Abstract
This book provides an interesting and contemporary look at young women involved in the youth justice system today. There is scarce published research in this area which includes young women’s narratives of their own offending behaviour, with this still being a relatively new topic in the criminal justice world. There are widespread moral panics about increases in female offending with the ‘bad girls’ becoming a popular folk devil of the moment. There has been a good deal of media attention given to a new breed of woman who have been afforded too much freedom by women’s liberation and have not only begun to match men in the working world, but also in terms of their so-called deviant behaviour and excessive drinking. Frequently these women have been characterized by the media as ‘ladettes’.
Interestingly this book criticizes other works for focusing too heavily on girl’s violence and proclaims that this is in fact a rare occurrence which feeds into and perpetuates the stereotypes of women offenders. However, although girls’ violence is rare, it should be acknowledged that relatively speaking there have been steady increases in this area over the past two decades. This would indicate a significant shift in the types of the offences that girls are committing. Whether these increases are influenced by media depictions and changes in legislation is a question that the author poses. This is achieved effectively by the interviewing of 20 practitioners in the field, most of whom believe that the increases in young female offending are in fact genuine and not ‘artefactual’ (p. 119). Those who felt that girls today are more violent, also supported the masculinization hypothesis, which suggests that girls’ criminal behaviour is an imitation of that committed by boys. It was also found that those more likely to hold these opinions were the less experienced professionals and male interviewees. The increase in violence amongst women was seen by these interviewees to be the result of an increase in their alcohol use, although professionals with a wider knowledge of female offending blamed this perception of female binge drinking on media representations of women drinkers.
The author then goes on to look at the views of criminalized young women and youth justice practitioners in terms of their perspectives on how well the youth justice system is working. Particularly this focuses on whether the involvement of female teenagers with the Youth Offending Teams (YOT) can in effect draw these young people further into the criminal justice system; for example non-compliance with an order can result in further convictions. The young women interviewed generally felt that YOT involvement had little or no impact on their lives and many felt that the support offered was ‘too little too late’. By offering accounts of youth justice professionals and contrasting their views with that of the young women themselves, this offers a new take on contemporary youth justice discourse to the extent that young women are being given a say on how they feel that the system is treating them.
This book offers a fascinating insight into the lives of girls who have offended and provides an edgy alternative to the usual accounts of female crime that all too frequently ignore the voices of the women themselves. The reader is provided with a background to the offending behaviour of these women and the author attempts to offer some explanation for their offending rather than the relying on the usual account which explains girls’ criminal behaviour by likening them to boys. In this way, the book offers these women some agency and allows them to take responsibility for their actions instead of repeatedly classifying criminal women as victims of crime themselves or as helpless individuals that are not aware of the actions they are committing. This academic analysis of the lives of criminal young women is an important contribution to the growing body of research focused on women and their propensity to engage in offending behaviour and could help criminal justice agencies to look at the way they manage these women. Specifically it could inform their decision-making processes based on real life histories of offending women rather than relying on anecdotal and often androcentric work. The text offers useful insights into working with these girls in the 21st century to those who work or study in the criminal justice field, and indeed is relevant for anyone who is interested in the place of young women in the criminal system.