Offending Girls

Young Women and Youth Justice

Gilly Sharpe

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843927587
• eBook ISBN: 9781136617843
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, panic about girls' offending in Britain reached fever pitch. No longer sugar and spice, a 'new breed' of girl, the hedonistic, violent, binge-drinking 'ladette', was reported to have emerged. At the same time, the number of young women entering the youth justice system, including youth custody, increased dramatically.

Offending Girls challenges simplistic and demonising popular representations of 'bad' girls and examines what exactly is new about the 'new' offending girl. In the light of enormous social and cultural changes affecting girls' lives, and expectations of them, since previous British research in this area, the book investigates whether popular stereotypes problematising female youthful behaviour resonate with the accounts of criminalised young women themselves, and to what extent they have infiltrated professional youth justice discourse.

Through the lens of original detailed qualitative research in two Youth Offending Teams and a Secure Training Centre – the first study of its kind since the 'modernisation' of the youth justice system over a decade ago – Offending Girls questions whether the 'new' youth justice system is delivering justice for girls and young women. It also contends that the panic about an 'unprecedented crime wave' amongst girls is not supported by robust evidence, but that the interventionist thrust which characterises contemporary youth justice has had a particularly pernicious impact on girls.

It will be key reading for students and academics working in the areas of criminology, criminal and youth justice, education, gender studies, youth studies, social work, sociology and social policy, as well as youth and criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers.

1 New offending girls?¹

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, panic about girls’ offending in Britain seemed to have reached fever pitch. No longer sugar and spice, a ‘new breed’ of girl, the ‘ladette’,² was reported to have emerged – a hedonistic, violent, binge-drinking young woman whose crude and very public uncouth behaviour differed little from that of her male underclass counterparts. Published crime statistics lent considerable, albeit superficial, support to these claims. For example, official figures indicated that recorded offences committed by girls in England and Wales had increased by 38 per cent between 2002/03 and 2007/08 (Youth Justice Board, 2004a, 2009), and that violent crimes attributable to young women had risen even more starkly. Popular commentators were quick to attribute this ‘shocking trend’ to the ‘dark side’ of girlpower. As reflected in the newspaper headlines below, girls were believed to be enacting the gains of feminism in problematic ways, and ‘ladette culture’ was widely purported to be the cause of the apparent dramatic increase in female youth crime:

Britain is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave among teenage girls.

(Patrick Hennessy, The Telegraph, 10 May 2008)

British girls among most violent in world, WHO survey shows. Link to binge-drinking ‘ladette’ culture feared.

(Mark Honigsbaum, The Guardian, 24 January 2006)

The female of the species is now just as deadly as the male.

(Jan Moir, Daily Mail, 2 August 2008)

Scourge of the ladette thugs: rising tide of violent crime committed by young women.

(James Slack, Daily Mail, 30 January 2009)

Violent attacks by teenage girls treble in seven years.

(Richard Edwards, The Telegraph, 1 March 2009)

Politicians, senior criminal justice professionals and even some academics lent credence to these popular stereotypes by uncritically accepting the ‘evidence’ on which such stories were based. A typical newspaper article about ‘violent ladettes’ published in The Times cited a professor of child forensic psychology, who asserted that ‘there was evidence to suggest that girls were becoming more violent and aggressive’ and even that ‘[t]here is beginning to be evidence that girls are capable of being perpetrators of sexual crimes in their own right’ (Ford, 2009). Judge Alan Berg, who sentenced a 20-year-old female student to eight weeks’ imprisonment after she attacked a paramedic (she was later released on appeal), was reported in The Telegraph to have claimed that ‘booze-fuelled yobs were behind the sharp spike in ‘‘mindless’’ violence that had left many people fearing for their safety’. Judge Berg went on to claim that ‘[t]here is this ladette culture which creates these problems. There is a culture among a certain sector of female society of drinking until they are senseless’ (Hough, 2010).

Not all girls have prompted such anxieties, however. Images of high-achieving, successful and glamorous ‘self-made’ young women are perhaps as ubiquitous as those of ‘ladettes’ and girl gang members. Indeed, the ‘girlpowered’ (Aapola et al., 2005³) young woman is commonly ‘championed as a metaphor for social change’ (McRobbie, 2004: 6). The ideal modern subject, she is celebrated for enjoying unprecedented achievements in education and employment (and has delayed motherhood so as not to hinder her career prospects), considerable freedom in her sexual relationships and success and glamour in the field of consumption (Harris, 2004). She is cast as a deserving beneficiary of the gains of feminism. Such images throw the offending girl into particularly stark relief: she is unable (or refuses) to keep within the narrow boundaries of respectable and ladylike behaviour; she makes poor consumption choices (drinking heavily, using drugs and behaving violently); and she has dropped out of school and has no interest in educational advancement. She is also far less likely than her girl-powered counterpart to be white and middle class. Together with her alter ego, the economically unproductive lone teenage mother who is dependent on the state for financial support, the offending girl is the subject of widespread public and political anxiety. It is these young women, this ‘certain sector of female society’, to use Judge Berg’s terminology, who are the subject of this book.

‘Old’, ‘new’ and ‘new-old’ anxieties about girlhood deviance and criminality

Contemporary anxieties about ‘bad girls’ are by no means unprecedented, although the purported emergence of a ‘new breed’ of girl criminal is often presented as a new phenomenon. A steady growth in the female share of youth crime in England and Wales during the second half of the last century attracted widespread commentary: the sex ratio fell from approximately 11:1 in the late 1950s to around 6:1 in the early 1970s, and to 3.6:1 in 1995 (Rutter et al., 1998), subsequent rates remaining fairly stable. In fact, as I show in Chapter Two, concerns about offending (or, at different historical junctures, ‘wayward’ or ‘delinquent’) young women can be traced back more than 100 years, during which time ‘successive generations of girls in England and Wales have been cast as posing an ever-new threat to social order requiring ever-new restraints’ (Cox, 2003: 3). However, changes in the classification of girlhood delinquency and lawbreaking over time mean that a young woman’s ‘offending’ behaviour today may bear little resemblance to that of her ‘delinquent’ counterpart half a century ago, which casts doubt on the validity of long-term historical comparisons of female crime rates.

From ‘liberated’ to ‘ladettes’

During the twentieth century, girls’ ‘emancipation’ was continually identified as a primary source of their moral deterioration, and unsupervised young girls without domestic responsibilities to curb their morals or their finances were perceived to threaten state stability as well as the future of the family (Cox, 2003). As long ago as the 1800s, as Sprott and Doob (2009: 11) document, it was claimed that ‘every step made by a woman towards her independence is a step towards that precipice at the bottom of which lies prison’ (Pike, 1876: 527).

The belief that rising female crime rates are attributable to a growing number of women adopting ‘male roles’ (entering paid employment in greater numbers), and to women’s increasing expectations and opportunities – a theoretical perspective that came to be known as the ‘liberation hypothesis’ – dominated popular accounts of female lawbreaking in the 1970s. It was widely claimed that women’s roles had changed in ways that were threatening to the social order, and that this had resulted in more women being brought within the control of the criminal justice system (Morris and Gelsthorpe, 1981). This popular belief was supported by two American academic studies by Freda Adler and Rita Simon, both published in 1975. In contrast with earlier theories emphasising biological and psychological sex differences, and considerably more liberal in their view of women’s emancipation, Adler and Simon claimed that ‘social position and social-role expectations are more important than sex in determining behavior’ (Adler, 1975: 47). The rising female crime rate during the 1970s was purported to represent the ‘dark side’ of women’s liberation, a position Simon outlined as follows:

The women’s movement … claims that women are no more moral, or conforming, or law-abiding than are men; and that women should neither bask in their superiority over men nor feel they are trapped into wearing a mask of morality and goodness … If one of the consequences of sexual equality should turn out to be higher crime rates among women, the women’s movement would not feel that it has all been in vain.

(1975: 106)

Despite the considerable moral panic created by Adler’s book, in particular,⁴ the available empirical evidence lent little support to the liberation hypothesis. In fact, the women’s movement had the greatest impact on white, middle-class women, while it was (and still is) working-class and black women who are most likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system. Darrell Steffensmeier, in a review of statistical evidence on female crime rates in the United States in the 1970s, concluded that ‘[t]he new female criminal is more a social invention than an empirical reality and [ … ] the proposed relationship between the women’s movement and crime is, indeed, tenuous and even vacuous. Women are still typically non-violent, petty property offenders’ (1978: 580).

Box and Hale were of much the same opinion in their analysis of British female violent crime rates: they found that the sex composition of the police force (the proportion of female police officers was steadily growing), but not the ‘masculinisation’ of women’s roles, was significantly related to female conviction rates for violent offending. Their conclusion, consistent with a ‘labelling’ hypothesis, was that media exaggeration of female violence had ‘sensitized both public and police to the alleged relationship between violence and female emancipation [which in turn had apparently led to] a harsher stance towards females suspected of violence’ (1983: 43).⁵ The liberation hypothesis has been enjoying a sustained renaissance in Britain in recent years, primarily in the guise of moral panics about girls and violence. Fears about the ‘liberated’ female criminal abound in contemporary media representations of ‘ladettes’, female violence and ‘girl gangs’, and newspaper headlines, such as those reproduced above, have once again stirred up respectable fears that girlhood criminality is increasing rapidly.

From sexuality to violence

Throughout the majority of the last century, definitions of girls’ delinquent and troublesome behaviour were closely tied to ideas about ‘respectable’ femininity, which precluded sexual experimentation outside wedlock. Indications that the usual familial controls were proving unsuccessful in constraining girlhood enterprise and adventure were reflected in legal definitions which included being ‘beyond parental control’ or ‘in moral danger’, and girls admitted to carceral institutions – many of whom had not actually broken the law – were routinely tested for pregnancy and venereal infections. Indeed, the moral policing of girls’ sexuality, which appears to have been a central objective of the juvenile justice system for the major part of the twentieth century (Gelsthorpe and Worrall, 2009), not only created the impression that girls’ delinquency was, for the most part, sexual in nature, but also kept much of their ‘ordinary’ lawbreaking out of the criminal courts (Cox, 2003;Sharpe, 2008).

In the late twentieth century, a new threat to the gender order – girls’ violence – was identified, and the preoccupation with girls’ sexuality that had long been evident in both popular and criminological discourse was eclipsed to a large extent by panic about violent young women. But what brought about this shift in focus? Expectations about what it means to grow up female have undergone considerable change over the course of recent decades and young women today are invoked to put the ‘old’ markers of feminine success – marriage and motherhood – on hold until they reach at least their mid-20s. Moreover, chastity is no longer expected or considered desirable (in many Western cultures, at least), and youthful female (hetero)sexuality – as long as it does not result in pregnancy – is no longer widely condemned as ‘unfeminine’.⁶ Anita Harris has argued that three domains – professional ambition, consumption and motherhood – are most significant for identity work for contemporary young women, and that success and failure are manufactured in these contexts (2004: 183–5). However, success in reproduction has, for teenage girls and young women, been overtaken by success in the spheres of consumption and production – as evidenced by a new focus on (and celebration of) young women’s educational achievements and their enactment of successful employment and glamorous ‘lifestyle’ choices.⁷ Today’s young women feature as much, if not more, in governmental discourse for their productive as for their reproductive capacities (McRobbie, 2009).

It is perhaps also culturally untenable that overtly sexual young women today might be considered to be in ‘moral danger’. According to sociologist Ros Gill, young women have been transformed – in the media and, subsequently, by themselves – from sexual objects to sexual subjects, and there has been a broad cultural shift in recent years which she refers to as ‘the knowing and deliberate re-sexualisation and re-commodification of women’s bodies’ (2003: 101). Gill argues that new femininities are being constructed, ‘organised around sexual confidence and autonomy’, wherein young women are represented not ‘as passive objects but as knowing, active, and desiring sexual subjects’ (p. 103).⁸ This ‘re-commodification’ has arguably been further encouraged by the mainstreaming of the pornography industry and the proliferation of sexual entertainment/ encounter venues in the city centre night time economy, as well by the influence of such developments on the content of ‘lads’ magazines, women’s and ‘celebrity’ weeklies and the popular press. The contemporary ‘hyper-culture of commercial sexuality’ (McRobbie, 2009: 18) makes the governance of young women from a ‘moral danger’ perspective extremely difficult to uphold.⁹

Despite the shift of attention from young women’s sexuality to their violence, certain historical continuities are in evidence. The public display of sexuality and promiscuity by young women is now tolerated, indeed celebrated, at least within certain parameters.¹⁰ No longer considered evidence of female pathology, the coming forward of young women as sexual subjects, as opposed to objects, is seen as a sign of ‘empowerment’. Young women in the twenty-first century are free to make individual sexual and reproductive choices relatively unfettered by moral censure. A significant exception here is when girls’ reproductive choices end in teenage pregnancy. In fact, old anxieties about promiscuity have not entirely disappeared, but they have become more narrowly focused on teenage pregnancy and motherhood; indeed, the financially unproductive young woman who is dependent on the state has been constructed as a new, near-criminal major social problem requiring urgent government intervention (Duncan et al., 2010; see Chapter Five). And while the condemnatory gaze may have shifted from girls’ sexuality to their violence, what is believed to constitute girlhood deviance continues to be embodied and the working-class female body continues to be scrutinised and found wanting. Today, as before, it is young women’s assumed lack of physical and self-control and restraint that is a central source of moral censure. Fascination about girls, coupled with anxiety about them, is greater now than ever, and there are many more avenues – with girls and women themselves the chief consumers – through which such concerns can find expression: magazines, ‘chick lit’, media commentary, online fora, TV chat shows, and so on. The claim that ‘girls, including their bodies, their labour power and their social behaviour are now the subject of governmentality to an unprecedented degree’ (McRobbie, 2001, cited in Harris, 2004: 14) is perhaps no exaggeration.

A number of authors have argued that feminism, in the twenty-first century, has been denounced as no longer relevant (Griffin, 2004;McRobbie, 2009, inter alia). This repudiation arguably allows for girls’ problems and failures, as well as their achievements and successes, to be individualised, thus situating blame – or credit, as the case may be – at an individual, rather than a social, level, thereby rejecting the notion that opportunity remains structured by social class, gender and ethnicity (Aapola et al., 2005; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007;Walkerdine et al., 2001). Anita Harris has suggested that the structural barriers and exclusionary policies that working-class girls are confronted with have been largely erased from understandings of their behaviour,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. New offending girls?
• 2. Historical perspectives on offending girls
• 3. The construction of a girlhood crime wave: Recent trends in young women’s lawbreaking and criminalisation
• 4. Researching new offending girls
• 5. Pathways into crime and criminalisation
• 6. Accounting for trouble: The girls’ perspectives
• 7. The trouble with girls today: Professional perspectives on young women’s offending*
• 8. Youth justice for girls in the twenty-first century?
• 9. Conclusions and recommendations
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Notes
• References
• Index