Routledge International Handbook of Crime and Gender Studies

Claire Renzetti, Susan Miller, Angela Gover, Claire M. Renzetti, Susan L. Miller, Angela R. Gover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415782166
• eBook ISBN: 9781136836855
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminological research has historically been based on the study of men, boys and crime. As a result, the criminal justice system's development of policies, programs, and treatment regimes was based on the male offender. It was not until the 1970s that some criminologists began to draw attention to the neglect of gender in the study of crime, but today, the study of gender and crime is burgeoning within criminology and includes a vast literature.

The Routledge International Handbook of Crime and Gender Studies is a collection of original, cutting-edge, multidisciplinary essays which provide a thorough overview of the history and development of research on gender and crime, covering topics based around:

• theoretical and methodological approaches
• gender and victimization
• gender and offending
• gendered work in the criminal justice system
• future directions in gender and crime research.

Alongside these essays are boxes which highlight particularly innovative ideas or controversial topics – such as cybercrime, restorative justice, campus crime, and media depictions. A second set of boxes features leading gender and crime researchers who reflect on what sparked their interest in the subject.

This engaging and thoughtful collection will be invaluable for students and scholars of criminology, sociology, psychology, public health, social work, cultural studies, media studies, economics and political science.

Section III Gender and offending

DOI: 10.4324/9780203832516-10

Introduction

As we, and many contributors to this volume, have already pointed out, traditionally the study of criminal behavior focused almost exclusively on offending by men and boys. The longstanding assumption was that women and girls just don’t engage in crime often enough to make their offending worth studying and, even when they do offend, their behavior is not very serious – or interesting. One exception to this “rule” was prostitution, which was viewed by criminologists – and others – as “the female crime.” But as Jody Raphael and Mary C. Ellison show in their chapter, which opens this section of the Handbook, a more accurate conceptualization of prostitution and other types of sex work is that they are gendered crimes. Consider, for example, the fact that while both the sex worker and her “client” are breaking the law, it is nearly always only the sex worker who is arrested and prosecuted. Many sex workers are not self-employed, but rather work for a male pimp, who also usually escapes arrest and prosecution. This scenario plays out repeatedly, even when the sex workers are under the age of 18, which makes their sale a violation of human trafficking laws. Raphael and Ellison’s chapter provides ample empirical evidence that refutes many of the myths about sex work and sex workers, and that highlights not only the gendered nature of the sex trade, but also the importance of examining the interplay of social class, race and ethnicity, place and culture in order to understand how sex workers are treated by criminal justice systems.

Denise Paquette Boots and Jennifer Wareham discuss various types of violent crime. They begin by tracing the growing attention given by criminologists and the media to female perpetrators of violence and discuss some of the explanations offered for observed gender differences in violent offending. They document these gender differences for many different violent crimes, including robbery, serial murder, gang violence, and terrorism. Ultimately their analysis returns us to a theme raised by other contributors: the gendered relationship between victimization and criminal offending.

In the 1970s, reports began to claim that women’s and girls’ involvement in violent crime was outpacing that of men and boys, generating concern among both criminologists and the public. Careful analyses in the intervening years have shown that much of the alarm is unfounded. Nevertheless, female involvement in property crime has increased substantially, even though, as Tammy L. Anderson and Mary Dodge report in their chapters, women’s and men’s property crime differs in significant ways. Indeed, their chapters show quite convincingly that the property crime “labor force” is at least as gender segregated – and race, ethnicity, and social class segregated, too – as the “legitimate” labor force. Anderson looks at the relationship between drug use and property crime, a relationship that her analysis demonstrates is far more complex than many people assume. She takes readers beyond the official statistics on both drug offenses and property crime to tease out the gendered, raced, and classed differences in these types of offending and their connections to one another. Dodge’s analysis makes these same connections, but in the realm of white-collar crime. As Dodge states, the study of white-collar crime has been “all about men,” but the growing attention to female offending in general has included the area of white-collar crime. Gender differences in white-collar offending, according to Dodge, reflect the differential opportunity structures accessible to men and women. But what is perhaps more interesting here are the official and public reactions to female versus male white-collar offenders. Dodge notes how the female white-collar offender not only violates traditional norms of respectable femininity, but she also “steps on the toes” of white, male corporate enterprise. This is obviously an area fruitful for future research.

The question of how female and male offenders are treated within the criminal justice system has generated a great deal of contentious debate. There are those who argue that traditional gender norms and stereotypes operate in favor of girls and women because they induce reluctance among police, prosecutors, judges and juries to convict them or, if convicted, to sentence them harshly. This perspective is often referred to as the “chivalry hypothesis.” Others argue, in contrast, that traditional gender norms and stereotypes put women and girls who commit crimes at a disadvantage in that they are viewed by actors in the criminal justice system as pathological, not “real” women, but “bad” women, resulting in a harsher than warranted response to their offending. Cassia Spohn and Pauline Brennan unpack this debate with a careful analysis of sentencing data available from a variety of sources across different countries. Their examination reveals consistent sentencing disparity between male and female offenders, with women receiving more lenient sentences even when legal factors such as offense seriousness and prior criminal record are taken into account. This finding indicates that extralegal factors are playing a critical role, but precisely which factors in addition to gender are most important remains a question for future researchers to answer.

A substantial body of research shows that females and males who are sentenced to correctional supervision have different concerns, reactions, and experiences. Mary Bosworth and Andriani Fili, in the chapter that concludes this section of the Handbook, examine gendered differences in incarceration experiences and re-entry into society post-incarceration. Among the many issues they discuss, for example, are the parenting concerns of prisoners, particularly since throughout the world, incarcerated women are more likely than incarcerated men to have been the primary or sole caregiver to their children prior to incarceration. This raises unique concerns that typically have long-lasting consequences for both the women and their children. As Bosworth and Fili show, however, some governments are addressing gender differences in correctional experiences like these by instituting gender-specific programming, a promising response, but one that awaits systematic empirical evaluation. One might argue that any positive response is an improvement over the neglect – and, worse, the abuse – that many prisoners experience. But only rigorous evaluation will allow us to determine if these programs are able to meaningfully address the gender-specific needs and concerns of women and men, and girls and boys, under correctional supervision.

7 Prostitution

The gendered crime

Jody Raphael and Mary C. Ellison

DOI: 10.4324/9780203832516-11

Prostitution is the ultimate gendered crime. Although there are boys and men who sell sex, demand for girls’ and women’s bodies fuels the very lucrative world-wide sex trade industry. Until recently, the criminal justice system has pursued a gendered approach to prostitution, with no or few penalties for male buyers as compared to harsh sanctions for female sellers. In fact, in 1962 the American Law Institute enshrined this unequal treatment in its influential Model Penal Code, which specified a misdemeanor penalty with jail time for women in prostitution, but only a minor infraction with a fine for the customer. The Institute justified the unequal treatment on the fact that the women receive money from the activity, making their crime more serious, deserving of harsher penalties (Lefler, 1999).

This gendered pattern has recently been disrupted by new facts coming forward about the trafficking of women and girls into prostitution, which forces a consideration of the women as victims rather than as criminals. They can be considered victims of violence and degradation from customers, and victims of coercion and violence from pimps and traffickers as well.

Until recently in the United States prostitution was ipso facto legal, because laws in every state other than Nevada criminalizing prostitution were rarely enforced, typically and only when law enforcement officials were under pressure to clean up newly gentrified neighborhoods. Within the last five years, however, government policy in the United States has undergone a major change. Due to new concerns about sex trafficking, law enforcement officials have stepped up efforts to apprehend customers buying sex from minors, have begun to develop procedures to identify and rescue trafficked women and girls, and have started to prosecute the men and women who have recruited, controlled, and abused them for profit. In the United States, the government has recently taken a new look at prostitution, viewing the young girls supplying the demand as victims of coercion, violence, and abuse, and not as offenders or perpetrators, a development that has not been mirrored in Europe or other countries around the world.

As law enforcement and state legislators are revising laws and practices on prostitution in response to these new facts, a hotly contested debate has arisen. Viewing prostitution as sex between consenting adults, some commentators take great pains to differentiate prostitution from sex trafficking, which involves fraud, violence and coercion, often along with relocation to obtain access to a particular market. Arguing for decriminalization of prostitution, they look upon women in prostitution as those who have freely chosen to participate and abusive customers to be in the minority (Weitzer, 2010). Others (Jeffreys, 2009) believe that increased demand for women’s bodies in prostitution, especially in venues like Germany where prostitution is legal, make trafficking, violence, and coercion inevitable as an adequate quantity of volunteers to meet this new demand is unavailable. They worry about the implications of so many uneducated poor women of color without economic opportunities supplying this demand. Is participation truly voluntary? How does this power differential affect customer behavior? And, as the majority of women in prostitution begin regularly as teens, is consent a meaningful term in this context?

It would be helpful if facts could settle this dispute about the nature of prostitution and its acceptability, but the clandestine nature of the sex trade industry makes constructing representative samples for research impossible. Research cannot give us any real sense of the number of girls and women currently active in the sex trade on any given day and their race and ethnicity. Nor can research help determine the number of individuals trafficked for the sex trade.

For example, estimates are bandied about by governmental and nongovernmental groups about the prevalence of trafficking for the sex trade. Supporters of decriminalization rightfully point out that the number of trafficked individuals in the United States often put forward by the State Department is just an estimate not resting on any sound research base (Weitzer, 2010), and in this they are entirely correct. Over the past few years, the number of trafficking cases identified by law enforcement in the United States has been low; only about 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking were identified for investigation between January 2008 and June 2010 by 45 federally funded task forces (Banks and Kyckelhahn, 2011). It is interesting to note, however, that the number of trafficking cases investigated and charged has risen appreciably during the past five years in the United States, presenting much useful information about how victims are recruited and controlled, and the manner in which the business is structured and managed. And since 2007, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline has identified 4,904 potential human trafficking victims (Polaris Project, 2011a).

Given the difficulty of identifying or discovering trafficking victims, who are always deeply hidden, these data cannot in and of themselves dictate a definitive conclusion about the extent of sex trafficking in the United States. But from cases investigated by law enforcement during the past few years and research with samples of women and girls in the sex trade industry in the United States, much is beginning to emerge that has heavily influenced law enforcement to view women and girls in the sex trade industry as victims rather than perpetrators. This chapter will explore relevant research findings as well as new criminal justice responses to these data in the United States.

Prostituted girls and women in the United States

Childhood sexual assault

Although most childhood sexual abuse survivors do not engage in prostitution, the large majority of women in prostitution in the United States have been victims of incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Two recent studies of women in street prostitution found that half had been sexually abused as children (Kramer and Berg, 2003; Surratt, Inciardi, Kurtz and Kiley, 2004). Research with women who had all been involved in prostitution before age 18 found that 91 percent had a child abuse history (Nixon, Tutty, Downe, Gorkoff and Ursel, 2002), and interviews with 13 girls who were victims of sex trafficking in Toledo, Ohio found that 91 percent had experienced child abuse in their homes (Williamson and Prior, 2009). In a sample of more than 1,000 women in the Cook County Jail (Chicago) between 1991 and 1993, detainees who had experienced childhood sexual abuse had substantially higher rates of ever being involved in prostitution (44 percent), compared with 28.5 percent for detainees with no history of abuse. Childhood sexual assaul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Understanding the relationship between gender and crime: An introduction to the Routledge International Handbook of Crime and Gender Studies
• Section I Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of crime and gender
• Section II Gender and victimization
• Section III Gender and offending
• Section IV Gendered work in the criminal justice system
• Section V Future directions in gender and crime research
• Index