This article’s aim is to analyse domestic violence using official data from the CSEW, which is
an annual victimization survey that takes in consideration a sample of adults aged over 16.
There are three approaches to domestic violence: the first approach exhibits coercive
control and is gender assymetrical; the second one does not involve coercive control and is gender symmetrical; and the third approach states that domestic violence is gender asymmetrical and escalates overtime if the victim is not able to resist it due to lack of resources and support. Therefore, the third approach looks not only at violence and motives, but also at economy and society. In this article the authors tries to clarify the meaning of violence, coercive control, and the requirments for a crime to be considered domestic violence.
To prove that domestic violence is gendered, they applied the three approaches on seven issues: violence and coercion, violence and harm, repetition, seriousness, motivation and resilience, different types of escalation and gender.
For the first two issues, statistics reveal that 74% of domestic crime victimes are females and 82% of domestic crimes are against women. For the issue of repetition, they found that 85% of domestic violence cases are series crimes, and mostly reported by women. Seriousness is also gender, since about 77% of all the victims reporting injuries from domestic violence are women.
The finding also show that frequency and seriousness vary based on the economic resilience of the victim. Gender and domestic relations are to be taken into account when analysing a violent crime, as well as socio-economic resources of the victim.
This article explains how media misrepresent sex crimes. Crimes such as rape and sexual abuse receive a substantial amount of media attention, but they don’t often represent the reality of sex crimes. The media often focus on sexual assaults committed by strangers, who often have specific characteristics; they are dangerous and violent black men, who come from a low socio-economic status. But statistics show that the 90% of rapes and sexual abuse crimes come from people who knew the victims, in environments familiar to them. This kind of sexual assault is called “simple rape”, while sexual crimes committed by strangers are called “real rape”. The over representation of the latter, leads women to change their behavior in order to prevent rape from happening. But another problem linked to “real rape” is also the blaming of the victim and the consideration of things like walking in the streets at night or having a flirting behavior, contributing factors to sexual assaults.
Victim blaming is more common when victims come from low socio-economic environments or they come from minorities groups. Crimes against middle class white women are far more likely to be represented in the media than crimes against black women. The author tries to explain current taboos and myths concerning rape and sexual crimes, such as the myth of the black man or Muslim rapist, the myth of false allegations that leads women to avoid speaking up about the topic in fear they won’t be believed. The author also analyses child sexual abuse and tries to explain how the medias distorted the character of the “pedophile” by giving them specific traits that don’t reflect the truth (homosexuality, childless men, strangers etc.), and analyses sexual offences online such as revenge porn. In conclusion the article considers the evolution of the media and the representation of sexual offences, looking at pornography, entertainment and the feminist movements that are contributing to change how we view women and sex crimes.
Claire M. Renzetti is the Judy Conway Patton Endowed Chair in the Center for Research on Violence Against Women, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, as well as editor of several journals. “Feminist Criminology” Is part of Tim Newburn’s series of books “Key Ideas in Criminology”, which aims to explore the issues, principals and controversies in Criminology, giving an overall knowledge of the subject through authoritative essays by different authors. In this volume the author follows the development of feminist criminology, which was generated from the Women’s Movement of the 1970, to counter the male dominance in the criminology field, that not only excluded women in the criminological research, but didn’t even consider them as subjects. She examines the different types of feminism that developed from the 1970 to modern days, starting with liberal feminist criminology, postmodern feminism, to reach black/multiracial feminist criminology. In her book she attempts to show how these perspectives influenced the criminology field, the criminal justice system but also their limitations. It analyses how and to what extent feminist criminology influenced our social structures and social institutions, as well as education and research. The aim is to study criminal offending and victimization as fundamentally gendered, in order to change public policies and to achieve more equitable social structures.
This journal article introduces a study, conducted by the authors, that analyses the effectiveness of the aggression replacement training (ART), which is a behavioural training meant to reduce recidivism among criminal offenders. It is a three-step program that includes interpersonal skills training, anger control and moral education. This type of research has been based on a sample of 1,124 convicted offenders from The Swedish Prison and Probation Services 2003-2009, that were matched in the study with the 3,372 convicted offenders that did not take part in ART.
The method used in this research is called propensity score matching, that reflects the probability to be assigned to a certain treatment or category considering the covariates, that in this research were age, gender, ethnicity, area of residence, education and childhood socio-economic status. Each of these covariates are calculated for each individual, giving their propensity score. They are then matched with ART non-attending offenders with a similar propensity score, to establish the rates of recidivism and the efficiency of the ART.
Results showed minimal improvements in recidivism among adult criminal offenders, but the program seemed very beneficial among children and teenagers, who are the targets the aggression replacement training was originally created for.
Rosemary Barberet is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department of the John Jay
College for Criminal Justice, where she currently directs the Master of Arts degree program in International Crime and Justice. In this volume, she focuses on women as offenders,
victims and justice professionals in the international framework. Through providing
background and information, she leads the path to the understanding of the forces shaping women and crime. The first topic introduced by the author is globalization and how it affected female offending and female victimization, and then she tries to analyze and explain women’s crime, victimization and role in the justice system by considering international perspectives and how human rights could affect these three elements. It also considers the role of women in the international criminal justice system.
From the 1980s there has been a more attentive focus on gender and research about women, not only in the criminology and criminal justice field, but also in international relations, health and other fields. This book centers its analysis on women in crime and female issues in the criminal justice system. The book is divided in three sections: the first section is Global Forces and introduces topics such as globalization, development, human rights and activism; the second section is Violence Against Women, which analyses violence against women both in times of war and peace, sex work, prostitution, and trafficking; the third and last section is Justice for Women, which talks about offending, incarceration and women viewed as criminal justice professionals.