Abstract
This paper outlines the origins of feminist criminology, tracing them to the 1960s, especially the social and cultural shifts of that period and the student movement, noting that approaches such as new deviancy theory did not provide any answers to the questions raised by pioneers in the field. The history of feminist perspectives is summarised and claims are asserted that these are the most successful developments in criminology of the second half of the 20th century. A number of cautions and criticisms are suggested, followed by several outstanding examples of recent scholarship and finally some ideas of blue sky thinking and proposals of areas which may be developed further in the future.
Introduction
In the history of criminology, which dates back over 200 years, feminist perspectives arrived relatively recently, in the 1960s, and are not yet 50 years old (Heidensohn, 1968, 2010).Yet these challenging views have gained a firm place in the canon and certainly have a future. In this paper, I suggest some of the directions which that future might take. It is important to trace the roots of this development in order to explain its success and its persistence and also because these origins still influence its shape, subject matter and main concerns.
The study of gender and crime has become one of the strongest and most enduring areas of criminological endeavour. Its origins lie primarily in the second wave feminism of the 1960s, which altered social, political and cultural consciousness profoundly. This was an era of major change, when older established ways were challenged by young people who marched against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, opposed university administrations, and experimented with new substances and lifestyles. These changes reflected a society, in the West at least, which was more affluent than it had ever been before and where a larger proportion of the younger generation were able to take part in higher education. Above all, this was a cultural shift, reflected in music, literature and art as well as the growing mass media. Thus the Beatles and the Rolling Stones became global phenomena and alternative youth cultures flourished (Hebdige, 1979). Unrest with the established order erupted in riots in Paris in May 1968, in West Berlin and, less seriously, in the ‘troubles’ at the London School of Economics in 1969.
In analysing student violence of this period, Paul Rock and I (we were both then junior lecturers in sociology at the LSE) noted that ‘Students themselves recognise their new status and the importance of their violent image’ (Rock and Heidensohn, 1969: 113, my italics). We went on to argue that media reactions and public attitudes, as well as the consciousness of the students themselves, were crucial to this new feature of contemporary society; we accorded ‘primary importance (to) … dramatic presentation of events and complaints which result from the use of violence’ as reasons for this turn of events (ibid: 114, original italics). In the same piece, we recorded the grandiose claims of activists about their aims, summed up by an Evening Standard journalist after interviewing one of them as follows: ‘An interestingly cohesive international force has emerged in the last year on the political scene—students of the world are rearing up at systems that are designed to isolate, repress or silence them’ (cited in Rock and Heidensohn, 1969: 117).
I have quoted from this article at some length to show how students and their actions changed, and were being perceived as changed, in the 1960s, but also how crucial media reactions were to this process. As became evident, the cautious alternative prediction with which we ended the chapter, that ‘if student militancy does continue (and there seems every likelihood that it will …)’, proved in the long run to be a poor one. To be fair to ourselves, our first likely scenario was that ‘there might be a de-escalation of protest, perhaps even a right wing reaction’ (ibid: 119). It is telling, too, as a near contemporary account and one in which, while we had both lived through and closely observed events in UK universities, we do not give any space to the one feature which was blossoming even then and has lasted until the present: the advent of second wave feminism. Even more remarkable is the fact that, shortly before we researched and wrote our ‘New Reflections’, I had published an article on ‘The Deviance of Women’ (Heidensohn, 1968) which was to become one of the founding texts of feminist criminology (Mooney, 2009). My only defence for this omission is that my paper, while anticipating much of what was to become the feminist agenda, was not written in language or using terms we would now recognise as feminist; in short, I was not myself aware of how significant this step was to become. There were many battles ahead and, for the moment, the main arena of criminology was not yet a place to fight them. Nevertheless, I had already raised the main issues which were to be taken up by feminist critics of our subject in the UK, the USA and Canada (Rafter and Heidensohn, 1995).
As this paper is to be part of a collection reflecting the 2011 York Deviancy Conference, which celebrated the past events, I should say, as I did at York in July, that, while I attended several of the symposia, and had at first, hopes of the insights New Deviancy theory might offer, I was disappointed, despite enjoying some of the stimulus there. I have argued elsewhere that this failure was eventually a plus (Heidensohn, 2010) and a loss only to those who did not realise what they were missing.
Pioneers
The first stage of this history can be seen as one of pioneering, one in which this territory was being claimed, mapped out and explored. Criminology was slower to respond to the influence of feminism than other areas of social science: the British Sociological Association held its first major conference on the subject in Aberdeen in the spring of 1973. Cohen and Taylor, however, in their confident account of the state of the sociology of deviance in Britain at the same time, mention not a whisper of such ideas, nor any awareness of their challenges. There is one reference in their chapter to the ‘tyranny … of “femininity”’ but this refers to the concept and it is linked to schizophrenia and sexual abnormality (sic) (Cohen and Taylor, 1975: 27).
My original demand in my 1968 paper was for a ‘crash programme of research, which telescopes decades of comparable studies of males’ (Heidensohn, 1968: 122). While this certainly did not happen immediately, by the late 1970s there was plenty of activity to record, and within another decade enough indeed to justify the production of summaries and updates on the state of play and whole texts on the subject (Heidensohn, 1985, 1987; Morris, 1987). Themes common to the initial critique were:
in most mainstream criminology women and girls were invisible and ignored; when they did appear their lives and experiences were distorted and stereotyped;
the notable differences between men and women in recorded crime rates—the ‘gender gap’—was not questioned or explored, leaving much of conventional theory weakened and inadequate;
a major programme of research on women and crime was needed to catch up with decades of neglect;
an important outcome would be the learning of valuable lessons for criminal justice policy for both sexes (Heidensohn, 1968, 2010).
The pioneering researchers achieved much of this agenda over the three decades from 1970 to 2000 (Britton, 2000). Progress was neither smooth nor instant, but the climate was propitious: higher education around the world was undergoing a period of growth; feminist perspectives were key features of the zeitgeist. Political changes in Eastern Europe and South Africa put radical ideas on the agenda, particularly as far as human rights and criminal justice were concerned. Major debates developed in the field, such as the ‘liberation causes crime’ argument (Adler, 1975; Simon, 1975) even if this turned out to be a distraction and not supported by the evidence (Smart, 1977). Chivalry versus equity as characteristics of the criminal justice system as far as women and girls were concerned (Daly, 1994; Eaton, 1986) was another debate which decisively shifted these issues into the wider arena of mainstream criminology.
Unexpected offspring of the advance of gender studies appeared in criminology: raising the profile of females and studying their lives led to a focus on their victimisation, especially as a consequence of domestic violence and rape (Kelly, 1988; Stanko, 1981). The public agenda, policy, policing priorities and even the legal framework were affected as a result. Another initially unintended consequence was the emergence of the analysis of masculinities and crime which grew out of the new emphasis on males as the dominant sex in criminal behaviour and problematised this (Messerschmidt, 1995; Newburn and Stanko, 1994). New theoretical and methodological approaches were advanced and enhanced as scholars stressed the personal and the political in their work and strove to fill the gap described by Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) as ‘the generalizability problem’. By this they meant the failure of most criminological explanations to account for gender, gender differences and the experiences of women as well as men in relation to crime and criminal justice.
Expansion and Consolidation
The next phase of development was one of both expansion and consolidation in the field with research, teaching and public policy all showing growth and widespread, if conditional, acceptance. Numerous indicators testify to the massive expansion of the field in the late 20th century. The website of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology records the substantial growth of papers given at the Society’s annual meetings on relevant topics in the period. Literature reviews of published articles show not only huge expansion of the area but also considerable recognition of it as a key topic to be covered in textbooks (Heidensohn, 1996, 2006) both in its own right and in general criminology texts (Newburn, 2007/2012). There was clear evidence of global interest: a key international congress was held in Montreal in 1991 (Rafter and Heidensohn, 1995) with delegates attending from around the world for whom the discourse of feminist criminology was already a familiar one.
Issues highlighted in the considerable number of research studies completed by the turn of the millennium included:
the economic basis of much female offending; this was in contrast to the biological, psychological and sexual characteristics and motivation stressed by the very few earlier writers on women and crime, such as Lombroso and Pollak;
the range and diversity of female offending, disproving the notion that women confined their activities to prostitution or shoplifting. In fact, they are represented in all categories of offence, including homicide and violence. There are, however, marked gender differences in recorded crime, with the number and frequency of male activities, their greater professionalism and recidivism all being notable. This proved to be true of self-reported behaviour, albeit with narrower differentials (Heidensohn, 2004);
links between emphasised forms of masculinity and some types of offending were asserted;
the deconstruction of notions of gender (as well as many other analytical concepts) and the connecting of the gender dimensions with others—such as race, age, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation—to produce what is rather clumsily called ‘intersectionality’ became both an important criticism of feminism and then a more complex and appropriate form of analysis;
subsections of the research field had been marked out and developed in markedly fruitful ways. Studies of women’s experiences in the criminal courts and their penal treatment particularly flourished. Debates about the relative strengths of the competing notions of double deviance and of chivalry to typify these experiences collided;
research projects on gender and crime were being undertaken across the world and international agencies such as the United Nations were supporting the collection and comparison of survey data on topics such as domestic violence, sexual assault and trafficking for sexual purposes, leading to the concept of blurred boundaries, where the links between the status of the same women as victims and as perpetrators were recognised;
at national level the impact on the public policy agenda was considerable: many nations had altered their legal and social welfare structures to respond to research on domestic and sexual violence;
recruitment of women to law enforcement agencies became a priority in increasing numbers of countries, based on evaluative research which had demonstrated their competence (Brown and Heidensohn, 2000);
there were signs that ways of treating female offenders were being taken much more seriously, with extra resources being invested in them and new regimes adopted in places as varied as Ireland, Canada and Britain.
Cautions and Criticisms
It would be wrong to view the history of gender and crime research over the past four decades as smooth and successful. Progress was at first slow and has remained patchy. There remain gaps in both issues addressed and approaches developed. For obvious reasons, such as ease of access, there are more studies of women in prison, fewer of their experience of community punishment. Theorisation of the gender gap and related questions is still relatively unsophisticated. As discussed below, there has been a serious engagement by mainstream researchers with a select number of problems on the gender and crime agenda, but comparative silence from others. Indifference to questions raised by gender perspectives persists in the work of contemporary scholars such as Cohen, Garland, Wacquant, Young and Rose. In one sense, this suggests that little has changed since the earliest feminist critiques appeared, but nowadays a rapid response team of quick-firing scholars will respond—and be published (see, for example, Gelsthorpe, 2010).
Disdain or omission may represent implicit forms of criticism, but more serious ones have come from within the field. Many years ago now, Smart suggested that too high a price might be paid for raising the profile of the study of women and crime, and a version of what may be called the Pandora effect has been postulated recently by some scholars. Snyder argues that the global trend towards greater and harsher punishment of women is an unintended consequence of feminists whose work has forced criminal justice agencies to take women much more seriously. Worrall has used a similar argument about girls’ delinquency in Australia and the UK, while Steffensmeier and colleagues tested ‘behaviour change’ and ‘policy change’ hypotheses to explain recorded increases in female involvement in violent crime in the USA (but see below for further contributions to this debate). They concluded that policy change was the more plausible theory and attributed it to the impact of greater equality and enhanced awareness of gender issues.
I conclude this section with a bold assertion: of all the new or transformed concepts and theories which had an impact on mid-to-late 20th-century criminology, feminist perspectives have proved to be the most robust and the most fruitful. It is with no schadenfreude whatsoever that one can observe that critical theory and left realism are discarded or moribund. The sociology of deviance has had its obituary written, though that was certainly premature. Feminism is still a powerful set of perspectives: this owes a good deal to its varied and diverse heritage. As I recorded above, the rise of the second wave women’s movement coincided with the heyday of the ‘New Deviancy’ in Britain and they shared some characteristics. Both were products of an innovative era and flourished in the expanded theatre of higher education, they were equally outcomes of dialectical engagements with more traditional forces: deviance with the older approaches to the study of crime, but feminists took these on board too and also found they had to contend with the indifference of colleagues and the failure of these ‘new’ perspectives to offer answers to their questions. As a result, they sought them elsewhere in various feminist perspectives (Rafter and Heidensohn, 1995) and were undoubtedly seasoned and strengthened by their encounters and experiences.
By any measure, the outcomes have been successful: journals have been launched, texts written, or are revised in second editions; no general text is complete now without its chapters on gender and crime, and feminist criminology. I now turn to consider the future of this field.
Conclusions and Proposals
I have outlined above my argument that research on gender and crime, its relevance to public policy opinion is well established as a field and that its future looks assured. It is nevertheless important to look at the overall position and review, in management jargon, its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Strengths include:
there is a substantial and growing body of work, which is widely accepted and cited;
there are large numbers of postgraduates doing relevant research and significant, but fewer and in junior posts, numbers of faculty;
arguably a fundamental cultural shift has taken place in criminology: female offending was not of interest to anyone 40 years ago, but now it is—to scholars, policy-makers, criminal justice professionals, and to offenders themselves;
notable impact in the UK at least on policy debates about the penal treatment of women as a host of reports and studies testify—Fawcett, Carlen et al., Corston and Gelsthorpe, as do the various government initiatives which ensued (see Heidensohn and Silvestri, 2012) for a review);
the same is true, though with a smaller research resource involved, of several areas in criminal justice and law enforcement—gender and policing, the relevant skills needed for officers, diversity in the judiciary and other criminal justice systems (CJS) professionals.
Among obvious weaknesses are:
little innovation on theoretical approaches;
gaps in the range of topics researched, especially in intersectional areas, but also equity, gender in criminal justice professions such as probation and in the history of crime and punishment;
the continued failure of some of the major writers in the field to give more than token acknowledgement to gender in their work remains a limitation—for them and for the subject.
Threats:
I have already noted the worldwide upward trend in the penalisation of women and girls which can be construed as an example of taking gender too seriously in the study of crime;
what Chesney-Lind (2006) called, in the US context, ‘vengeful equity’—a form of backlash against women and gender-aware studies has been stressed as a danger in a polarised, punitive, post-credit-crunch world;
in the world beyond the West, and in western nations also, there are too many examples of the most egregious gendered crimes, from genital mutilation, through abuse by soldiers and police to so-called honour killings.
Opportunities and the Future
I am no Pollyanna, but I do see, the threats and weaknesses outlined above notwithstanding, reasons to be glad and even confident. This is a field which is well established within criminology and one that has an assured outlook. My predictions for that future are based on that strength and maturity and hence the likelihood that research is likely to continue to follow present trends, and I indicate some of these below.
Other opportunities will present themselves as imbalances are redressed and there is certainly scope for paradigm shifts in the study of gender and crime. Indeed, the dominance and persistence of feminist and feminist-inspired perspectives in research in this area is one of its most remarkable features. This selection is indicative, not comprehensive—that would be impossible to achieve in this allotted space; it is also inevitably focused on work from the English-speaking world, but there are comparable initiatives in other countries and languages.
First, a brief outline of several outstanding examples of recent scholarship, which represent continuity with key issues raised by pioneers, but also advance knowledge and understanding. Even more importantly, they indicate where research is and should be going.
I then suggest some ‘blue sky’ ideas where more, or new, research projects should be focused.
The Gender Gap
The first star project is really a set of serious papers which appeared in the May 2009 issue of Criminology. In these, Lauritsen and her colleagues (Heimer, Lauritsen and Lynch, 2009; Lauritsen, Heimer and Lynch, 2009) and Steffensmeier and his group (Schwartz, Steffensmeier, Zhong and Ackerman, 2009) put forward, debate and disagree over their respective analyses of US data on the gender gap and, in particular, in male and female trends in violent offending. Steffensmeier et al. had earlier published papers, in Criminology and elsewhere, developing their interpretations, which Lauritsen and co challenge. The arguments are dense, complex and somewhat technical. What is most striking, however, is that this is the oldest question raised in the pioneer critiques of mainstream criminology (Heidensohn, 2006) and it is now being given care and attention in leading journals. No conclusive answers can be offered to the queries raised, but I suggest that such work will and should continue and that it should be extended to other countries and to other aspects of the gender gap.
Gender and Justice in the UK
The second, contrasting case study is, again, made up of a number of reports and projects on gender and justice, this time in Britain. Indeed this was, during the first decade of the 21st century, a very busy quarter of policy space. Research on the needs of women involved in the criminal justice system, their families and the policies directed at them flourished (Carlen, 2002; Condry, 2006). In addition, numerous reports from pressure groups, individuals and activists used this research or their own, to engage in representations about the special needs of female offenders, the social costs of neglecting these and the possibilities for distinctive approaches (see Heidensohn and Silvestri, 2012, for a summary). The (Labour) government themselves commissioned, and partly accepted, a report on the subject (Corston, 2007) and promoted initiatives. In the past there have been similar initiatives which have faded away, but this has been handled differently in both official responses and especially in the way that the voluntary sector has responded by building up what has come to be known as the Corston Coalition, a collaboration between over twenty trusts and foundations to ensure continued pressure on government and support for the Corston recommendations (Kaufmann, 2011). The terms of the debate have been very much those of feminism, and the implementation of policy proposals depended on several key figures in the last Labour government who can be called femocrats.
All this activity generated evaluation and criticism of its own. It is not, at the time of writing, possible to say that permanent and effective changes in penal policy were accomplished (Kaufmann, 2011) nor that, where innovations such as women’s centres were established, their aims had been achieved (Jolliffe, Hedderman, Palmer and Hollin, 2011). What is welcome, and should continue, is this form of research-related debate where participants acknowledge some of the same parameters to that debate. Other countries, with rising trends in the penalisation of women, could engage in such debates.
Girls, Guys and Gangs
The next signal project is very different: it is (mainly) the work of one outstanding young scholar, Jody Miller (2008), whose research has focused at street level on young women, and men too, who are involved with gangs, fighting and surviving. Using a range of qualitative techniques, she observes and records how her subjects make sense of their lives. It is subtle, nuanced research, in which she has already covered young African Americans and also how urban youths in St Louis, all of whom have witnessed shootings, justify their own fights and at the same time, belittle those—‘cat fights’—among girl gang members. More research like this, exploring masculinity, femininity and crime, should be achieved in the future and extended to other topics and areas.
Comparative Study of Gender, Justice and Human Rights
My last example again has a quite distinctive approach and focus and is a remarkable demonstration of intersectionality, in which Oliver Phillips (2006) considers gender equality in two adjacent countries, Zimbabwe and South Africa, through the lens of law, post-colonialism and feminism. He shows the complexity in analysing and then achieving justice in such societies and how opposite outcomes can arise, despite formal constitutional constraints. He uses historical research as well as local observation to illustrate his study and has also explored the status and treatment of gay men and women in these nations. This work illustrates how well issues of ethnicity, gender and culture can be explored and how promising a human rights framework can be.
Blue Sky Thinking
There are a range of other ideas and concepts which are already being explored and tried out but which I predict we will hear more of. One is that of human rights perspectives, a massively growing area of study and one which holds real promise for achieving justice for women (Silvestri, 2006). Britain already has in place requirements for gender equality, which impose duties on public bodies to comply. It is evident, however, that these laws are not being respected, when, for instance, children are penalised because their parent (usually their mother) receives a custodial sentence (Epstein, 2011).
I began this paper by noting the (relatively) short history of feminist criminology and going on to insist that the roots and development of that history are critical to predicting its future. Yet most of that narrative has yet to be written. What we have so far is fragmentary: there are short biographies of individuals (Eaton, 2000; Mooney, 2010) and autobiographical accounts such as Stanko (1998). What is vital is both a project to record systematically the memoirs of key players in academia, activism and policy-making, and scholarly study of the gestation and growth of the field. (There has been such a scheme in the USA, under the auspices of the American Society of Criminology.) Rock (1996) has produced an account of the rebuilding of Holloway Prison in London but this is unique; there should surely be one which explores the Labour government’s engagement with policies for women offenders. Oakley’s biography of Barbara Wootton (Oakley, 2011) presents and reviews the life of a formidable campaigner for justice and human rights. Wotton did not see herself as a feminist, but with her often quoted assertion that ‘if men behaved like women, the courts would be idle and the prisons empty’ she can be seen as one of the founding mothers of the approach. Few of the pioneers are as notable as she was, but A Critical Woman is an exemplary account and one which offers many lessons about wielding influence, conducting research and campaigns, and living life as a modern woman.
There are undoubtedly archive treasures yet to be mined, as Oakley did for her book, which would offer rich seams. Activist groups such as Women In Prison hold them and the Griffins Society, originally a charity devoted to aftercare for women leaving prison, commissioned their own history (Rumgay, 2006) from an academic, showing what can be achieved. Another major source, which Betsy Stanko has argued strongly for, are administrative statistics and survey material which tend to be under-exploited, as they are a great source for evidence-based challenges to existing policy directions.
There has been comparatively little work which has looked at media representations of deviant women or deployed the approaches of contemporary cultural studies to do so. Certainly, a few topics, in particular those rare women who kill, have been the focus of some attention and individual cases such as Myra Hindley have been studied, but this is an area which lacks, and needs, major analysis. One striking feature is that some of the fictional depictions of women offenders and women in the criminal justice system have been disproportionate to their lives (think of the TV show Bad Girls) and other topics have been closer to ‘reality’, yet analyses of these aspects and their significance are very limited. Dixon of Dock Green, a very early TV police series, has been accorded iconic status by serious, male police researchers who have explored its importance at great length (McLaughlin, 2006; Reiner, 2004), while Cagney and Lacey and Prime Suspect, game-changing American and British female cop shows, have not attracted anything like the same attention, despite their massive success (Heidensohn and Brown, 2012). A further aspect of this is that the mass media have played a vital role in promoting gender stereotypes of and to women (and men) but they are also the route through which most people learn about feminism and where debates occur.
The limitations of existing theories have already been cited as a weakness in the review above and hardly need repeating. Rather, some of the most high-profile of current concepts should be tested to see how far they could account for gender and gender differences. Thus the thriving debate on penality and the state needs more than just an added section on women—it requires to be proved against the old generalisability notion.
At a very different level, it is time to be more self-reflective, or for this to be the aim of a generation of younger scholars. There is much debate—it is very marked in the UK—on questions of impact and influence in all academic subjects. New ways of measuring these factors (‘metric’) are devised and discarded almost every day. Research on gender and crime, and especially feminist perspectives on this area, has been one of the most robust, resilient and important features of modern criminology. Why is this so? There have been various descriptions of phases of that development, but as yet there is no in-depth history or sociology of knowledge. This is partly an archival, partly an empirical project that is urgently needed.
Since I first became engaged in the project of building and developing feminist criminology I have made summaries of the story so far and suggested likely developments to come. Some of them have proved prescient, some not. What happens next is more, and more safely, in the hands of other generations than ever before; it will be for them to decide and achieve. I have tried here to offer suggestions, which are coloured with hope and confidence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Betsy Stanko and I worked together on an earlier version of this paper. I am most grateful for all her help and advice.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.