Female Crime

The Construction of Women in Criminology

Ngaire Naffine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317296676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Female Crime, first published in 1987, surveys the major schools of criminology in order to explore the images of the female offender which underpin many contemporary crime theories. In reveals the ways in which male-centred norms dominated much analysis, and how crude stereotypes of women were a common attribute to the armoury of criminological research.

Although feminists and other researchers are directing increasing attention to criminology, this was one of the first attempts to deploy feminist analyses developed within other disciplines to examine critically the range of modern criminological theories on women. Its findings demonstrate the importance of a program to create a new feminist criminology which recognises the female offender as a reasoning, purposeful subject. This title will be of interest to students of criminology.

1
The reasonable man

Perhaps the least contentious proposition one can advance within the discipline of criminology is that women are more law-abiding than men. Official crime statistics and the unofficial data, derived from the admissions of undetected criminals, both reveal this to be the case. In the United States (Steffensmeier, 1980; Steffensmeier and Cobb, 1981; Smith and Visher, 1980), the United Kingdom (Smart, 1976, 1979; Box, 1983) and in Australia (Mukherjee, Jacobsen and Walker, 1981) the researches of criminologists consistendy reveal the majority of the criminal population in almost every category of offending to be male. Virtually the only offence group in which women figure in anything like the numbers of men is petty property crime.¹ If one were to typify the average female offender, she would be a once-only shoplifter who tends to steal items of little value (Cameron, 1964; Brady and Mitchell, 1971; Naffin, 1983: Chapter 4).

At times it has been mooted that women are the recipients of chivalrous treatment by the agents of the law. The police and the judiciary have been thought unwilling to apply a criminal label to the 'fairer sex' which is, as a consequence, underrepresented in the criminal statistics (Adler, 1975; Price, 1977). This theory has been countered by research which has shown the sexes to be treated in a like manner when such factors as seriousness of offence and criminal record are taken into account (Green, 1961; Farrington and Morris, 1983). The chivalry thesis has been further challenged by evidence of punitive police attitudes to certain types of criminal women—particularly those who are perceived to repudiate their femininity (Chesney-Lind, 1979; Parisi, 1982; Visher, 1983). The present understanding of the treatment of women by the processes of the law is that, even if women are the beneficiaries of 'chivalry^' in relation to less serious offences (and this is now open to question), as soon as the offending becomes more serious or places their morality in question, they are likely to be dealt with more retributively than males who commit similar offences (Edwards, 1984).² The agents of the law are clearly inconsistent, even in their paternalism. Indeed, it is likely that official crime statistics are unreliable guides to both male and female crime. Varying degrees of 'chivalry' merely exacerbate the problem of interpretation (Chesney-Lind, 1979; Curran, 1983; Box, 1983:Chapter 5).

With more success, it has been suggested that recent trends in female offending constitute a new wave in crime. Women have been described as now substantially more violent (Adler, 1975) and more prone to engage in crimes against property (Simon, 1975). They have also been accused of invading criminal domains once exclusively male (Adler, 1975). After considerable debate³ and scrutiny of statistics there is now general agreement that only one of these contentions is true (Smart, 1979; Steffensmeier and Steffensmeier, 1980; Steffensmeier and Cobb, 1981). Women's contribution to property crime, particularly of a petty nature, has indeed increased significantly over the past few decades (Steffensmeier, 1978, 1980, 1982; Smith and Visher, 1980; Mukhenee and Fitzgerald, 1981). Otherwise there has been little shift in patterns of the relative participation of women in crime.

This book is about the criminological endeavour to explain these statistics. It is a study of criminologists and their attitudes to women, rather than a study of criminal women and their patterns of offending. More particularly, this is an inquiry which employs explicitly a feminist perspective. It seeks to have women fairly represented in the criminological literature, to have their experiences rendered faithfully through rigorous scholarship. The argument to be advanced is that women should be accorded the same empathetic treatment that criminologists have so far reserved for their study of men. The demand is that women be allowed to give their own account of themselves, so that their criminal and conforming actions are invested with a greater sense of the sort of instrumentality and intelligence which criminologists have been willing to recognise only in die male.

The title of this chapter is drawn from the British law of negligence with its concept of 'the reasonable man'. Through the tort of negligence, British law recognises a range of relationships in which one party is said to owe another a duty of care. We all owe a general duty to other persons not to inflict harm by our foolish acts. There are also more specific duties of care. Shopkeepers, for example, owe a duty to their customers not to act in a negligent fashion through die sale of unwholesome products. Doctors owe a duty to their patients to exhibit a degree of skill usually associated with their profession. Likewise plumbers are expected to perform their services competently. The standard against which any individual's actions are judged is that of 'reasonableness'. The question asked is 'whether the defendant has acted as a reasonable man would have acted in the situation in which the defendant found himself?' (Baker, 1985:114).

In imposing a requirement that the defendant act reasonably, the law invokes what it calls an 'objective' standard. It asks, what would 'the reasonable man' do if he found himself in the same situation as the defendant? The 'reasonable man', however, is a legal abstraction. The standard of behaviour it invokes is considered impartial and impersonal 'in the sense that it eliminates the personal equation and is independent of the idiosyncracies of the particular person whose conduct is in question' (Rogers, 1984:95). The reasonable man is 'the man on the Clapham omnibus', according to Lord Bowen. Another jurist sees him as 'the man' who 'in the evening pushes the lawn mower in his shirt sleeves' (Rogers, 1984:46–47). In the case of the defendant who has professed to possess certain skills, he is also expected to be a 'reasonable man' who has the skills of his calling.

Law's 'reasonable man' provides a useful introduction to the argument of this book because he represents the male point of view. That is to say, the mythical man of law is intended to be ungendered, an objective standard of human conduct, and yet the characters used to illustrate the concept are invariably men. And, of course, they are deemed to be 'reasonable men'. In their search for a perfectly impartial standard of reasonable human behaviour, legal writers have retained in their mind's eye an image of a man, not a woman. The apparently generic reasonable man becomes unmistakably masculine as images are invoked of commuting civil servants and suburban husbands, 'in shirt sleeves', tending their gardens.

The point of law's 'reasonable man', for present purposes, is not simply that a male-dominated profession has, not surprisingly, invested a supposedly gender-neutral legal abstraction with male status. The point is also that the reasonable man of law is a fine example of an academic profession, finding its standards of ideal behaviour, or at least of 'reasonable' behaviour, in the male and not the female. When it comes to characterising the nature of being human, and in particular the better side of that nature, law has in common with other spheres of learning the practice of casting women outside the field of vision and invoking the experiences, the expectations and the values of the male. The result, it will be argued, is that when women are finally brought into the equation, they are regarded as in some way aberrant from the human = male norm. In law, the subliminal message is that reasonable people are men, not women. In other disciplines, the communication is more explicit: men are ideal and women are not.

This volume is about the male view which has dictated standards of acceptable human behaviour not only in law but across the social sciences. It entails the argument that criminologists are at one with their colleagues in associated fields of learning who have conceived the world through male eyes, but have presented it as ungendered social reality. The feminist task of this book is to expose the set of male values which has coloured perceptions of the sexes in the discipline of criminology.

The idea for this volume was stimulated by a paper published in 1975 by the American feminist sociologist, Marcia Millman (1975). 'She Did It All For Love' is a powerful feminist indictment of the treatment of women by sociologists of deviance. The burden of Millman's argument is that her colleagues 'have come to associate women with the dullest, most oppressive aspects of society, or else to view their deviance in narrowly sex-stereotyped (and unappealing) terms, yet to see in our male deviants the expression of creativity and a courage to stand up to society's hypocrisies'. Millman observes also that the professional understanding of deviance has been constrained by what she describes as a 'systematically male-biased perspective' (Millman, 1975:253).

To demonstrate her point, Millman examined a small selection of criminological writings of the 1960s for their portrayal of the sexes. This confirmed that the sympathies of sociologists lay with their male subjects, who were consistendy presented as more inventive, more interesting and more independent than the women who featured in their accounts of social behaviour. The overwhelming impression created by the sociological canon on deviance is that men alone are capable of standing up for their rights and defying convention, particularly when social rebellion is interpreted in terms of the 'heroic' qualities of bravery and loyalty to the oppressed. Deviant women, by contrast, are regarded as anaemic, as 'politically uninspired'.⁴

Millman's pioneering paper concentrated on a handful of paradigmatic cases of sexism in the sociology of deviance. In this volume, the brief is to consider all the major schools of modern social theory on the criminal woman.⁵ The aim, in the first instance, is to identify in each school the dominant view of women. The larger task is to examine the way in which this perception has shaped theory and determined research outcomes. Exposing bias is useful but the more challenging project facing feminist scholars is to show how the employment of a male norm of behaviour, and the neglect of women, undermines much of the analysis.

Over the past decade, a vigorous feminist literature has evolved which throws into question the most fundamental categories of human thought. This volume is placed squarely within the context of this new feminist work. It is part of a common enterprise of feminists from different fields of scholarship who have begun to identify the sexist assumptions of their discipline. The project of these feminists is to uncover the masculine bias of knowledge. They seek to reveal that a male reality has constructed uneven accounts of the sexes. The male view, they say, takes the activities of men to set the standard from which all human behaviour is judged. It deems also that social experiences associated with the lives of men are valuable while the experiences of women are to be held in disdain. More fundamentally, the feminist endeavour has been to cast doubt on a good deal of orthodox theory about human nature and human behaviour which has been developed with such a slight or distorted knowledge of the female.

The proposition offered here is that criminologists have drawn on this discriminatory thinking disclosed in many of the older disciplines to construct their accounts of women. They have employed the very same unflattering images of women discovered by feminists inquiring into disciplines as diverse as mainstream moral philosophy and industrial sociology. Consistently, the male is portrayed as colourful, lively and appealing; the female by contrast is conceived as drab, inert and unattractive. Criminology's woman, in the main, has this considerable intellectual heritage.

The structure of the book is as follows. Chapters 2 to 7 deal critically with criminology and its treatment of women. Chapter 2 considers the postulate that crime is an expression of social strains of a mainly financial nature in the male and of an emotional kind in the female. Chapter 3 addresses the notion that offending is learned in social groups which approve of crime and from which women are excluded. The book next considers masculinity theory—the view that crime is symbolically masculine and is therefore an unsuitable activity for women. Chapter 5 examines the statement that crime is a natural and spontaneous pursuit whose curtailment depends on an acquired commitment to the conventional social order. Labelling theory—the contention that becoming a criminal is a matter of the application of stigmatising social labels—is the topic of Chapter 6. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the impact of the women's liberation movement on the thinking of criminologists.

With an appreciation of the criminological female, the reader is then asked to consider the parallels between this unattractive character and her counterpart in other disciplines. The penultimate chapter points to the contribution of feminists in highlighting the misogyny of mainstream Western thinking and knowledge. Specifically, it looks at philosophy's idea of 'human nature', at psychology's interpretation of moral maturity, at political science's understanding of the political animal and at sociology's characterisation of the worker. Here is revealed the intellectual tradition from which criminology derives its conception of the sexes, a tradition which esteems men for their supposed autonomy, their intelligence and their force of character while disdaining women for their alleged weakness, their compliance and their passivity.

A program for a new feminist criminology is the subject of the final chapter. The closing message is that it is possible to draw a more positive construction of women from the material already collected by mainstream criminology. The stereotypes that have been imposed on the present body of findings derive from a male world-view which has distorted criminology's conclusions about women. A feminist re-examination of the existing research produces a different interpretation of woman which recognises her reason, her purpose and her essential humanity. The feminist agenda is to ensure that a balance is struck between the treatment of men and women in criminology. Once this work has been done, criminologists will need to return to their original task of uncovering the causes of crime.

2
The frustrated offender

The essence of strain theory, as the title suggests, is that criminality is caused by pressure or tension. The source of this tension is stimulated aspirations to achieve certain goals coupled with obstacles to their achievement. Frustrated individuals turn to crime either to release this tension or to achieve their goals via illegitimate avenues.

The progenitor of strain theory is the American social scientist Robert Merton (1949). Although he borrowed ideas and terminology from the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1951), strain as the basis of a detailed typology of crime and deviance is largely his own invention. The key concept of strain, coined by Durkheim but adopted (and adapted almost beyond recognition) by Merton, is 'anomie'. Durkheim in fact had resurrected the term from the Greek word meaning 'without law'. He used it to denote the human condition flowing from those events which he observed in industrialising France: the disintegration of a widely accepted normative code which led to ungoverned aspirations and unregulated egoistic behaviour.

Although under the sway of Durkheim's thinking, Merton used the word 'anomie' in a quite different sense. To Merton anomie was not a state of normlessness which precipitated anti-social behaviour, but the condition experienced by individuals taught to want the goals of their culture but denied access to them. American society, according to Merton, was dominated by a concern for material wealth. The accepted means of achieving this monetary goal were education and then upward mobility through employment. Merton conceived the whole of (American) society as sharing this goal but not sharing equally the means of its achievement. Inequities in the social structure meant that the undereducated were limited in their occupational opportunities and were bound to feel frustrated by their disadvantages and consequently to turn to deviance.

Merton found support for his theory in the official crime statistics in which a disproportionate number of the poor and socially underprivileged was represented. He did not question the nature and meaning of the crime figures but took them to be evidence and proof of his theory of strain.

It was another American social scientist who took up Merton's idea of 'strain' explicitly to explain the different patterns of male and female crime, in particular the crimes of youth. In a landmark work. Delinquent Boys (1955), Albert Cohen interpreted strain as the main catalyst to the formation of delinquent gangs by male working-class American youth. Cohen suggested that the delinquencies of adolescent gangs were essentially a reaction to being judged and found wanting according to the standards of the middle class. In school, the working-class boy found himself equipped poorly for the routines of study and exams. He employed the wrong accent. An environment conducive to quiet learning was not provided at home. The prospects of satisfying employment seemed bleak and school an irrelevance. The boy's solution to failure at school and the accompanying sense of 'status frustration' was to invert the values of the middle class and construct an alternative culture.

In the delinquent gang, Cohen maintained, the working-class boy who was condemned by the school system thumbed his nose at conventional society. His life became a statement against the expectations and the aspirations of the middle-class child. In the gang, the lower-class boy embraced short-term hedonism and malicious and negative behaviour. Vandalism, joyriding and fighting all became means of expressing disdain for the colourless, hard-working and achieving life of the middle-class boy. In this manner the gang youth also sought to achieve status in the eyes of his gang peers. Anti-social activity demonstrated toughness and affirmed one's masculinity.

In the course of setting forth his theory of strain and the delinquent boy, Cohen provides us with a detailed picture of 'the American way of life'. To Cohen, the dominant middle-class culture in America is distinguished by a number of characteristics. Ambition is 'a virtue; its absence ... a defect and sign of maladjustment'. There is an ethic of autonomy, of putting oneself first, of 'resourcefulness and self-reliance'. Altruism is almost a negative attribute. 'Although it recognises ... a certain virtue in generosity, [America] minimises the obligation to share with others, even with one's own kin, especially insofar as this obligation is likely to interfere with the achievement of one's own goals'. Altruism is a handicap to the full-blooded American. 'If one's first obligation is to help, spontaneously and unstintingly, friends and kinsmen in distr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1 The reasonable man
• 2 The frustrated offender
• 3 Learning crime
• 4 Masculinity theory
• 5 Conformity as control
• 6 Crime and stigma
• 7 The women's liberation thesis
• 8 Re-writing the human sciences: the impact of feminism
• 9 A feminist agenda for criminology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index