimes (including homicide) but also increased their risks of committing property crimes, drug offenses, and prostitution (DeHart, 2008). Taken together, these studies not only attest to the high rates of SMI among women offenders but also how SMI intersects with offending (and reoffending), substance use, and trauma.
Summary
Regardless of how crime data are collected (e.g., police, victimization surveys, self-report), most offenses are male-gender-related, and the more serious and violent the offense is, the more male-dominated it is (e.g., Hsieh & Schwartz, 2018; Roth & King, 2019; J. Schwartz et al., 2015). According to the most recent (2018) Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data, all but 4 of the 24 individual offenses are male-gender-related: Larceny-theft is approaching male-gender-related for combined ages (but male-gender-related among youths), embezzlement for combined ages is the only gender-neutral offense (it approached male-gender-related among youth), liquor law violations are approaching male-gender-related among youths (and was male-gender-related for combined ages), and prostitution/commercialized vice is the only female-gender-related offense, but this is only for combined ages and surprisingly found to be approaching male-gendered-related among youths.
This chapter addressed the complexities of determining whether offenses are gender-related and whether gender convergence is occurring, and if so, whether it is consistent with or antithetical to the women’s liberation/emancipation hypothesis (WLEH). Three steps were provided to help unpack analyses of gender–crime patterns, particularly gender convergence, emphasizing the significance of the type of data (e.g., police arrest, self-report victim, self-report offending) and accounting for economic and social changes as well as policy changes, particularly net-widening policies and practices. The most recent UCR data indicate a convergence in offending for almost every offense, yet they also indicate that almost every offense is still male-gender-related. As one longitudinal study concludes, in terms of offending, “crime—especially in its more serious and lucrative forms—largely remains a man’s world” (Steffensmeier & Schwartz, 2004, p. 106).
We will revisit net widening in the next chapter, on the processing of crimes in the criminal legal system (CLS). This chapter also took some specific offenses that are particularly useful to examine through a gendered lens. It was beyond the scope to cover all offenses, but ideally patterns are clear on how things such as intimate partner abuse impact many individuals in terms of both victimization and offending. The next chapter addresses the CLS responses to women and girl offenders. Recent research overwhelmingly confirms that where we see gender convergence, it is at least in part due to harsher responses to girls and women, and most profoundly, to victimized girls and women who are often further marginalized by their race, class, age, sexuality, nationality, and other factors.
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This illustration shows a triangle with three layers. The lowest layer is in the lightest tone and the text in this layer reads, gender-related; [greater than or equal to symbol] 20.0% gap. The middle layer is in a darker tone and the text in this layer reads, approaching gender-related; 10.1–19.9% gap. The upper layer is in the darkest tone and looks like a small triangle. The text in this layer reads,