Many of the theories and concepts discussed in chapter 12 of Introduction to Criminology: Why Do They Do It (Schram & Tibbetts, 2018) are related to research studies that have previously been done. One of these concepts are the subtypes of feminism: liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist. Liberal feminism or mainstream feminism, places emphasis on the assumption that inequality between men and women in offending is due to the gender inequality in education, employment, ect. Radical feminism says that gender inequality is due to the male need/desire to control women and their sexuality and reproduction potential (Schram & Tibbetts, 2018). Marxist feminism says that the cause of gender inequality is due to hierarchical relations of control among men. Socialist feminism is a mixture of Marxist feminism and radical feminism, attributing gender inequality to male domination and political and economic relations (Schram & Tibbetts, 2018).
Otto Pollack argued that women were more criminal than people realized and proposed three questions to assess the criminality of women. First, “Are those crimes in which women seem to participate exclusively, or to a considerable extent, offenses that are known to be greatly underreported?” Second, “Are women offenders generally less often detected than are men offenders?” Third, “Do women, if apprehended, meet with more leniency than do men?” (Schram & Tibbetts, 2018). Feminist criminology started to evolve with the realization that gender was often not accounted for in criminological theories, despite being a significant predictor of criminal behavior. As feminist criminology grew it started to incorporate new concepts such as multiracial feminism and pathways research (Schram & Tibbetts, 2018). Incorporating multiracial feminism into feminist theories was important, because a critiques of feminist theories was the focus it put on the experience of middle-class white women, excluding minority women. Feminist criminology and theories have guided policy and led to the development of several programs, one of which being gender-specific programming. Gender-specific programs target adolescent females and aim to foster a sense of community that is associated with the development and integration of a healthy identity (Schram & Tibbetts, 2018).
The first article “Women’s Status and Risk of Homicide Victimization: An Analysis with Data Disaggregated by Victim-Offender Relationship” by Lynne M/ Vieraitis, Tomìslav V. Kovandzic, and Sarah Britto studies the impact of women’s absolute status and their risk of homicide victimization by both intimate partners and nonintimate strangers. Several studies have attempted to study the link between relationships and homicide rates in the past, but the study of this article aims to further the topic in four major areas (Vieraitis, Kovandzic, & Britto, 2008). First, the homicide data is broken into categories based on victim-offender relationship to better measures intimate and nonintimate homicide victimization. Second, the dark figure of crime or missing crime data is accounted for using a mathematical allocation method. Third, data is drawn from the 2000 Census in order to construct women’s absolute status, gender inequality, and control variables. Fourth, Poisson regression is used to better analyze female homicide victimization (Vieraitis, Kovandzic, & Britto 2008).
In present day, there are four main subtypes of feminism: Marxist, liberal, radical, and socialist. Liberal feminism hypothesizes that gender inequality is the cause for violence against women, while radical feminism hypothesize that greater gender equality causes a backlash from the male gender that increase violence against women (Vieraitis, Kovandzic, & Britto 2008). Marxist feminism attributes violence against women to the absolute status of women, while socialist feminism attributes the violence to the absolute status of women and gender inequality. The subtypes are studied by doing a cross-sectional study on cities with a 2000 census population of 100,000 or greater (Vieraitis, Kovandzic, & Britto 2008). The study found that the data compared most similarly with Marxist feminism and socialist feminism explanations. The study found no support for radical or liberal feminism. Other significant findings include women’s absolute status having a significant correlation to female homicide victimization by intimate partners. On the other hand, there is not a significant correlation for women’s absolute status to female victimization by nonintimate (Vieraitis, Kovandzic, & Britto 2008).
The second article “Experiencing Community Through the Eyes of Young Female Offenders” by Paula Smith and William A. Smith studies the experience of female youth involved in youth corrections and the sense of community that they have built. Since recent decades, the rate of females entering the juvenile justice system has been on the rise. While females are still outnumbered by males in the justice system, they are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system (Smith & Smith, 2005). During 1992, the reauthorization of the Juvenile and Delinquency Prevent Act allocated funding for the development and implementation of gender specific programs. More specifically, female programs were instituted that addressed the specific needs of females in the justice system. One of these specific needs is the focus on identity and community. Marcia derived four main identity statuses during adolescents: moratorium, achievement, foreclosure, and diffusion (Smith & Smith, 2005). This study focuses mainly on the diffused identity of adolescents. This study also uses Valentine Recommendations, which focuses on fostering relationships. It is important to take into account relationships in gender-specific programs because adolescent female criminal behavior is closely related to their relationships with important people in their lives.
Because of the importance of relationships to adolescent females, it is important that programs foster a sense of community. McMillan and Chavis attribute community to four factors: membership, influence, the integration and fulfillment of individual needs, and shared emotional connection (Smith & Smith, 2005). To study the impact of community and identity in the gender specific programs, interviews were held with thirty individuals with first offense ranging from age 10-14. From the interviews, three motifs appeared. First, there was a sense of community fostered by the programs that allowed the girls to begin to deal with their incarceration and related issues (Smith & Smith, 2005). Second, the girls were pushed to develop complete and future-oriented views of themselves by the program. Thirdly, the programs helped the girls prepare for the transition from the justice system back into their lives outside of the justice system. There were however shortcomings of these programs, one being the short length in which girls leave right when they start making progress in the program (Smith & Smith, 2005).
The third article, “From Victims to Survivors to Offenders: Women’s Routes of Entry and Immersion into Street Crime” by Mary E. Gilfus studies the ways in which women enters into criminal activity. The patterns by which women enter into criminal activity and the crimes that they commit are vastly different than that of males. Most notably is the difference between male and female offender is violent crime, men being much more likely to commit a violent crime (Gilfus, 1992). Within the female population, certain ethnicities are more likely to be arrested for crimes against persons. This has resulted in minority women comprising more than half of the adult female inmate population. This article studies the patterns by which women enter into crime by analyzing twenty comprehensive life interviews of incarcerated women. These women range from twenty to forty-one and represent a range of races and offense (Gilfus, 1992).
The interviews were evaluated with reconstruction of chronological life event histories, narrative coding of interview segments by themes, and thematic coding across interviews. Thematic coding led to the emergence of dominant themes such as violence, loss, and neglect with a sub theme being the role of the care giver and protector of the family (Gilfus, 1992). As the inmates grew into adolescence, previous themes were cast aside for questions of survival and escape. Many of the women grew into adulthood early on because of teen pregnancy or lack of a home. With the onset of adulthood, the commonalities of repeated victimization, drug addiction, street work, relationships with men involved in street crime, and the demands of motherhood became new patterns of the entrance into criminal behavior (Gilfus, 1992). The life histories of these women suggest that the violence they were consistently exposed to throughout their life can attribute to their criminal behavior. Despite the violence these women endured, they were committed to not enacting violence on others in their criminal activities (Gilfus, 1992).