The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
many published studies are consistent with, and can be referred to as, PT testing (as done in this chapter), this theory or perspective was first labeled “pathways” in 1992 in Daly’s article “Women’s Pathways to Felony Court: Feminist Theories of Lawbreaking and Problems of Representation.” Daly analyzed women’s felony court presentence investigation reports (PSIs). Although there was considerable overlap in the women’s experiences (e.g., childhood abuse victimization, battering by an intimate partner, and alcohol/drug dependency), she identified five categories of offending women: street women, harmed and harming women, battered women, drug-connected women, and other. The street women were consistent with E. M. Miller’s (1986) definition in her classic ethnography Street Women; these are women who survived significant physical and psychological damage as a child and/or adult and ended up hustling on the street to “eke out a living” (Daly, 1992, p. 37). Harmed and harming women acted out from childhood abuse and neglect, were then labeled “problem children,” developed alcohol problems, and harmed others because they were angry from being “done wrong.” Battered women were in or just out of an intimate relationship with a very violent man, and this abuse is what brought them to court. Although there are battered women in the other categories, these women were in court for hurting or killing the man who abused them during a violent incident the man started. Daly’s drug-connected-women use or sell drugs often due to their relationships with male partners, their children, or their mothers. The battered and drug-connected women tend to have the least extensive (including no) criminal records. Finally, Daly’s other women had no or limited chemical dependency or abusive partner histories, and their crimes were economically motivated.
Gilfus (1993) interviewed 20 incarcerated women to understand their entries into street crime and found many of the women’s survival skills to avoid victimization were criminal; these “skills” included running away from home, using drugs, and prostituting themselves. The women were from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly the African American women. In addition to abuse and poverty, educational neglect and extremely troubling school experiences were prevalent in the women’s childhoods. The African American women reported significant racial violence in their childhoods, including a woman who, as a girl, had witnessed her uncle murdered by two white men. The women’s victimizations often led to offending, which often led to revictimization while living on the street, including rape, assault, and attempted murder. Many of the women also reported adulthood violent victimization perpetrated by their intimate male partners (domestic violence). Similarly, Comack (1996) interviewed 24 incarcerated women and, while not trying to excuse their offenses, highlighted how these women’s extreme adult and child physical and sexual abuses and subsequent offending cannot be removed from political, social, and economic analysis given their lives.
One of the most profound and classic PT studies is Richie’s (1996) research reported in Compelled to Crime, focusing on incarcerated women. In this work, Richie used life-history interviews to elicit women’s voices. Ultimately, she developed her theory of gender entrapment to understand the “contradictions and complications of the lives of the African American battered women who commit crimes” (p. 4). More specifically, gender entrapment involves understanding the connections between (1) violence against women in their intimate relationships, (2) culturally constructed gender-identity development, and (3) women’s participation in illegal activities. Two of the many important contributions of Richie’s research are her dispelling of myths about battered women regarding “why they stay” and her investigation into the impacts of race and racism and class and classism. For example, a major finding is that the African American battered women in her study appeared to have had a more privileged childhood family environment (e.g., felt loved and important) than the white battered women and the African American nonbattered women. Richie suggests this “heightened status” in their families of origin is what makes these women vulnerable to entrapment when they become involved with batterers: They become disappointed with their experiences in the public sphere where they encounter racism instead of a heightened status; thus, they refocus their goal on obtaining the perfect nuclear family. When the battering starts, they are optimistic about being able to “fix” things. In addition to identifying numerous ways that imprisoned women have been “trapped by the violence” in their intimate relationships as adults, she also reports their other pathways to crime,” including poverty and drug addiction.
The goal of J. W. Moore’s (1999) study of Latinx gang members and their families in East Los Angeles was to understand gang membership in terms of major themes relating to the family, including immigration and ethnicity, parental economic status, and the climate of the homes in which the gang members were raised. Ethnic identity was reported as confusing for many of these youths, as they were virtually all born in the United States yet were raised by their parents and treated by racist Whites as if they were Mexican. For both girls and boys, the racist experiences with Whites could lead to fights. The households in which they were raised were more reflective of “poverty” than of traditional extended Mexican families, and their parents typically had little formal education. A third of the male and two fifths of the female gang members reported seeing their fathers beat their mothers. When asked about their reaction to witnessing this, about half of the females and two thirds of the males reported “withdrawing in fear” (J. W. Moore, 1999, p. 167). Notably, the females were more likely than the males to try to intervene and stop their fathers’ abuse of their mothers or to fight their fathers themselves. About half of the boys and two thirds of the girls were clearly afraid of their fathers, often “with good reason” (p. 168). Girls were also more likely to be afraid of their mothers than were boys, and consistent with other research, girls tended to be far more restricted than their brothers by their parents. Although a few boys disclosed inappropriate sexual advances made to them as children, 29% of the girls reported incest, usually perpetrated by a father, but also by uncles, brothers, and grandfathers. Moore found that girls were more likely than boys to come from “troubled” families.
Patterns and Advancement of PT
Significantly, while it is important to hold parents and guardians of youth responsible and to expect them to be non-abusive/nonviolent, there is also a long history of holding mothers far more accountable than fathers for children’s failures (including delinquency) and well-being. Often such narratives are not only sexist but also fraught with racism and classism. A study of incarcerated mothers found white women were more likely than African American or Latina women to report “bad homes” and “poor parenting” as their pathways to prison (Enos, 2001). African American women reported their mothers and other caretakers “as doing the best they could” in parenting them, but “the temptations of the street were too much for them to resist”; and Latinas were more likely to attribute their pathways to “the lure of quick money through drug sales” (Enos, 2001, p. 57).
Numerous studies confirm PT and the disproportionately high rates of trauma, particularly sexual and physical abuse, experienced by incarcerated women and girls, rates far higher than those reported in the general population (e.g., Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Bloom, Owen, Rosenbaum, & Deschenes, 2003; Browne, 1987; Browne, Miller, & Maguin, 1999; Coker, Patel, Krishnaswami, & Schmidt, 1998; S. L. Cook, Smith, Tusher, & Raiford, 2005; Daly, 1992; DeHart, 2008; Gaarder & Belknap, 2002; Gehring, 2018; Girshick, 1999; Grella, Lovinger, & Warda, 2013; P. C. Johnson, 2003; C. E. Jordan, Clark, Pritchard, & Charnigo, 2012; H. Klein & Chao, 1995; Lake, 1993; McDaniels-Wilson & Belknap, 2008; S. L. Miller, 2005; Owen, 1998; Richie, 1996, 2012; Sharp & Marcus-Mendoza, 2001; Singer, Bussey, Song, & Lunghofer, 1995). Significantly, PT has also been confirmed for men and boys in the studies that included them (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Dembo, Williams, Wothke, Schmeidler, & Brown, 1992; K. A. Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990; R. D. Evans, Forsyth, & Gauthier, 2002; Gehring, 2018; C. E. Jordan et al., 2012). Belknap and Holsinger’s (2006) PT test of 444 incarcerated youth found that although the abuse variables were gendered (girls reported significantly more physical and sexual abuse than boys), boys’ abuse rates, including surviving sexual abuse, were still very high: Three fifths (59%) of girls disclosed having been sexually abused by at least one person and one fifth (19%) of boys disclosed this in the anonymous surveys. Given that boys are typically three quarters to four fifths of the youth we incarcerate, this is no small problem,