Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice

Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Sandra Walklate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317221401
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the relationship between gender and crime and explores both the gendered nature of crime alongside the gendered nature of criminal victimisation. Covering theory, policy and practice, this new edition has been fully revised to reflect the wider changes, development and influence of gendered thinking in these areas. It brings together a range of key issues, including:

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• Theories and concepts in feminist criminology,

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• Gender and victimisation,

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• Sexual and domestic violence,

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• Male dominance in the criminal justice system,

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• Gendered perspectives in law and criminal justice policy.

New to the third edition is increased coverage of gender and crime in international perspective, particularly within the global south, and emerging concepts of risk and security. This is essential reading for advanced courses on gender and crime, women and crime, and feminist criminology.

Part I
Theory

Chapter 1
Criminology, Victimology and Feminism

Introduction

Criminology and victimology are two areas of investigation characterised by their substantive topic of interest: crime in the case of the former, victims (of crime) in the case of the latter. As a consequence, each of these ‘disciplines’ is peopled by a wide range of other specialists (sociologists, psychologists, economists and so on), all of whom make claims about understanding and/or explaining crime and criminal victimisation. Thus criminology and victimology are highly contested, theoretically diverse and hotly debated areas of investigation. The interconnections among criminology, victimology and criminal justice policy afford an added piquancy to these debates. Such issues notwithstanding, criminology and victimology share much in common. These commonalities reflect what Gouldner (1973) once referred to as domain assumptions: assumptions embedded so deeply in their disciplinary view of the world that they frame how an area of investigation does its work. All (social) science disciplines operate with such assumptions.

Some of these assumptions have recently been called into question in relation to the influence and presence of what Connell (2007) has termed ‘Northern theorising’. This theorising, she argues, reflects the deployment of concepts and assumptions developed in the Northern hemisphere and applied throughout the rest of the world as though these concepts and methods are pertinent everywhere. In criminology this kind of theorising reflects domain assumptions around Occidentalism (Cain 2000), a deep attachment to positivism (Young 2011; see also Walklate (2008) on victimology), and presumptions around geography (Aas 2012). All of these features of the discipline have been the subject of critical scrutiny for the ways in which they limit the discipline’s imagination. So much so that latterly, Carrington et al. (2016) have called for the development of a ‘Southern criminology’ agenda whereby the voices of the South are interjected into the debates traditionally confined to Northern scholars (see also the interventions of de Sousa Santos 2014). Such critiques notwithstanding, the focus of this chapter is to explore the extent to which the domain assumptions of criminology and victimology in relation to gender frame how each of these areas of investigation thinks about crime, the criminal and the victim of crime.

In so doing, this chapter will offer an overview of the origins of each of these ‘disciplines’ as one way of providing some insight into what they each take for granted about gender. Put simply, it will consider the extent to which criminology and victimology persist in being ‘gender-blind’ and will examine the (various) feminist responses to this problem. As Dekeseredy (2016: 1) reminds us, ‘One thing that all feminist responses have in common is prioritizing the concept of gender’, though, as discussed in the Introduction to this book and developed in this chapter, they do not all agree on how this ‘prioritizing’ should be achieved, or indeed, once having prioritised it, how it might inform the investigative process and with what impact. A second feature shared by feminists is the desire to engage in rigorous empirical work. How this is done involves challenging, as Dekeseredy (2016; 2) also points out, ‘the twin bastilles of positivism and abstracted empiricism’. This chapter interrogates the role and presence of positivism, abstracted empiricism, and how they can frame the capacity of criminology and/or victimology to consider gender. The first question then is: How, if at all, might criminology and victimology be thought of as gender-blind?

In some ways this may be considered an odd place to start. After all, feminism from the late nineteenth century up until the present has been actively challenging presumptions around men and women, with some commentators writing contemporarily about a fourth wave of feminism as doing so. Moreover, it is now routinely possible to read policy documents of all kinds apparently informed by gender and to listen to criminal justice professionals discuss issues relating to gender as part of the focus of their work. Yet at the same time it remains possible to pick up criminology books discussing mainstream issues around crime, its causes and impact, and to find no reference to gender in the index. So the question arises, as implied in the introductory chapter to this book: What does this contemporary talk about gender amount to? Furthermore, to what extent have criminology and victimology genuinely re-examined their respective domain assumptions about this concept? In order to examine this it will be useful to say a little more about what is meant by gender-blindness or what Belknap (2015) calls ‘the invisible woman’.

Thinking about gender-blindness

Historically, criminology and victimology been blind to ‘differences’ of all kinds, like race, ethnicity and culture, alongside being imbued with the kind of Northern theorising criticised by Connell (2007). Yet while the capacity to ‘see’ race, ethnicity, sexuality and class is at least empirically increasingly evident (as discussed in Chapter 2), the question of gender arguably remains persistently problematic. This is in part a result of the knowledge base upon which each of these areas of investigation has been built. Thus, in order to get to the roots of gender-blindness, it is important to ask: How is it that criminologists and victimologists know things?

Asking this question brings to the surface a way of thinking which presumes that the world is a masculine world. Smith (1987: 74) expressed the problem in the following way:

The knower turns out after all not to be ‘abstract knower’ perching on an Archimedian point but a member of a definite social category occupying definite positions in the society.

Once it is recognised that the knower is always male, and that the position of this (male) knower informs what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts, the deep-rooted nature of gender-blindness becomes apparent. To make the point more clearly and reiterate the examination of sex and gender set up in the Introduction, the human world does not consist of androgynous subjects. It comprises males and females who are differently attributed with masculine and feminine qualities. Moreover, as was intimated in the Introduction and further considered here, while sex and gender are thought of in far more flexible terms contemporarily than they were several decades ago, it remains the case that using the term ‘human’ as if it captured the (potentially) diverse ways of thinking about the world implied by Smith above is problematic. The fundamental privileging and elision of male knowledge with human knowledge constitutes gender-blindness and throws into sharp focus what underpins the knowledge-production process. It is at this deep level that criminology and victimology share in gender-blindness. This has been one of the focal concerns of feminism, since it poses questions about whose knowledge, and what kind of knowledge, is privileged. These questions are central to understanding the domain assumptions of relevance here.

Gendering criminology

Criminology, like other social science disciplines, is depicted as a ‘modern’ discipline. Its nature and focus flowed from the historical period known in the Northern hemisphere as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment encouraged the belief in reason as opposed to religious belief as the basis on which to make decisions. This belief in the power of reason, specifically the reasoning capacities of men, centred the reasoned power of science and the scientific enterprise. Criminology and latterly victimology carry the hallmarks of these historical shifts and are found in these areas of investigation in the ongoing presence/dominance of positivism. While the precise nature of positivism as a way of knowing is open to debate, Taylor et al. in The New Criminology (1973) deduced that criminology’s commitment to this way of framing empirical knowledge equipped the discipline with three characteristics: the quantification of behaviour; a belief in objectivity; and a deterministic view of human behaviour (see also Roshier 1989). Taken together, these characteristics reflect a commitment to search for a universal explanation of crime, importantly a search that has travelled the globe, that would lend itself to appropriate policy intervention. This search, delineated by Young (2011) as a ‘nomothetic impulse’, has blighted much criminological endeavour. The roots of gender-blindness are buried here, since this nomothetic impulse conveys much about what there is to be known, by whom and about whom. In order to excavate this further it is of value to appreciate the prevailing scientific context in which those considered to be the Founding Fathers of criminology, later victimology, formulated their ideas.

Eagle Russett (1989: 63) states:

Women and savages, together with idiots, criminals and pathological monstrosities, were a constant source of anxiety to male intellectuals in the late nineteenth century.

According to Eagle Russett, this anxiety could be discerned in the four principles underpinning nineteenth-century ‘sexual science’ within which it is possible to trace the birth of early criminology. The principles of this science were, according to Eagle Russett, the law of biogenetics, the notion of the greater variability of the male of the species, the drive within the species to conserve energy, and the physiological division of labour. Of these four principles, the most influential was the law of biogenetics. This law stated: ‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny.’ In other words, every individual organism revisits the development of its species within its own developmental history. This principle of recapitulation was one of the unifying and organising principles of what was then referred to as criminal anthropology. It is here that the origins of the discipline are to be found, particularly in the seminal work of Ceasare Lombroso. Influenced by the Darwinian thinking associated with this emergent biogenetics, Lombroso drew from these ideas to inform his concept of atavism. Assuming that the process of recapitulation usually produced biologically normal individuals, Lombroso envisaged the criminal as a throwback, an atavistic degeneration, to an earlier biological ancestry. Indeed, more contemporaneously the tendency for criminals to mark themselves with tattoos, for example, led Lombroso to argue that this was evidence of their closer relationship with ‘savages’, a form of human deemed to be located at an earlier point of the human species development on the Darwinian evolutionary scale. The concept of atavism explained the abnormality, understood as criminality, in an individual. Not confined to explaining male criminality, Lombroso’s concept was also applied to females and children. Consequently the idea of the ‘atavistic criminal’ served a double helping of inadequacy to the female criminal.

To explicate this point more fully, in general terms Victorian science viewed women as a ‘developmental anomaly’ (Eagle Russett 1989: 74). The biogenetic laws presumed that the ultimate stage of evolutionary development was that reached by the white, Caucasian male. This resulted in certain presumptions about women; primarily that they suffered from arrested development. This rendered the criminal woman particularly problematic. Lombroso and Ferraro reached this conclusion in The Female Offender (1895). The female criminal was seen as a ‘monster’: she constituted both a throwback to an earlier species type and was arrested in her development as a member of her species. It is worth remembering that, influenced by the principles of positivism as a way of generating knowledge, Lombroso and Ferraro were searching for a universal explanation of crime. This search constituted the female criminal as problematic because of her presumed (inherent) species conservatism rather than her deviance per se. Thus, Brown (1990: 50) asserts:

[T]he important thing about Lombroso and Ferrero’s book is not biological determinism but the siting of women’s conformity as the object of criminological analysis.

Yet this siting of women’s conformity as the object of analysis was lost in much of the related work that followed, with some notable exceptions (see, inter alia, Wootton 1959; Heidensohn 1985; Cain 1989). However, of note here is that the principles of biogenetics deployed by Lombroso and Ferraro placed males and females (children and savages) on different points of the evolutionary scale. The greater development of the male (reflected in the greater variability in the male of any species) was likely to produce a greater variation in atavistic degeneration. Whereas the greater conservatism (less variability), alongside the arrested development of the female of the species, resulted in her degeneracy (in this case criminal behaviour) being all the more problematic when it occurred. Thus, the principle of the biogenetic law afforded Lombroso and Ferraro theoretical consistency for their explanation of the male and female criminal.

This search for a unifying explanation of criminal behaviour did not start and finish with the work of Lombroso and Ferraro specifically and the criminal anthropologists, or biological positivists as they are more conventionally referred to more broadly. It is a recurrent feature of criminological theorising. For example, the idea that female criminals are driven by their differently constructed nervous system (Thomas 1923) or their hormones (Dalton 1991) stands as testimony to the influence of this way of thinking. Biologism, as these approaches are sometimes referred to – in other words, explaining behaviour in terms of intrinsic biological make-up – was not confined solely to explaining the female criminal. Neither should it be forgotten that that which Hall-Williams (1982) labels the ‘chemistry of crime’ infiltrates a range of criminological work, from twin studies through to chromosome studies through to more contemporary neural imaging of the criminal brain. Many of these studies have focused either implicitly or explicitly on men, particularly on violent men. Of course, such a concern is entirely consonant with the deep-rooted view of male offenders derived from a presumption of the greater variability of the male of the species. Importantly when taken together this work denudes the offender of a sense of agency. Nonetheless, what is particularly significant about the influence of these nineteenth-century scientists, and their biologically rooted explanations of the differences between males and females, is the way in which these ideas permeated later work. This influence is particularly displayed in research which presumes that the differences between males and females are ‘natural’, biological and/or given, all of which are forms of gender-blindness.

As suggested above, the criminal anthropologists (biological positivists) laid a particular foundation for the ensuing development of criminological explanations. In drawing upon the ideas associated with nineteenth-century science, both in their commitment to positivism and to the biologically derived presumptions concerning the nature of sex differences, they provided a deep-rooted framework for thinking about and explaining crime. Moreover, the influence of nineteenth-century concepts of the evolutionary process and the way in which these were applied to explanations of sex differences has, arguably, made a significant contribution to cultural concepts of these same differences. In other words, they have framed the ways in which thinking about males and females, masculinity and femininity, have been constructed. While overt biological conc...