Female Criminal Liberated - From What?

• NCJ Number: 73441
• Journal: Deviance et societe Volume: 3 Issue: 4 Dated: (December 1979) Pages: 363-376
• Author(s): D Groman; C Faugeron
• Date Published: 1979
• Length: 14 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Best Practice/State-of-the-Art Review
• Language: French
• Country: Switzerland

Annotation

Although recent increases in, and the emergence of, new forms of female criminality are ascribed to cultural and political influences such as women's liberation movements, old stereotypes of female societal roles still prevail.

Abstract

Criminological literature has generally neglected the phenomenon of female criminality because of the quantitative insignificance of female offenders as well as on account of age-old perceptions. Women criminals were thought of as monstrous aberrations and pathological exceptions to the norm as represented by the overwhelming majority of women who fulfill their biologically-determined roles of spouses and mothers, naturally incapable of delinquency and violence. This concept of female offenders has determined paternalistic police and judicial attitudes toward them. Female juvenile offenders are regarded as slightly feeble-minded, wayward children, to be protected and treated rather than punished. Violent acts committed by women are regarded as crimes of passion, whose perpetrators deserve to be allowed all possible extenuating circumstances. On the other hand, female sexual trangressions are regarded with a severity never applied to their male counterparts, due to the same traditional role perceptions and expectations. Women are arrested, tried, and convicted with significantly less frequency than males, but women generally receive longer sentences than men--usually indeterminate terms to allow for their rehabilitation and reintegration into the appointed wife-and-mother societal role. Current increases in female criminality are blamed on women's liberation movements, rather than or changes in socioeconomic factors and new aspirations on the part of marginal women who, unable to fulfill them, drift into deviance and crime. Generally, further research is needed into female criminality and into the ambivalent attitudes of members of the judicial establishment toward them. The numerical insignificance of female representation in criminal justice statistics must not perpetuate the indifference of criminologists concerning their problems. Fifty-six references are appended.