Feminist Criminology History

Abstract

• This article explores the history of criminology regarding the introduction, or lack thereof, of gender analysis.
• It examines "missed opportunities" in the works of scholars like Sutherland, Cohen, and Sampson concerning gender.
• Gender was initially identified as a major cause of crime in classical criminological scholarship but was later overlooked.
• The article analyzes critical criminologists' continued under-emphasis on gender despite examining social inequalities and crime.
• It addresses contemporary challenges to the mainstream from critical and feminist criminologists, who have provided innovative gender and intersectional analyses.
• The article concludes with thoughts on moving feminist criminology toward a more intellectually diverse and complete discipline.

Keywords

• Feminist criminology, gender and crime, intersectionality and crime, and critical criminology are key terms.

Introduction

• The article traces the foundations and impacts of feminist criminology within the field.
• It is prompted by the 30th anniversary of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Division on Women and Crime (DWC) and the 10th anniversary of Feminist Criminology journal.
• Many special sessions were devoted to the 30th anniversary of the DWC during the 2014 conference.
• Feminist criminology is motivated by the acknowledgment of gendered analyses of crime and that sexism influences social life. Additionally, feminist criminologists produce knowledge that informs policy and practice, focuses on violence against women and girls, incarcerated women and girls, gendered injustices throughout society, and broad social policies that contribute to the oppression of women and girls.
• Feminist criminologists have recently been much more explicit about examining racism and sexism as companions of social inequalities.
• The feminist critique emerges from an exploration of missed opportunities to analyze gender and crime, and also between criminology's exploration of the impacts of socioeconomic oppressions and non-dualistic feminist epistemologies.
• The exploration expands the scope of concern to gender inequalities, racialized inequalities, and inequalities based on sexual orientation.
• Conventional quantitative criminology is deeply invested in analyzing how gender, race, social class, and heteronormativity impact crime.
• The field evolves as "yes/and" scholars push the research into new directions, which interrogate complex impacts on crime and crime control.

Criminological Theory on Gender and Crime: A History of Missed Opportunities

• Criminology, defined by Edwin Sutherland in 1924, was initially concerned with the techniques of control and punishment, particularly for men to deter them.
• Early scholars focused almost exclusively on men as criminals/inmates, considering men and boys as the objects of study in generalizable criminological research.
• Problems of gendered and racialized patterns of criminal offending were apparent from the start of the discipline but were rarely analyzed as conceptual subjects.
• Sutherland and Cressey believed that the "sex ratio" of criminal offending meant maleness is not significant in the causation of crime, but they believed it indicates social position instead.
• The explanation for the sex ratio difference is based on gendered familial supervision strategies of parents.
• Sutherland and Cressey proclaimed that gender is inconsequential to understanding the causes of crime and amputated gender from serious consideration by the scholarly community for decades to come.
• Sutherland and Cressey were more inclined to acknowledge that racial bias exists within the crime control apparatus in the United States.
• Sutherland and Cressey examined official crime statistics relating to "White, Negro, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese" and cross-tabulations of arrest rates by race and gender.
• They argued that "they can be explained only by social interaction" and that "The specific theory of social interaction which explains these racial ratios in crime has not been determined."
• Cohen understood he was examining delinquency among urban boys; still, he did not take issues of gender qua gender as serious contributing factors affecting the crime experiences of these boys.
• Criminology did not benefit from Cohen's intellect where masculinity is concerned.
• Cohen alludes to aspects of ethnic backgrounds as examples of “subcultures” but does not fully employ the concepts associated with racial inequality to examine boys' delinquency.
• Cohen explores social class differences and the exploration of the "middle-class measuring rod."
• Cohen's contributions are classics and from this platform, later generations of scholars would continue to shape it.
• While Cohen's focus was adolescent boys, gender and race as contributing social conditions in and of themselves were not central to his analysis, resulting in another missed opportunity.

Mainstream Contemporary Criminology

• A General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990) and Lifecourse Theory (Sampson & Laub, 1993) both claim to offer generalizable explanations of criminal offending.
• An empirical trend over 22 years as a faculty member and 27 years attending ASC conferences has involved the two theories.
• A General Theory of Crime is influential for empirical research, having inspired quantitative analyses frequently used in doctoral dissertations and published research.
• Searching online produces over 177,000 scholarly articles and 57 books associated with A General Theory of Crime.
• Lifecourse theory has provided rich analyses of crime causation over a lifetime and a quick search online produces more than 600 scholarly articles and two books related to "lifecourse theory of crime."
• Both theoretical traditions document that men/boys are most actively engaged in criminal offending, but neither digs deeply into gender as an analytical frame.
• Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) pose the question "why are men, adolescents, and minorities more likely than their counterparts to commit criminal acts?" (p. xvi).
• This theory's most enduring contribution is the examination presented incorporating gender and race, in addition to age.
• Gottfredson and Hirschi broaden the conception of crime beyond the legalistic definition to include "acts of force or fraud undertaken in pursuit of pleasure" (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990, p. 15).
• Criminality arises as a consequence of "low self-control," and people with low self-control are more likely to be "versatile" in their criminality.
• According to Gottfredson and Hirschi, “ineffective child-rearing” is the main cause of low self-control and includes parental failures to monitor, recognize, and punish deviant behavior (p. 97).
• Ultimately, they argue that "single-parent families” are “among the most powerful predictors of crime rates" (p. 103).
• Patterns of criminal offending state that “men are always and everywhere more likely than women to commit criminal acts” (p. 143) and ultimately women, especially single mothers, are responsible for the problem.
• As for race/ethnic patterns associated with criminal offending, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) dispute the "inequality thesis" (p. 152).
• Gottfredson and Hirschi perpetuate androcentric conceptions within criminology and dismiss volumes of criminological research documenting that gender is the leading predictor of crime.
• Sampson and Laub (1993) present a highly regarded mainstream criminological exploration of crime; they use rich longitudinal data from the famous Glueck and Glueck studies of juvenile delinquency among males.
• Issues of gender and crime do not factor into their main points as there are no entries for the following concepts: sex or sex ratio, gender, masculinity, males, females, or femininity.
• Sampson and Laub (1993) conduct extensive follow-up interviews with the Gluecks's original participants and document experiences of crime throughout their lives.
• By claiming that the source of the violence was from excessive alcohol use, the authors missed an opportunity to explore the facets of masculinity that, by 1993, had been well documented in the research on violence against women.
• Sampson and Laub (1993) argue that the causes of crime across the life course are not rooted in race, but rather in structural disadvantage.
• It is regretable that these criminologists continued the historical story of missed opportunities to analyze gender and racial as well as class-based dynamics.

Turning to Critical Criminolgy

• Whereas lifecourse theory explicitly "deracialized" and "depoliticized" crime, critical criminology began to embrace; still, the social realities of gender remained largely invisible.
• Critical criminology proffered keen analyses of power dynamics; but its scholarship has been geared toward promoting progressive political agendas to combat social class and racialized inequalities.
• According to DeKeseredy (2011), "critical criminology is defined as a perspective that views the major sources of crime as the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society" (p. 7).
• DeKeseredy (2011), citing Gelsthorpe and Morris (1988), acknowledges that early critical criminology was "gender-blind" and that androcentrism remains a problem within some of the critical criminological studies published.
• Taking on the challenge of economic analyses, early critical criminologists theoretically established links between social class inequality and crime.
• A key accomplishment of critical criminology included commitment to being proximal to the subjects whose lives they were documenting by prioritizing analyses of the exercise of unequal power. Critical criminologists exposed vastly different worlds associated with street crime versus corporate crime.
• Critical criminologist Raymond Michalowski (1985) examined gender and crimes of the powerless.
• In contrast, feminist criminologists would react by saying let´s not overlook that men are gendered beings too, so let’s extend the ideas of inequality to consider masculinity.’
• Roger Matthews and Jock Young (1992) directly tackled feminist critiques of criminology.

Feminist Contributions and clarifications

• In 1988, Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) explore the foundations and contours of feminist theory and its applicability to criminology; they argued “criminologists should begin to appreciate that their discipline and its questions are a product of White, economically privileged men's experiences (p. 506).
• Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) write that their work signaled an awakening of criminology from its androcentric slumber" (p. 507).
• Five years later, Renzetti (1993) asks "why should I have to make this case again?" (p. 232)
• Hannon and Dufour (1998) document androcentrism within criminological research.
• They were specifically interested in measuring if criminological research with men-only samples generalized their findings to "all" crimes (male-bias in generalizability).
• Britton (2000) bluntly states that "[g]iven men's overrepresentation as offenders and victims, the screaming silence in criminology around the connection between masculinity and crime has always been something of a paradox" (p. 73).
• Jeanne Flavin (2001) invites mainstream criminologists to appreciate and embrace feminist insights within criminology as "[g]ender is the strongest predictor of criminal involvement: boys and men perpetrate more, and more serious crimes than do girls and women" (p. 273).
• Flavin (2001) argues that "feminism challenges criminology to reject androcentric thinking."
• A paradigm shift occurred in feminist theory when West and Zimmerman (1987) published their now-famous article "Doing Gender."
• An additional component to "doing gender" and/or "doing difference" is accountability.
• Intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, and social class impact social patterns of crime offending and victimization.
• Crenshaw (1991) launches her analysis by pointing out that "[c]ontemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider intersection identities such as women of color" (pp. 1242-1243).
• Crenshaw explodes the idea that all women experience violence similarly.
• Like feminist theory and action writ large, feminist criminology has been the target of considerable backlash (Chesney-Lind, 2006),
• Carrie Buist and Emily Lenning (2016) articulate "queer criminology" that "moves beyond the traditional deviance framework and shifts the spotlight from the rule breakers to the rule makers."

Moving Forward

• The path forward includes the need for much more research on the intersectionality of crime and crime control.
• By endorsing Cohen's early acknowledgment that social class differences matter, and by expanding that concern to sexism, racism, and heterosexism, we have a richer and more complete criminology awakening from a slumber that was both androcentric and biased in terms of race and sexualities.
• Organizational attention has been given to varying forms of social inequalities as they impact the study of crime in the ASC.
• The DWC celebrated its 30th Anniversary whose pioneers include Betsy Stanko, Nicole Hahn Rafter, Chris Rasche, CoraMae Richey Mann, Ruth Petersen, and many others.
• Combining scholarly interest with policy advocacy renders feminist criminology relevant to the modern conundrum of crime.
• Within the ASC, members of the DWC help support each other in efforts to translate feminist theory into action with the annual “Feminist Theory in Action" workshop.
• After reading Lauren Silver's recent book (2015), conduct trauma-informed research.

Conclusion

• Scholarly research is a dynamic social process that is not free from bias, assumptions, interests, and judgment calls on the road to illuminating the social world.
• Contemporary scholarship regularly attends to both sexism and heterosexism within and outside criminology per se.