Gender and Crime features 11 original essays from leading scholars in criminology. Grouped into three sections, “Gendered Offending,”“Gendered Victimization,” and “Intersectionalities,” the essays examine a range of topics concerning females' relation to crime, from girls' pathways to delinquency and incarcerated women's histories of victimization to maternal infanticide and the use of restorative justice in sexual assault cases. Hegemonic masculinities, sexualities and crime, women in the criminal justice system, and critical race theory are not covered. These works are generally well-researched and are balanced between quantitative and qualitative studies.
The dominant theme tying the volume together is the need to integrate traditional criminological theory with more recent feminist perspectives. While traditional criminological approaches are useful in predicting patterns in women's criminal offending and victimization, feminist perspectives are required to understand the substance of their experiences. For example, the book's first three essays, from Giordano et al.; Miller and Mullins; and Smith et al., respectively, each demonstrate how girls' pathways to offending, like boys', involve experiences with abuse, negative peer relations, parental neglect, and peer conflicts over status and reputation. Nevertheless, delinquent girls are more likely to have experienced sexual abuse and negative peer relationships with older males, important differences that service providers and youth justice administrators must learn to address better.
Similarly, studies in other chapters demonstrate how patterns in women's arrest rates (Heimer et al.), self-reports of delinquency (Simpson & Gibbs), and homicide victimization rates (LaFree & Hunnicutt) are best explained by structural variables at the family, community, and societal levels. However, women's self-reports reveal that, over the life course, they experience different patterns of victimization both within and across relationships that vary in their intensity and continuity (Kruttschnitt & Macmillan, Dugan & Castro).
While consistently offering new and interesting research findings, the studies in Gender and Crime often neglect to critically assess these findings' significance. In their excellent description of restorative justice procedures in sexual assault cases, for instance, Daly and Curtis-Fawley conclude that family conferencing does more for victims than courts by ensuring that offenders admit their guilt and receive sanctions and allowing victims to have their side of the story validated by conference participants. This assessment is persuasive, but it too easily dismisses the problematic aspects of family conferencing that the authors' detailed investigation uncovers. Victims do not choose conferencing (police officers do), victims complain about being excluded from defining the conference agreement (the coordinator, offender, and his or her stakeholders do this), and coordinators at times seem ill-prepared for handling such sensitive cases (a male coordinator decides that a teenage boy accused of sexual assault will purchase his victim a present as a penalty and show of remorse). To the extent that the potential benefit of using restorative justice in gender violence cases lies in empowering victims through their participation in the process of administering justice, these details suggest that group conferencing still possesses key limitations.
Other essays seek to move beyond simplistic depictions of female offenders as “victims” of structural forces by highlighting their agency. This is an important theoretical move. But these studies fail to place these women's agency in its full social context, resulting in individualistic conceptions of gender subjects that do not advance theory. Gartner and McCarthy, studying unsolved cases of infanticide over the last 100 years, argue that only a “dark figure” of infant homicide—resourceful, self-possessed mothers—would be capable of getting away with it. This new category of gendered agent does not capture, however, the changing social attitudes confronting single mothers over the last century or the networks of accomplices that the authors themselves note were necessary for these women to exercise such agency. As a result, readers are left with a single female figure who simply appears “bad.”
Meanwhile, Giordano et al. and Dugan and Castro both emphasize the agency that women (who are disproportionately African American and have spent time in correctional facilities) exercise in desisting from crime and resisting violent victimization. While insightful, these studies overlook that fact that individual expressions of agency are continually judged and acted upon by institutions of social control marked by race, class, and gender biases. More than 50% of the women in Giordano et al.'s study do not have custody of at least one of their minor children, and many report having faced child-endangerment charges, charges that fathers seldom face. Meanwhile, the women in Dugan and Castro's study, who have tried to survive on streets and in homes where they are at high risk of violent victimization, and who have distinguished themselves by fighting back against their offenders, end up incarcerated.
Perhaps these critical remarks simply reflect the distinct disciplinary traditions informing criminological and law and society research. But such criticisms aside, the rich empirical material contained in Gender and Crime still makes it a valuable resource for law and society scholars interested in females' experiences with criminal offending and victimization.
