NCJ Number
127260
Date Published
1987
Length
14 pages
Annotation
The depiction of female offenders and their serious violent crimes in Court reports by psychiatrists and probation officers in Great Britain follows a distinct and sexually specific pattern that tends toward the exoneration of the female offender and uses discursive techniques that are either absent or unusual in cases involving male offender.
Abstract
Thus, these reports systematically neutralize the assertion of the woman's guilt, responsibility, and dangerousness, thereby undermining any demand for punitive or custodial sanctions. Unlike reports regarding male offenders, reports regarding female offenders also deal extensively with the offender's mental condition, often asserting that at the time of the crime she was acting without conscious volition, without comprehension, or without meaning. The reports also emphasize the various privations and unhappiness that the defendant has endures and the importance of keeping the woman in her home and family. Such descriptions of violent female offenders are offensive to feminism in many ways, but they also sustain a logic that many feminist discussions support that emphasizes denial and exculpation of female criminality. Notes