The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
(FTA) and whether they had a new arrest while in the community—found PT applied to both genders but did so in varied ways. For women, childhood abuse indirectly increased both FTA and new arrest likelihoods through mental health and substance abuse issues, and physical child abuse was directly related to new arrests. For women, “childhood abuse led to a history of mental illness which contributed to substance abuse and later pretrial failure” (p. 128). Alternatively, for men, no distinct pathway emerged: “While childhood abuse, a history of mental illness, and a history of substance abuse are related, they are not working together to influence men’s pretrial failure” (p. 128).
PT research is increasingly documenting the importance of including mental illness (Gehring, 2018; Green et al., 2016; S. M. Lynch et al., 2014) and sexual identity (Belknap, Holsinger, et al., 2012), racism (Arnold, 1990; Richie, 1996, 2012; Sommers & Baskin, 1994), school experiences (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Bloom et al., 2003; Gaarder & Belknap, 2002), and the intersections of various combinations of these variables to understand risks for actual offending and the likelihood of being labeled an offender, including when one is actually solely a victim (i.e., wrongfully identified, labeled, or convicted as an offender).
Masculinity Theory (MT)
Flavin (2001) points out that ignoring the role of gender in criminological theories denies how gender not only shapes girls and women’s experiences and behaviors but how gender also impacts boys and men’s experiences and behavior. Similarly, Naffine (1996) contends that feminism, particularly using masculinity, is suitable to assess why offending is gendered, dominated by men and boys. Notably, Delgado and Stefancic (2017) define critical race masculinism as the application of CRFT “to the construction of male norms in society” (p. 171). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail, but MT also holds important potential for addressing the gendered aspects of fear of crime.
In his 1993 book, Masculinities and Crime, Messerschmidt stresses that masculinity is key to explaining criminality, which needs to be viewed through how gender, race, and class are interconnected and intersect with three gendered social structures: labor, power, and sexuality (J. Messerschmidt, 1999). Accounting for differences among males, Messerschmidt describes how middle-class white males can use power structures, such as a good education and respectable careers, to establish masculinity and provide for themselves and their families. Lower-class males and males of Color have fewer legitimate options, however, and thus are more likely to use crime and delinquency to prove masculinity. Accounting for gender differences, it is far more important for males than for females to show power or to need to prove masculinity. Messerschmidt effectively uses these variables of class, race, and sexuality to explain rape causality, the differential treatment of males and females who are sexually active, and participation in various crimes and offenses ranging from sexual harassment to robbery and homicide.
Messerschmidt’s book has been criticized not only for its portrayal of racial and socialist feminism (Daly, 1994; Hearn, 1994) but also for reinforcing racist stereotypes of African American men and boys, including neglecting middle-class Black men, and emphasizing “the history of white men in the cities, rather than the impact of slavery on black men or black men’s own histories” (Hearn, 1994, p. 634). Bottcher (2001) criticizes Messerschmidt for failing to understand what gender tells us about crime by focusing on how gender “is expressed or enacted in crime”: He does not “fully reveal the process by which crime becomes a resource for doing masculinity” (p. 896). Similarly, Laidler and Hunt (2001) question how we are to understand women and girls’ involvement in offending if crime is a mode for “doing” masculinity. Their extensive study found that “to be entirely feminine and respectable in their highly marginalized communities is unrealistic and dangerous” (p. 665). A study of the role of gender and masculinity in violent retaliations in urban street life found that male-on-male retaliations were the most common violent retaliations and frequently involved “doing masculinity” to regain respect, but that the second most common violent retaliation was female-on-female, typically in a dispute over a man (Mullins, Wright, & Jacobs, 2004). (Female-on-male was the least common type of street retaliation violence.)
E. Anderson’s (1999) classic “code of the street,” from his ethnography of the same name (Code of the Street) about predominantly African American Philadelphia neighborhoods, describes how aggressive and even violent retaliation against interpersonal attacks and insults are necessary to ensure one’s safety and maintain or gain respect, particularly for young Black men. It can also be described as how justice is meted out and regulated in impoverished urban areas. The code of the street has been found in numerous studies since the publication of Anderson’s book, including four books based on ethnographic studies of the lives of youths in different urban neighborhoods: Rios’s (2011) Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys in Oakland, CA; N. Jones’s (2010) Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence in Philadelphia, PA; Panfil’s (2017) The Gang’s All Queer in Columbus, OH; and J. Miller’s (2008) Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence in St. Louis, MO.
N. Jones (2010) describes girls’ use of violence ranging from those who are reluctant to fight and do so only when they feel they have to (“good girls”), to girls whom she describes as “girl fighters” or “ghetto,” who fight and win fights on a regular basis. Jones found two paths to becoming a “girl fighter.” The first is the girl who learns young, typically in elementary school that being a good fighter provides her with a status among peers and more power to subvert such powers of control as parents and teachers/principals. The second is the girl who, after elementary school, is taught by male family members how to protect herself against violence in order to be less vulnerable in violent situations. Jones (2010) concludes, “For these girls, adolescent fears of violating traditional expectations regarding what it means to be feminine are at times trumped by concerns for personal safety and survival” (p. 154). Stated another way, “They accept as a fact of life that ‘sometimes you got to fight’” (p. 154). Panfil’s (2017) book, an ethnography of gay young men in gangs, most of whom are of Color, draws on “the code of the street,” masculinity, and symbolic interactionism perspectives and through an intersectional gender, race, class, and sexuality lens. For example, the men identify “fagging out” (a reclaiming of this highly offensive label) as “acting stereotypically gay (flamboyant) in overt and aggressive ways, to show that flamboyant can also mean being fierce to defend oneself” (p. 189). The Gang’s All Queer provides rich data for understanding gender performance, drug-selling, sex work, violent crime, and gang members’ preference for legal (over illegal) work.
Summary
The Marxist or “new criminologists” of the early 1970s were just as guilty of omitting women and girls from their theories and analyses as the traditional theorists, despite the powerful potential of gender and sexual stratification in society to explain criminal behavior and official/systemic processing. Although critical legal studies (CritLS) emerged to explain how the laws were inherently oppressive to the poor and disenfranchized, it was dominated by white elite men and criticized by women and people of Color in leftist academia who became frustrated with its well-meaning but limited views. Subsequently, critical race theory (CRT) and then critical race feminist theory (CRFT) emerged and have been far more useful in applications to criminology research than have the Marxist and CCT theories’ applications, overall. The overlaps between the cycle of violence theory (CVT), life course theory (LCT), and pathways theory (PT) are summarized in Table 3.2, and it is not surprising that research increasingly combines two or all three of these theories in the same study, and sometimes with general strain theory (GST), social learning theory (SLT), and/or CRFT.
Masculinity theory (MT) also holds the potential to provide a better understanding of criminal behavior and the intersections of gender with race, class, sexuality, and so on. Many queer and/or of Color ethnographic criminologists have been highly effective in applying MT and E. Anderson’s (1999) “code of the street” approach to their work (E. Anderson, 1999; N. Jones, 2010, 2018; Panfil, 2017; Rios, 2011). It is clear that criminology needs to more consistently include adverse life events, including child maltreatment, to not only understand and theorize about offending