Daly (1992, pp. 13–14) described the “leading feminist scenario of lawbreaking” as women who ran away from abusive homes, entered deviant street networks, and got immersed in victimization and offending through substance addiction. This description was gleaned through Daly’s assessment of qualitative studies of women and girls, which provided rich detail not present in traditional quantitative studies of female offending. Quantitative studies focused on demographic variables and official data sources, offering limited insight into context. The dominant approach taken by quantitative studies testing criminological theory was to control for sex, rather than identifying important between-sex differences. As Daly noted, the assumption that the “leading feminist scenario” described most if not all women also perpetuated an inaccurate myth. Daly (1992) sought to reconcile these positions.
Daly’s Original Study
Relying on data obtained from a felony court in New Haven, Connecticut, between 1981 and 1985, Daly (1992, 1994) examined variation in sentencing for a “wide sample” of 400 male and female offenders. She also examined Pre-Sentence Investigation (PSI) reports to construct life histories – termed biographies – of 40 men and 40 women, or a “deep sample.” This analysis of women’s biographies produced five unique pathways taken to the most recent felony conviction.
Daly’s (1992) female pathways included four “gendered” groups of women: Street, harmed and harming, battered, and drug connected. The first two pathways made up more than half of the women in Daly’s sample. The street woman pathway takes its label from Eleanor Miller’s (1986) study of female street hustlers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the late 1970s, and is also consistent with the “leading feminist scenario” described by Daly (1992). Women who followed this pathway ran away or were pushed out of their homes as teenagers, used and sold drugs, engaged in other petty crimes to support drug habits, and eventually got involved in prostitution and street hustling. They had more extensive criminal records, often including time in jail or prison. And they were not specialists when it came to their offending: prior arrests and/or convictions included prostitution, drugs, violence, and theft-related crimes. Similar to this group, Daly’s harmed and harming pathway was comprised of women who were also abused or neglected in childhood. They responded to victimization by acting out violently against aggressors or others; leading to arrest. While harmed and harming women also abused substances to cope with their victimization, they differed from street women in that their criminal histories were not as lengthy or versatile, they were not typically immersed in deviant networks and street life, and lacked a history of prostitution. However, the trajectory of harmed and harming women can eventually become street women .
Also part of the larger group of women with uniquely gendered contexts, Daly’s (1992) battered woman pathway consisted of those women whose recent felony conviction was violent. Unlike harmed and harming women, the abuse – and onset of offending – tended to be restricted to adulthood for battered women in the sample; battered women did not have extensive histories of abuse and victimization; rather, their victimization occurred in a recent intimate relationship. This group was also unique in its limited criminal history, and lack of substance abuse. Their current court involvement was almost exclusively acting out against a partner; Daly (1992, p. 30) found that battered women “would not have appeared before the court had they not been in relationships with violent men.” Drug-connected women made up the fourth gendered group in Daly’s sample. Women in this particular pathway committed drug-related offenses, and were immersed in selling and/or using illegal substances with intimate partners or other close family members. Overall, they had less experience with victimization than the other gendered pathways, and their offending onsets were later. Their offending patterns were also more specialized in that they typically consisted of drug-related arrests. The “other” and fifth pathway in Daly’s sample differed considerably from the four gendered groups in that these women – who committed fraud, theft, and other abuses of trust – had very limited criminal histories. Indeed, their most recent felony conviction in many instances was their only involvement with the criminal justice system. Subsequently labeled economically motivated, women in this pathway were more educated, had relatively stable lives and relationships, lacked substance abuse problems, and had not experienced prior victimization (Morash & Schram, 2002; Reisig et al., 2006). In sum, Daly’s study established support for both the leading feminist scenario and simultaneously confronted problems of representation in mainstream criminology by recognizing that there is substantial within-sex variation in the context of offending.
After Daly’s (1992, 1994) study, feminist criminologists continued to make strides, challenging the dominant mainstream theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches. Daly presented a model that could be replicated and extended in other settings and with more diverse samples. As this body of scholarship evolved, the reach of subsequent research also extended beyond theoretical support and empirical validation to practical applications within the criminal justice system. This includes applications for correctional assessment, treatment, and policy. Before outlining practical implications, quantitative and qualitative studies are discussed.
Empirical Support
Quantitative studies.1 While the first research into gendered pathways used qualitative methods, quantitative approaches have become more common. Daly’s perspective has been tested in a wide variety of contexts and has received considerable support. Evidence for gendered pathways has been found for both adolescents (Benedini & Fagan, 2020; Jones et al., 2014; Walters, 2020) and adults (Broidy et al., 2018; Salisbury & Van Voorhis, 2009), and in many geographical areas and cultures, including Argentina (Salisbury et al., 2018), Australia (Broidy et al., 2018), Israel (Shechory et al., 2011), and the Netherlands (Joosen et al., 2016).
Street woman. Recently, Broidy et al. (2018) found evidence for a pathway that linked childhood abuse, drug use, and offending in a sample of female offenders. These women used drugs to deal with their childhood hardships, and used property offending to support their drug habit. Women with early onsets of drug use and offending had more extensive offense histories and completed a wider variety of offenses. Joosen et al. (2016) examined samples of male and female offenders in the Netherlands and found subgroups that resembled the street woman pathway for both genders. While both groups were defined by substance abuse, economic marginality, and mental health issues, the males did not have a history of running away from home like the females in the study did, like Daly’s street woman pathway.
Drug connected. Women commonly offend with romantic partners and family members, and empirical support has been found for this pathway. Simpson et al. (2008) identified a specific subgroup of women involved in using and dealing drugs, although they were more violent than the drug-connected women in Daly’s sample. Joosen et a...
