NCJ Number
159488
Date Published
1995
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This chapter examines various studies designed to explain female criminality.
Abstract
The discussion focuses on the writings of Lombroso and Ferrero, W.I. Thomas, and Pollak. What distinguishes writers on female crime is not only that they represent a particular criminological tradition, but that they seek to rationalize and to make intellectually acceptable a series of propositions about women and their consequences for criminal behavior. Women, in this view, are determined by their biology and their physiology. Their hormones and their reproductive role, inexorably determine their emotional characteristics, unreliability, childishness, enviousness, etc. These factors lead to female crime. Only women, however, are viewed as particularly dominated by their biology. Any adequate explanation of female crime in biological terms must explain why female but not male biology determines deviant behavior. Moreover, such explanations are overly deterministic, in that since most women experience the physiological changes discussed, a much higher crime rate should be predicted for women than for men. Women's deviance is also viewed as being peculiarly sexual. Thus, they are viewed as engaging in prostitution as an equivalent to normal crime in men (Lombroso, 1895) or as the key symptom of the "unadjusted" girl (Thomas, 1923). Even apparently nonsexual actions such as assault or theft are redefined as evidence of sexual repression (Pollak, 1961), or of the hysterical abnormality of the "born female criminal" (Lombroso and Ferrero, 1895).