The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap

      5 The Context of Women and Girls’ Offending for Specific Crimes

      Findings from ethnographic studies of street crime reveal that women involved in street hustles are typically confined to low status, high risk, and low reward criminal opportunities.

      —Becker and McCorkel (2011, P. 83)

      The last chapter discussed the ways crime can be measured, the usefulness of various crime measures, and the assessment of gender patterns at one point in time and over time. This chapter reviews the existing research on the gendered nature of some specific offenses. It is important to remember not only the gendered differences in individuals’ lives that impact their offending (and responses to it by the criminal legal system, schools, families, and so on, which is addressed in Chapter 6) but also how intricately gender intersects with race/ethnicity, sexual identity, class, and other potentially stigmatizing and discriminatory factors (e.g., Conover-Williams, 2014; Panfil, 2017; Richie, 2012). For example, Conover-Williams’s (2014) extensive analysis of the Add Health data found that “sexual minority youth do indeed offend differently from their sexual majority peers, in terms of higher levels (prevalence and frequency) of offending than sexual majority youth; but, they largely participate in the same offenses as their peers, with a few exceptions” (p. 467). Although sexual minority status (SMS) youths “have similar levels of protective factors” as their sexual majority peers, similar to Belknap, Holsinger, and Little (2014), Conover-Williams found SMS youth have higher levels of risk factors for offending than their sexual majority peers, such as worse home and school experiences and higher levels of abuse victimization and homelessness.

      Drugs and Alcohol: Substance Use, Abuse, and Selling (SUAS)

      Substance (alcohol and drug) use, abuse, and selling (SUAS) research is complicated given that some circumstances of use are legal (e.g., alcohol use is legalized by age, marijuana is medically or even recreationally legalized in some states, prescription drugs can be legally and illegally sold and owned) and it can be difficult to distinguish between use, abuse, and addiction. SUAS has historically been conducted on men. Regardless of gender, this research has focused on the most economically and socially disenfranchised. As SUAS research has advanced in scope, including women/girls and the enfranchised, gendered (as well as class and race) distinctions have been found. Notably, “women are the fastest-growing segment of substance users in the United States” (Ait-Daoud et al., 2019, p. 699).

      At least eight gender differences in SUAS have been documented. First, research consistently finds SUAS is largely male-gender-related for alcohol (Bègue & Roché, 2009; C. A. Green, Freeborn, & Polen, 2001; Hussong, 2000; Kaufman, 2009; Pinhey & Wells, 2007; Svensson, 2003) and most drugs (Payne, 2009; Pinhey & Wells, 2007; Svensson, 2003). Given that the “magnitude of the gender gap, however, is said to vary by stance, life course position, and shifts in control” (Cutler, 2016, p. 1134), the rest of the gender differences to some degree account for these variations. As such, the second gender difference is the disproportionate (sexist) societal and legal disapproval of women and girls’ (relative to men and boys’) substance use, including when it is legal (Ait-Daoud et al., 2019; Haritavorn, 2019; Luthar & D’Avanzo, 1999; Maher & Curtis, 1992; Sterk, 1999). The third SUAS gendered distinction is that criminalizing the use of drugs/alcohol while pregnant is an example of a gender-specific law (addressed in the following chapter)—a law that criminalizes one gender/sex. Fourth, some SUAS research documents gender/sex differences in the body’s response to substances (e.g., gender differences in absorbing and metabolizing) (Ait-Daoud et al., 2019). This has had profound impacts on driving-under-the-influence of alcohol (DUI) laws, which will be noted in the following chapter. Fifth, women and girls are far more likely than men and boys to be in a position to have to exchange sex and companionship for drugs from a dealer, romantic partner, pimp, or other user, or do sex work to buy drugs (T. Cheng et al., 2019; Inciardi, Lockwood, & Pottieger, 1993; Inciardi, Pottieger, Forney, Chitwood, & McBride, 1991; Lichtenstein, 1997; Maher, Dunlap, Johnson, & Hamid, 1996; Ratner, 1993; N. Rodriguez & Griffin, 2005; Sterk, 1999). Sixth, relative to boys and men, girls and women are more likely to use drugs to “self-medicate” for depression, anger, or trauma (Erickson, Butters, McGillicuddy, & Hallgren, 2000; R. D. Evans, Forsyth, & Gauthier, 2002; Inciardi et al., 1993; Mason, Hitchings, & Spoth, 2007; P. Smith, 2019). Or, as poignantly stated by Haritavorn (2019) from her study on Thai injection drug users in the context of structural violence, “Hence, women using drugs have to find specific ways of dealing with their lives in a social world that constitutes the condition for their suffering” (p. 200). Seventh, women and girls are more likely than men and boys to report using drugs to lose weight (e.g., Cutler, 2016; Strauss & Falkin, 2001), which is also an indication of the social construction of gender in society. Eighth, in general, men and boys use a larger variety of drugs than do women and girls (e.g., Cutler, 2016). Many of these gendered findings will be described in more detail in the remainder of this SUAS section.

      Acquiring and Reasons for Trying and Using Substances

      Research identifies seven gender comparisons, discussed in detail later, regarding individuals’ reasons and means of initiation into and continued use of alcohol and drugs (most research is on drugs). These comparisons include some of the themes addressed in Table 5.1, such as entry into sex work or trading sex for drugs and self-medicating to cope with trauma, anger, and depression. Other gendered reasons for the use of, and pathways to, drugs include who initiates a person to use drugs, the process and impact of adultification, and the complicated “doing masculinity” in terms of SUAS. First, although some research finds no gender differences in being introduced to drugs, other research claims women and girls are more likely to be introduced to drugs by husbands and boyfriends, whereas men and boys are more likely to be introduced by male friends (R. D. Evans et al., 2002; Inciardi et al., 1993; Lichtenstein, 1997). Moreover, women’s substance abuse can be a result of being in subordinate relationships with abusive partners (Richie, 2006) or, for girls, relationships with older men (Lopez, 2017). But research also suggests that many women and girls are introduced to drugs by girlfriends (Cutler, 2016; Sterk, 1999) and parents (Lopez, 2017; Sterk, 1999). Second, there is some indication that