Female violent offenders: moral panics or more serious offenders?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 April 2008
• Author: Kruttschnitt, Candace,Gartner, Rosemary,Hussemann, Jeanette
• Published date: 01 April 2008
• Author: Kruttschnitt, Candace

Nearly 40 years ago, in research conducted for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Ward and his colleagues, asked 'Are women more aggressive in committing violent crimes today than in the past?' The reason they asked this question, and others have continued to, is the common fear that women, as the putative gatekeepers of social morality, are changing. Using data from the same prison Ward and his colleagues relied on to document the nature of women's violent offences, we examine whether and how the characteristics and crimes of incarcerated female offenders have changed. In so doing, we also seek to explain observed patterns of stability and change over the last third of the 20th century in women's crimes of violence and the moral panics that circumscribe violent criminality by women.

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Almost 40 years ago, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence charged David Ward and his colleagues with providing data to shed light on women's involvement in crimes of violence (Ward, Jackson, & Ward, 1969). The backdrop for their analysis for the National Commission, was surprisingly thin--Lombroso's The female offender (1893), Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's Five hundred delinquent women (1934) and Pollak's The criminality of women (1950)--and certainly justified the need for their report. To obtain information on a relatively large number of women who committed crimes of violence, they turned to data Ward and another colleague had collected from the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s (Ward & Kassebaum, 1965), which they then supplemented with data from a sample of women at the same institution in the late 1960s. Today, many would view their study as a curious relic of a bygone era, given that research on female offending is not only common but generative of special symposiums and journal issues such as this. Nevertheless, the central questions they addressed in 1969--are women more aggressive in committing violent crimes today than in the past and do any observed changes in their criminality emanate from changes in gender role requirements?--remain as relevant today as they were then.

The answers to these questions have varied over time but perhaps what remains most intriguing is the resilience of this line of inquiry. While increases in female offending were linked to changing gender roles early in the 20th century (Bishop, 1931), it was Freda Adler's (1975) sensationalisation of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs), in concert with second-wave feminism, that contributed to a surge in scholarly and media discourse on women offenders in the 1970s. Adler argued that just as women were taking advantage of newfound opportunities in the labour market, so also were they expanding their roles in illegal activities. In the introduction to her book, Adler asserted that '[t]he phenomenon of female criminality is but one wave in the rising tide of female assertiveness--a wave which has not yet crested and may even be seeking its level uncomfortably close to the high-water mark set by male violence' (Adler, 1975, p. 1). While scholars found her analysis of UCR data wanting and were quite successful in debunking the link between feminism and female offending (see, e.g., Box & Hale, 1984; Steffensmeier, 1978, 1980, 1983), this argument never quite lost its hold particularly, but not exclusively (see, e.g., Fox & Levin, 2000), in media accounts of female offending (see, e.g., Faludi, 1991; Chesney-Lind, 2006).

In the late 1980s and early years of the 1990s, women were once again swept into the concern over rising crime rates in the United States. Even though the upsurge in crime was linked to the crack markets, and women were targeted as both users and small-scale dealers (Inciardi, Lockwood, & Pottieger, 1993), it was the problem of prenatal drug exposure that caught the media's attention (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 1994, pp. 216-219). In California, some state legislators and prosecutors devoted substantial efforts to criminalising drug-using women. As Gomez (1997) and Logan (1999) point out, women of colour were particularly targeted in this campaign thereby racialising and linking the images of the unfit mother and the female offender. Crack-cocaine was thought to make women promiscuous and destroy their maternal instincts and the prospect of women abandoning their children in pursuit of drugs and the underground economy, much as men had always done, was particularly threatening to 'old-fashioned patriarchal definitions of family roles' (Bourgois, 1995, pp. 276-77).

Females were also targeted in the relatively recent furore over gangs. There is a long tradition of scholarly research on male gangs and despite the persistent stereotype that this is an 'intensely male activity' (Moore, 1991, pp. 136-137), females always have been part of the gang scene. Even so, early research on this topic noted the presence of girl gang members only in passing and primarily in the context of 'individual maladjustment and the presumably sexual nature of [gang] girls' delinquency' (Miller, 2001, p. 3). As gangs proliferated across the United States in the last 2 decades of the 20th century, the media generated a panic over the so-called new phenomenon of 'gansta girls' and characterised them as particularly wild or cold-blooded (Dietrich, 1998). Some academic researchers were not far behind in contributing to this construction of the 'new' female gang member. For example, Vigil (2002, p. 24) argued that Latina gang members were more apt 'to take on the persona of a crazy person' than their Latino counterparts and Taylor (1993), reviving notions of changing gender relations and the increased autonomy of women, described the African-American women in Detroit gangs as a product of black female emancipation (c.f., e.g., Moore, 1991).

Critical scholarly analyses of women and crime (and especially violent crime) point out that much of this social concern about female offending is really nothing more than agitation over the shifting nature of gendered social boundaries (Gilbert, 2002; Jones, 1980; Pearson, 1997; Stanko, 2001). Harkening back to the very basic sociological question of 'why does a community assign one form of behaviour rather than another to the deviant class', they argue--much as Erikson (1966, p. 8) did in his classic study of the witch hunts in Massachusetts in the 1600s--that deviance appears 'in a community at exactly those points where it is most feared' (p. 22). Because gender roles in late modernity have been changing, as more women have become heads of households and single parents, the traditional spheres of informal control over women's lives have weakened. As such, the ongoing concern with women's criminality, a concern that was heightened over the last third of the 20th century, may be the product of a perceived 'collapse of informal norms of restraint' (Garland, 2001, p. 195) and a sense that there has been a 'decline in morality and discipline within the family' (Tyler & Boeckmann, 1997, p. 237), as opposed to a legitimate response to changes in the nature of women's criminality.

Adjudicating between these two alternatives--one which suggests that the concern with women's crime reflects unease with shifting gender roles and the other that suggests that this concern is based on real changes in female offending--is not easy. (1) Despite a morbid fascination with infamous cases that involve female violent offenders and what these cases might reveal about women's place (or lack thereof) in society (e.g., Jones, 1980; Morrissey, 2003), there is relatively little research on how women's involvement in crimes of violence has changed over time. Numerous quantitative analyses of aggregate trends in the gender distribution of violent crime exist (e.g., Kruttschnitt, 1994; O'Brien, 1999; Steffensmeier et al., 2005), but explorations of possible changes in the characteristics and contexts of female violent offending are rare. Some scholars have suggested that women's involvement in homicides outside the domestic sphere may be increasing (Kruttschnitt, Gartner, & Ferraro, 2002, p. 546); and a few studies using cross-national and historical data have linked changes in the targets of women's offending to changes in their social and legal status (Boritch & Hagan, 1990; Gillis, 1996; Kruttschnitt, 1995). But these studies rely largely on aggregate-level data and none focus on changes in the last third of the 20th century.

To obtain information on the nature of women's criminal activity, scholars have to turn to recent ethnographies of particular types of female offenders to obtain information on the nature of women's criminal activity--for example, life histories of female violent offenders residing in three 'hyperghettoised' neighbourhoods in New York City (Baskin & Sommers, 1998), women living and working in the drug markets of the Bushwick neighbourhood of New York City (Maher, 1997), and black gang and nongang girls in St Louis and Columbus (Miller, 2001). Although such studies provide different contexts and frames for understanding gender relations in violence, on their own they are not able to address the questions of whether and how women's participation in these activities has changed over time.

Exploring these questions therefore requires piecing together information from a range of different sources. In this article, we rely on data presented in the National Commission study by Ward and his colleagues, along with data we gathered in 1998 from the California Institution for Women (CIW)--the same women's prison they used for their analysis--and data from Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW), currently the largest prison for women in the world. (2) We focus particularly on women sent to prison for violent offences, while acknowledging that these women are not representative of all females who engage in these...