Feminist Criminology

On March 12, 2002, Andrea Yates was found guilty of murder for drowning her five children. Media reports of the Yates trial indicate that she was judged according to the idealization of mothers as self-sacrificial and nurturing. This article uses the theory of the sociology of the body to analyze Yates’s crime in relation to mental illness, gender roles, and embodied motherhood. The authors present a brief history of the crime of filicide and discuss the social factors that contribute to maternal filicide and the mental insanity defense in relation to the Yates trial. The authors conclude that there are no easy answers to the maternal filicide conundrum but that it is certain the Yates trial will bring renewed attention to the embodiment of such women in defining the criminality of their actions

The article examines the exportation of legal “best practices” in the field of domestic violence from the United States to other countries. The policies and programs being exported mostly focus on the legal system as the primary mode of responding to domestic abuse. However, women’s advocacy groups internationally have developed broader analyses of domestic violence, linking the issue of domestic violence to human rights, as well as economic and health issues and state concerns. This article argues that advocates in the United States have much to learn from their counterparts abroad and should proceed cautiously in exporting U.S. “models” of intervention in domestic violence

Fear of violence appears to be widespread among women, and many feminist scholars attribute such fear to gender inequality at a societal level. The present article uses qualitative interviews with 32 women older than the age of 50 to determine the context in which women perceive violence in their neighborhoods and communities and how their present experience with fear and violence differs from childhood experience. The authors also assess the various mechanisms women employ to keep themselves safe from harm and how daily routines are altered to avoid violence. Using feminist theory as a foundation for analysis, an ecological system of violence is constructed, which incorporates the individual, neighborhood, and societal environments

Although several studies find that the most dangerous part of an intimate relationship for women is when it breaks up, relatively few studies look at women who want to break up a relationship, are in the process of leaving, or who have left a relationship. This qualitative exploratory study looks at incidents of sexual assault committed by former husbands or cohabitants in the lives of rural women in Ohio. Male peer support, which has previously been examined only in studies of college men and men in urban areas, was a constant theme among this study’s respondents, in addition to patriarchal control and the use of alcohol and drugs. These women suffered multiple serious sexual assaults and experienced other harms, including psychological assaults and the destruction of prized objects