Transformative Feminist Criminology: A Critical Re-thinking of a Discipline

Meda Chesney-Lind • Merry Morash

Published online: 11 May 2013 � Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This essay makes the case for a transformative critical feminist criminology, one that explicitly theorizes gender, one that requires a commitment to social justice, and

one that must increasingly be global in scope. Key to this re-thinking of a mature field is

the need to expand beyond traditional positivist notions of ‘‘science,’’ to embrace core

elements of a feminist approach to methodology, notably the epistemological insights

gleaned from a new way of thinking about research, methods, and the relationship between

the knower and the known. Other key features of contemporary feminist criminology

include an explicit commitment to intersectionality, an understanding of the unique pos-

itionality of women in the male dominated fields of policing and corrections, a focus on

masculinity and the gender gap in serious crime, a critical assessment of corporate media

and the demonization of girls and women of color, and a recognition of the importance of

girls’ studies as well as women’s studies to the development of a global, critical feminist

criminology.

Introduction

Early theories to explain delinquency, crime, and victimization were actually limited to

theorizing male deviance, male criminality, and male victimization with a specific focus of

showcasing the utility of the positivist paradigm to the study of the distributions and causes

of these phenomena. Thus, the founders of criminology almost completely overlooked

women’s crime, and they ignored, minimized, and trivialized female victimization (Hughes

2005). When they did consider women, they considered them in relation to men, and

discussions of these relations rarely if ever included details of the horrific violence that

many women suffered at the hands of those men (or blamed the woman for the assaults).

M. Chesney-Lind (&) Department of Women’s Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: meda@hawaii.edu

M. Morash School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

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Crit Crim (2013) 21:287–304 DOI 10.1007/s10612-013-9187-2

Based on the assumption that aspects of the social world could be precisely measured

and clearly demonstrably linked as causes and effects, positivist methodology came to

dominate criminology by the mid-twentieth century (see Deegan 1990). This perspective

emphasized the researcher as objective and detached from both the data collection process

and the use of the findings. No consideration was given to the effect of field researchers on

study participants, or the potential that social phenomenon are given their meaning by

individuals, and these meanings are as important as precisely measured ‘‘realities.’’ Even

those criminologists that used more qualitative data, like Thrasher (1927) and Cohen

(1955), failed to understand how their own gender colored their view of the world, which

meant they completely ignored and/or sexualized girls and talked almost exclusively to

boys and young men about gangs and delinquency.

Feminist criminology directed attention towards gender as a key force that shapes crime

and social control, towards research methods that recognize power differentials between

the researcher and the researched, and give relatively powerless people voice to express

their standpoints, and towards action-oriented research to reveal and promote justice. We

have both written extensively from and on the feminist criminological framework

(Chesney-Lind 2006; Brown et al. 2007; Morash 2006, 2010). In this article, we present

highlights from and build on our recent collaboration to select articles and write an

introduction for the book, Feminist Theories of Crime (Chesney-Lind and Morash 2011),

which was published as part of Ashgate’s Library of Essays in Theoretical Criminology.

The book presents key work representing the best of feminist criminology. Notably, the

inclusion of Feminist Theories of Crime in this series reflects that feminist theory is a major

lasting paradigm within criminology. We know that some scholars see feminist crimi-

nology as a subfield of critical criminology. In our view, that is not really an accurate

depiction, since not all critical criminologists place gender at the center of theory, and not

all feminist criminologists see their work as part of the broader struggle for social justice.

So what might be an alternative way of thinking about the two fields, and possibly other

fields in criminology as well? One might envision overlapping perspectives, where one

field does not compete with another, but instead benefits from considering the concerns and

interests of the other field.

A virtue of this conceptualization is that it does not force different perspectives into a

hierarchy, with one subsuming the other. The non-hierarchical envisioning of alternative

perspectives opens dialog, allows for constructive challenges to both perspectives, and

promotes non-combative exchange of ideas. We hope in this essay to demonstrate that such

a conversation can push both perspectives forward. The authors of this piece are already

engaged in such a conversation, since we each come from quite different places within

both critical and feminist criminology. Meda is thoroughly comfortable with many of the

dominant concerns of critical criminology having had a long history as an activist as well

as a scholar. Merry has focused on addressing a broad range of research questions about

gender (and other topics); to do this she has explored and melded positivist, feminist, and

critical theories and methods with the hope for bringing new insights to criminology.

Collaborating on the recent book of essays, we enjoyed the differences between us, and we

felt those complemented and strengthened our work. Our differing criteria for selecting

articles to include and our differing acquaintance with different publications resulted in a

collection more inclusive and varied than either of us could have produced alone.

Despite many prior decades of neglect of the cornerstones of feminist criminology—the

pressing need for research to promote social justice and the recognition of gender as an

essential component in explaining crime, victimization, and injustice (see Richie 2012)—

our greatest challenge in creating the collection was to select between the many examples

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of excellent theory-driven feminist research given how much growth the field has expe-

rienced. Indeed, we finally had to restrict our choices to relatively recent publications, and

to omit the important topical area of gender in the workplaces of justice, that is in law

enforcement, court, correctional, and victim services/advocacy organizations.

In this article, we do note a few key works on gendered organizations—the police

departments, correctional enterprises, and courts—that address justice issues and the

crucial notion that key organizations of social control are clearly implicated in the

enforcement of patriarchal privilege. In addition, we explain feminist theory’s unique

contributions and key concepts, and note some challenges to the perspective and contro-

versies within it. Finally, we make some recommendations for future development of

feminist theory.

Feminist Theory’s Unique Focus

To recognize the unique contributions of feminist criminological theory, we first consider

what is ‘‘missing’’ in other paradigms, and we present key feminist work that has filled

these gaps (Sprague 2005). Specifically, inconsistent with the longstanding inattention to

girls and women caught up in the justice system, research on the early history of US courts

showed that concern for girls’ immoral conduct fueled the so-called ‘‘child-saving

movement’’ which established a separate system of justice for youth and that ended up

incarcerating large numbers of girls for sexual offenses for many decades into the twentieth

century (Chesney-Lind 1977; Odem 1995; Schlossman and Wallach 1978). Another his-

torical analysis (Rafter 1990, pp. 149–152) revealed that while reformatories housed white

women deemed amenable to being ‘‘saved’’ through grooming for work as domestics,

particularly in the South after the Civil War, the criminal justice system treated and

punished imprisoned African American women as if they were men, requiring them to

work alongside men in chain gangs, even subjected them to whipping, like men.

The recognition of women’s and girls’ variation in experiences based on race, gender,

and other differences has become another cornerstone of feminist criminology. Feminist

criminologists were also the first to recognize that many girls moved deep into the justice

system after they ran away from a sexually abusive parent, were arrested for running or for

‘‘survival crime,’’ and were then criminalized by the system (Chesney-Lind 1989). This

discovery stimulated much research on girls’ and women’s unique pathways into illegal

activity and institutions of control (e.g., Belknap and Holsinger 1998; Davis 2007; Hol-

singer 2000; Van Voorhis et al. 2010) and on the high prevalence of victimization among

women offenders (e.g., Browne et al. 1999; Moe 2004; Richie 1996).

The inclusion of women and girls in criminological research was catalyzed by the

second wave of the feminist movement in the late 60s and early 70s. 1

As might be

expected, feminist criminologists of this period brought the insights of feminist theories

unrelated to crime and social control into their groundbreaking work; indeed, inter-disci-

plinarity is another earmark of feminist work. Contemporary criminologists who work

from a feminist perspective continue to borrow heavily from the disciplines of women’s

1 The women’s movement has traditionally been divided into two historic ‘‘waves,’’ despite the fact that

work on the status of women can be dated well before the first of these events, and continued in a rather clear form after the first ‘‘wave’’ passed. Generally, however, the first ‘‘wave’’ is recognized as starting with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, and the second ‘‘wave’’ is dated to the publication of Betty Friedan’s influential book, The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

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studies, gender studies, and feminist scholarship in other social sciences and fields of study.

Often their keenest insights come when they transgress criminology, that is, they focus on

concepts apart from crime, victimization, and justice system; these imported concepts shed

light on the operation of gender as it pertains to the core interests of criminology (Cain

1990).

All of the disciplines that contain feminist theory have different strands that vary in

several ways: degrees of theoretical attention to intersectionality (i.e., combinations of

gender with race, class, ethnicity, and other status markers that affect social life and

individuals); preference for particular research methods; integration with constructionist,

conflict, or other theoretical paradigms. The best known of the early theoretical influences

on criminology were the notions of radical feminist theory, liberal feminist theory, and

socialist feminist theory. Radical feminism stresses that patriarchal gender arrangements

lead to men’s efforts to control women’s sexuality (and their reproductive capacity) often

through violence and abuse (e.g., rape and wife battering). Men dominate over women

throughout society, and meaningful change requires obliterating gender differences in

power and opportunities (Millet 1970; Brownmiller 1975). Liberal feminism suggests that

gender oppression would be reduced or eliminated by altering the way that girls and boys

are socialized and by reforming laws and their implementation, for example by eliminating

bias in the sentencing of women and men and between racial groups (Bickle and Peterson

1991). Socialist feminism made an important contribution to understanding that not just

gender, but also class, results in oppression, so for example, countries where women

receive little education and hold low occupational status experience high levels of sexual

violence against women and produce women’s tremendous fear of crime (Yodanis 2004;

also see Martin et al. 2006; Whaley 2001). According to socialist feminists, since gender

oppression takes on alternative forms and intensity depending on social class, reforms

require change in the economic system (e.g., a shift towards socialism) not just in the sex/

gender system.

New schools of thought continue to appear on the feminist theoretical landscape and

they, too, are of clear relevance to criminology. Each school has challenged both main-

stream criminology and other feminist theory to more fully account for the complexity of

how gender is connected to crime and justice. Despite different strands of feminist theory,

there are important key concepts and both theoretical and epistemological assumptions that

cut across the variants of feminist theory. The centrality of patriarchy and ‘‘feminine’’ and

‘‘masculine’’ identities, intersectionality that recognizes the combined effects of gender

and other status markers, agency even of the oppressed, and feminist epistemology and

research methods are persistent characteristics of feminist social science, including femi-

nist criminology.

Patriarchy Matters

While the dictionary defines feminism as simply ‘‘the theory of the political, economic, and

social equality of the sexes’’ (Merriam Webster 2009), the terrain has been made much

more complicated in the years that followed that 1895 definition. The sex/gender system

(also referred to as the gender organization and gender arrangements) stands as a central

concept in feminist theory. The sex/gender system exists globally and in countries, cul-

tures, regions, communities, organizations, families, and other groups. It affects individuals

by impacting their identities, imposing gendered expectations, and prohibiting and sanc-

tioning ‘‘gender inappropriate’’ behavior. Patriarchal sex/gender systems are characterized

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by males’ exercise of power and control to oppress women (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). The

degree and the form of patriarchy vary by place and time and even for subgroups (e.g.,

social class, racial, ethnic, and age groups) sharing the same geography and period (Lerner

1986a, b; Lown 1983; Pateman 1988, 1989). According to the ideology of extreme pa-

triarchy, women’s orientation should be totally restricted to the home with no participation

in education or the workforce (Stankuniene and Maslauskaite 2008). Slightly less extreme

forms of patriarchy allow women to participate in the workforce, but husbands and,

depending on the culture, other relatives control women’s earnings.

The sex/gender system typically functions as a system of social stratification, where

both men and women and the tasks they perform are valued differently—with men’s

assumed qualities and the work they do valued more highly (Conway et al. 1996; Fiske

et al. 2002; Gerber 2009). To illustrate, many citizens and some police associate effective

policing with characteristics assumed to be traits for men, especially traits surrounding

‘‘aggression, violence, danger, risk taking, and courageousness’’ (Franklin 2005, p. 6; also

Heidensohn 1992; Hunt 1984; Prokos and Padavic 2002). In highly gendered (Acker 1990)

police organizations, women are stereotyped and channeled into restricted types of police

work and support networks, are treated with hostility, and are rejected by other officers just

on the basis of their gender (Martin and Jurik 2007). Practices of exclusion from informal

work cultures, gender segregation, differential assignments, sexual harassment, and mar-

ginalization of women with family responsibilities also characterize correctional organi-

zations and the settings where legal professionals work (Martin and Jurik 2007, p. 2).

The feminist conceptualization of the sex-gender system contrasts sharply with repre-

sentation of a person’s biological sex category as an individual-level variable—an

approach that is frequently found in traditional criminological discussions of gender. In

feminist theory, gender is not a variable nor is it an unchanging personal trait. A person’s

gender is constructed through actions and interactions to produce a form of ‘‘masculinity’’

or ‘‘femininity’’ that either reproduces or challenges common expectations for gender-

appropriate behaviors (West and Zimmerman 1987; also see West and Fenstermaker

1995). The sex/gender system at the macro (structural) level affects individuals by

affording them access to influence and resources depending on their sex and gender. Thus,

in order to begin to fully explain key phenomenon, such as the gender gap in crime, as well

as the seemingly perplexing responses of the criminal justice system to girls and women as

both victims and offenders, we must theorize gender in terms of individual-level identity

and interactions embedded in a broader macro-level system of gender arrangements.

Feminist criminologists (e.g., Hunnicutt 2009; Ogle and Batton 2009) struggle to keep

attention focused on how different forms of patriarchy influence crime, victimization, the

justice system, and workers in that system. Importantly, they document inequities and

suffering introduced by patriarchal arrangements in order to protest and change them.

Masculinities and Femininities

In criminology, one important explanation that has traditionally been ‘‘missing’’ from

conversations about crime is that boys and men have always committed the most crime,

especially of a violent type or in the ‘‘crimes of the powerful’’ category (Daly 1989;

Schwartz et al. 2009; Steffensmeier et al. 2005). For decades criminologists by and large

ignored the gender gap (or dropped girls and women from the analysis as many early

longitudinal studies did) which had the effect of normalizing high levels of male violence.

Although certainly not the only explanation for men’s and boys’ high levels of illegal

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behavior, theories about gender identities are one approach that holds promise in

explaining the gender difference. Although feminist theory, by definition, is grounded in

women’s experience, some critical male scholars (Messerschmidt 1993; Schwartz and

DeKesseredy 1997; DeKeseredy 2011; Schwartz and DeKeseredy, this issue) have

increasingly adopted feminist perspectives in their own research on men and male behavior

as well as women, and they have explored the link of masculinities to crime. Also, feminist

criminologists have made major advances by showing the connection of pressure to

conform to particular aspects of manhood and male involvements in crime (Anderson and

Umberson 2001; Bui and Morash 2008; Bowker 1997).

The feminist perspective calls attention to gender (and thus masculinity) as something

that is enacted in the context of patriarchal privilege, class privilege, and racism. The

power of this perspective is clearly evident in work by Danner and Carmody (2001) who

document how the media accounts of school shootings completely miss the role of gender

in these crimes that so horrified the nation. Surveying newspaper coverage of shootings at

multiple districts, Danner and Carmody noted that while the media was obsessed with the

stories, all the stories ‘‘rounded up all the usual suspects’’—general culture of violence,

violent media, gangs, the access to guns, youth culture, etc.—with virtually no realization

that all the perpetrators were male and the victims were predominantly female.

What about girls? Here the discussion focuses on how girls, particularly girls involved in

crime, negotiate feminine norms that tend to reward obedience to authority, particularly male

authority, passivity, and nurturance. Consider girls who are gang members. Despite the ste-

reotype of gangs as hyper masculine, girls are present in gangs, and present in very significant

numbers (one estimate is that that girls are roughly a third of gang members) (Snyder and

Sickmund 2006). Exactly how do these girls negotiate what some might imagine as a quint-

essentially male space? Are they simply embracing a ‘‘bad girl femininity’’ as an ‘‘aggressive,

tough, crazy and violent’’ gang member? Laidler and Hunt (2001) do an outstanding job of

documenting how African American, Latina, and Asian American girls negotiate not only

dangerous neighborhoods and risky peer groups (since most girls are in mixed sex gangs), but

also engage in very complicated cultural notions of femininity. Contrary to the construction of

gang girls as ‘‘a bad ass’’ (p. 675), they note that girls place a very high value on both ‘‘respect’’

and ‘‘respectability.’’ They alternately challenge and embrace notions of traditional femininity

through interactions with others in a range of settings, but always returning to behaviors that

involve ‘‘defending one’s reputation as respectable’’ (p. 676).

Irwin and Chesney-Lind (2008) build on the insight that girls and women’s crime, even

violent crime, is not well understood or explained by simply assuming that girls are

mimicking their male counterparts and taking up a form of dangerous masculinity (the

‘‘bad ass’’ perspective). Long dominant in criminology, these theories of ‘‘violence’’

assume that female violence can be explained by the same factors that have long been

studied to explain male violence, since these ‘‘bad’’ women are seeking equality with men

in the area of violence (and acting just like men). Irwin and Chesney-Lind also identify

other approaches to female violence that stress its roots in female victimization in patri-

archal society, and the role of deteriorated neighborhoods in producing a female version of

the ‘‘code of the streets’’ tough femininity, particularly for urban girls of color. Building on

these more recent constructions, they conclude that one must examine how the multiple

systems of oppression (based on class, race, ethnicity, and gender) interact in complex but

co-equal ways to produce contexts where girls’ violence makes sense (often as a survival

mechanism), rather than understanding gender as something one ‘‘does’’ or doesn’t do

while negotiating more robust systems of race and class oppression (see Chesney-Lind and

Jones 2010).

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Intersectionality

African American scholar and activist bell hooks’s book, Ain’t I a Woman (1981), high-

lighted and forever invalidated the sole focus on gender. Hooks argued against white

feminists who felt that women were denied access to politics because they were stereo-

typed as frail and delicate. She pointed out that women like her had a history that fully

contradicted this imagery, in part because of the hard labor and the severe living conditions

imposed on slaves. The challenges of understanding the realities of the lives of women who

differ in their combinations of age, color, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other

characteristics pervade feminist criminology, and are addressed in attempts to take these

intersections into account in understanding individual identity, group and local context,

and social structure.

Black feminist criminology makes its contribution by emphasizing race-related struc-

tural oppression, the influence of Black community and culture, intimate and familial

relations affected by race, and the nature of women’s identities as Black, female, of a

particular class, and so on (Potter 2006). In this tradition, Jones (2010) explored and

explained the lives of Black girls who confront violence on a daily basis in their com-

munities. Providing an example of feminist theory that attends to identity, context, race,

and gender, Jones rejects placing the justice system at the center of the girls’ lives and

assuming that justice system labeling is a meaningful descriptor for the girls. Instead she

builds theory to show how the girls manage expectations for being ‘‘good girls’’ in

communities and schools that are marked by conflict and require an offensive posture and

even the use of violence for self-protection.

Agency

Theorists and researchers sometimes ignore women’s agency and focus only on their

compliance with patriarchal constraints (Gallagher 2007; Macleod 1991). Feminist crim-

inologists instead emphasize agency—an assertion of identity and attempts to steer one’s

life—even under extreme conditions (Lerner 1986a, b, p. 239). Although in a context

characterized by a constant threat of male and female violence, the girls that Jones (Jones

2010) studied were active and agentic in navigating between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘ghetto’’ mes-

sages about Black femininity. Similarly, Bosworth and Carrabine (2001) detailed how

women in prison, who certainly suffered from a profound loss of freedom, found a variety

of ways to resist, to cope with, and to survive the carceral conditions. As a final example,

Morash and Haarr (2012) discovered that many women police resisted reproducing tra-

ditional female–male stereotypes and hierarchies that devalue traits commonly associated

with women. Instead they fashion complex positive occupational identities that in many

cases were not tied to their sex category, but when they were, that associated women’s

positive attributes with excellent job performance.

Feminist Methodology and Epistemology

Although all sorts of research methods have been used to develop and improve feminist

theory (Reinharz 1992; Sprague 2005), feminist criminologists have contributed some

unique insights on ‘‘how we know’’ about social life and have challenged positivist science

norms that render the researcher invisible and study participants powerless. Feminist

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approaches to research are suited to revealing human agency and the constructed nature of

gender identity and structure. The recognition of these features of social life extends to the

research process.

Specifically, feminist researchers believe that the subjects of research can contribute

crucial information on their experiences, that their understandings are important, and that

these experiences must be considered in the context of patriarchy to be understood. They

recognize the need to consider the power differentials between the researched and the

researcher, and how these differentials affect the production of knowledge (Ramazanoglu

1989). Burman et al. (2001) put these principles into practice in their study of Scottish

teenaged girls’ views and experiences of violence. They faced many dilemmas in their

ethnographic work that over time involved 800 girls. For instance, sometimes discussions

of violence led to girls being violent towards each other, raising ethical issues about the

appropriateness of group discussion and how the researcher should intervene. Also,

researchers were strongly affected by girls’ accounts of being bullied, sexually assaulted,

or in other ways victimized, in some cases because the researchers had similar experiences

during their own childhoods. Researchers struggled, too, with girls’ descriptions of hitting

or slapping each other as ‘‘fun’’ and ‘‘not violence.’’

Also creating ambivalent feelings in many researchers, feminist research documents

that girls and women involved in crime are anything but ‘‘liberated’’ or emancipated in

their view of other girls and women. Indeed, they are often male identified, and view other

girls and women as ‘‘bitches’ and ‘‘sluts.’’ These are difficult and troubling issues for

feminist researchers to document about girls’ and women’s lives, but they remind us that

we oppose oppression and violence in girls’ lives precisely because it does not always

enoble (see Artz 1998; Kelly and Morgan-Kidd 2001). The feminist solution to these

difficulties include reflexive review of how the researcher affects and learns from study

participants, the complexities of establishing non-hierarchical relationships with partici-

pants, and of how the research process shapes knowledge (see also Flavin 2001). Some

feminists also insist that research must be done collaboratively with subjects who can

provide insight into the key questions to be asked and a credible interpretation of findings

(Campbell et al. 2009; Wahab 2003).

The importance of feminist criminology’s contribution to research methodology is

striking in the literature on violence against women. Depending on whether they use

positivist measurement and sampling approaches, researchers have drawn conflicting

conclusions: either that men and women are equivalently violent in intimate partner

relationships, or that men are markedly more violent and destructive than women. Feminist

criminologists emphasize that adequate measurement requires adequate theoretical con-

ceptualization of violence and its context and it must include aspects of male violence (like

stalking and sexual assault that women rarely commit) (Dobash et al. 1992; Melton and

Belknap 2003; Miller 2005; DeKeseredy 2011).

A valid measure of abuse must differentiate the types of intimate partner violence

identified by Johnson and Ferraro (2000): intimate terrorism which is violence used as one

of many tactics in a general pattern of extreme effort to control an intimate partner through

the combination of physical and emotional abuse; violent resistance in self-defense, often

just once; mutual violence in which domestic partners use controlling and manipulative

violence against each other; and situational couple violence, which ‘‘results from situations

or arguments between partners that escalate on occasion into physical violence’’ (Kelly and

Johnson 2008, p. 485). Shelter and domestic violence advocacy program samples consist

primarily of victims of intimate terrorism, but random samples drawn for surveys have

high representation of situational violence victims. To bring this point home, we point out

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that intimate terrorism victims are often prohibited from leaving home, answering the

phone, or reading the mail—so they are highly unlikely to take part in any sort of research,

unless they are in shelters. By accurately measuring the type of violence and by recog-

nizing the biases introduced by different sampling approaches, research demonstrates that

in heterosexual couples, males most often perpetrate the extremely damaging form of

abuse, intimate terrorism, and that misogynist attitudes and gender traditionalism con-

tribute to this form of abusive behavior (Johnson 2006, 2011).

A central tenet of feminist methodologies is that research methods must be up to the

task of producing knowledge that informs and promotes positive social change. As a case

in point, guided by feminist theory and methodological approaches, Dobash and Dobash

(2004) collected qualitative and quantitative data from a sample of couples. Their findings

justified public policies that emphasize men’s violence against women as well as cautions

against the practice of dual arrests, in which police take couples into custody together. If

they had studied a random sample of couples with methods to ‘‘count’’ incidents, Dobash

and Dobash might have made recommendations for family therapy to address situational

couple violence, thereby ignoring the imbalance of power and danger to the victim when

intimate terrorism or violent resistance occurs. To challenge damaging policies and

advance those that protect the less powerful, feminist criminologists often collaborate with

and carefully listen to the people they study. Additionally, they collaborate with advocates

to ensure that theoretical discoveries are translated into program and policy action

(Haviland et al. 2008).

Challenges for Future Theorizing and Research

As feminist criminology enters the new century, it must embrace two important and

exciting challenges: First, in an era of unparalleled inequality, we must find new and

powerful ways to continue paying attention to the powerful and the oppressors. We must

forcefully present the globalization of the world’s issues and the increasing need to see

violations of girls and women as human rights issues.

Consistent with the overarching critical criminology paradigm, feminist criminologists

have directed attention to a serious limitation of much social science theory, which is its

failure to explain the privilege and behavior of powerful people and its complementary

concentration on understanding people who lack power (Sprague 2005, pp. 11–12). Given

the connection of limited power with female status, feminist criminologists in particular

need to be quite careful about ‘‘studying down,’’ that is focusing exclusively on the

powerless, which can result in pathologizing crime victims, or girls and women in conflict

with the law, rather than showing how oppressive gender arrangements lead to victim-

ization and harsh punishment. Understanding structures of power and context are crucial.

For instance, Chaudhuri et al. (in press) found that when South Asian-origin husbands and

their natal families enforced extreme patriarchy through severe physical and emotional

abuse. South Asian women who had migrated to the United States for marriage were so

constrained by lack of resources and support network, lack of knowledge, low status in the

extended family, and the threat of severe harm, that only intervention by an advocacy

agency empowered them to leave the abusive relationship. Rather than blaming the victim

for staying in an abusive relationship, the emphasis needs to be on empowering women to

overcome cultural and structural barriers that place them at risk of victimization.

Globalization brings new challenges to feminist criminologists. Take the attempted

assignation of Malala Yousufzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by the

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Taliban for speaking out about girls’ rights to an education in October, 2012. Shortly

after—in December, 2012—in India there was the terrible gang rape and resulting murder

of a 23-year-old medical student which provoked worldwide outrage, and ultimately a

global women’s protest that went viral due to the internet (see onebillionrising.org for

images). So if we were asked to chart out the pressing issues for feminist criminology, we

would point to the following possibilities.

Malala Yousufzai’s courage causes us to see the importance of girls’ studies, not just

women’s studies—since, today’s girls will be tomorrow’s women. The tragic and brutal death

in India tells us about tolerance of girls’ and women’s victimization. As a horrific example,

after she was repeatedly raped over a 90-min period on a public bus she rode with a male

friend, who also was severely beaten and left suffering, the couple was dumped on the road.

The police who finally showed up argued for two hours about which of them would have to

take the seriously beaten couple to the hospital (Pokharel and Rana 2013). Both of these

incidents blur the boundaries between victimization, crime and profound human rights vio-

lations. The also put in stark focus the explicit failure of certain ‘‘courts’’ and ‘‘police’’ to

protect women. Indeed, in some parts of Pakistan, the establishment of Sharia courts actually

jail girls and womens seeking help for abuse (such as the arrest of women for adultery if they

report a rape) and often forcibly return them to their abusers from whom they are trying to

escape (Hadi and Chesney-Lind 2013; Asian Human Rights Commission 2010).

These incidents are not isolated or unusual in the countries where they occurred or in

many countries throughout the world. They are just two examples of a multitude of

organized group efforts, in some cases sponsored or tolerated by the State, to enforce

extreme patriarchy. The attack on girls’ education is not atypical.

Around the world, students, teachers and schools are attacked at an alarming rate.

This war against education, in which educating girls is often times a motivating

factor, gets very little attention or media coverage. But in at least 31 countries

education has been the target of intentional attacks for political, ideological, sec-

tarian, religious, military or other reasons. (Winthrop 2012, p. 2)

In one year, largely motivated by beliefs that girls should not go to school, Pakistan

experienced 152 bombings that destroyed schools, and Afghanistan had 35 schools burned;

similar patterns occur in parts of Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East

(Winthrop 2012). Lack of education and resulting dependence on others place girls and

women at risk for continued exposure to violence. If they leave or are expelled from their

natal or marital families—and expulsion is another form of violence—they may turn to

prostitution or illegal acts to survive and keep their children alive, and they often must live

in dangerous places that expose them to victimization and the need to defend themselves,

sometimes violently. The connection of girls and women being victim and being caught up

as offenders in the courts and correctional programs and institutions is strong, and it is

many times a causal connection.

Just as globalization alerts us to violence against women throughout the world, it directs

attention to US policies that bring women into prisons outside of the United States. Not

only did the US ‘‘war on drugs’’ develop into a ‘‘war against women’’ who in increasing

proportions came to make up non-violent prison populations charged with drug-related

offenses (Chesney-Lind 1977; Johnson 2006). Also, businesses that run and supply prisons,

US government entities, and US politicians have promoted arrest, prosecution, and

incarceration of women worldwide (Sudbury 2002; Richie 2012). US pressure to crimi-

nalize people involved in the international drug trade and in prostitution had the unan-

ticipated effect of promoting incarceration of women who’s only means of survival,

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economically or in face of pressures from criminal men is to carry drugs or prostitute

themselves (Kempadoo 2005).

One aspect of globalization is the movement of people across borders. There is an estimated

214 million international migrants worldwide, and 49 percent of them are women (http://

www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/about-migration/facts-and-figures/lang/en). Migrant women are at

high risk for sexual exploitation and violence by intimate partners (Piper 2003). Hoping to

improve their lives, women who join men as ‘‘picture brides’’ may barely know the men they

marry, if they know them at all. They often find themselves vulnerable to abuse because they are

isolated in a new country, unable to speak the local language, and unfamiliar with the justice

system and sources of help. Alternatively, women may be lured to foreign countries to take jobs

where they are exploited or forced to work in the sex trades. These and other circumstances

create new patterns of girls’ and women’s victimization, and new challenges for justice system

response.

Although we advocate theoretical and research attention to conditions for women

internationally, it is important to recognize that in the United States, which the Hausmann

et al. (2012) scores as providing equivalent education to females and males, inequality in

economic participation and opportunity place women at risk for being unable to leave

abusive relationships, move out of dangerous neighborhoods, or resist earning money

through illegal means. Dramatic cuts in welfare support that began in 1996 leave

increasing numbers of women (and their children) either without income or in low-paying

jobs that do not provide medical or other benefits (Peterson et al. 2002). The so-called

feminization of poverty (formation of female headed households, fathers’ failure to support

children, and segregation of women in low-paying traditionally female occupations) leads

to women’s increased involvement in consumer-based crimes, like shoplifting and welfare

fraud (Steffensmeier and Streifel 1992; Chesney-Lind and Pasko 2011).

Theory as a tool to fuel the disassembly and replacement of destructive processes in the

name of crime control and prevention is long over-due both in the United States and in all

the countries that are tempted to emulate the tolerance of violence against women and the

penal regimes that the United States has become so reliant upon. Does the new century offer

any hopeful signs for such a conversion in theory? The very fact that progressive and critical

criminology, and particularly feminist criminology, has survived three decades of furious

backlash politics gives us reason for hope. Beyond that, there is the vitality of our field. To

do feminist criminology, this article has posited, does not necessarily mean that one is

restricted to what was once the standard trilogy of our field: women as offender, victims, and

workers in the criminal justice system. Instead, the whole of the field of criminology can

fruitfully be re-thought from a feminist perspective. Finally, there is a growing body of

international research, particularly in the area of the victimization of women that allows us

to hope that feminist criminology will become globally relevant in the decades to come. As

it does so, the field will do more than simply ‘‘document and count’’ women’s victimiza-

tions; instead it will begin to act across ‘‘national’’ boundaries to name the problem and to

re-frame it in ways that make clear the centrality of the human rights of girls and women and

also to find ways to take action on behalf of victimized and criminalized women.

Future Directions for Theory and Research

Feminist criminologists, along with other critical theorists, must increasingly embrace the

insights of critical studies, particularly the role of the media in the construction and

framing of the narratives that shape and define the ‘‘crime problem’’ (and the implicit

Transformative Feminist Criminology 297

123

solutions to same). The corporate media, whether print or television, turn to crime stories,

along with celebrity gossip and scandals, as reliable front-page staples for a variety of

reasons. This mix provides a sensationalistic and profitable filler for newspapers and

television stations with shrinking newsrooms and diminished appetites to engage in serious

investigative journalism (Hamilton 1998; McManus 1994).

Post modern feminism directs attention to the ‘‘construction of truth’’ in such cultural

outlets as the media, which can play a very critical role in the public’s perception of the

crime ‘‘problem.’’ It is this emphasis on culture and the production of knowledge, rather

than on structure, that is an earmark of postmodernism (Milovanovic, this issue). Websdale

(1996), for example documented how the media portrayal of sexual assault and abuse as

perpetrated by strangers supported the passage of a Washington state law permitting

‘‘indefinite civil commitment’’ of sexual predators, but excluded husbands and fathers

assaulting wives and children as potential perpetrators. The law, supported by newspaper

reports, creates a discourse that sex crimes, rather than routine, are ‘‘dreadful but rare’’

events that require tough sanctions rather than a confrontation with patriarchal families

(Websdale and Alvarez 1998: 65). In an earlier piece, Websdale and Alvarez documented

how the corporate media traditionally discusses the murder of women by intimate partners

by using an approach they call ‘‘forensic journalism.’’ Here, the reader is given vivid and

dramatic details of the event and is ultimately told ‘‘more and more about less and less.’’ In

essence, the readers are left with salacious details, but little actual information that might

prevent future such occurrences (Websdale and Alvarez 1998).

Regarding offenders, we know that media exposure to crime stories does, in fact, have

an impact: heavier viewers of local television news are more likely to fear crime and

criminal victimization (Romer et al. 2003, p. 101). This is attributed to ‘‘pervasive cov-

erage of violent crime stories,’’ which also tends to increase fear of African Americans and

other minorities who are disproportionately featured in crime stories (Romer et al. 1998).

Research has shown that ideas about crime and criminals are based, in large part, on the

stories that individuals learn about from the media (Antunes and Hurley 1977; Chermak

1994; Chiricos and Eschholz 2002). A broader question, though, is the degree to which

crime journalism influences punitive crime policies like ‘‘the war on drugs’’ and ‘‘mass

incarceration (see Brennan et al. in press)’’.

We also know that the race of women offenders dramatically affects the way the media

treat them. In a study of drug stories appearing on the front pages of 17 national news-

papers, it was found that the stories about minority women who committed street-drug

offenses were considerably more negative than the stories about white women who

committed such offenses. The chief difference was the emphasis that journalists tended to

place on an offender’s degree of guilt, harm to another person, and reform potential. As an

example, stories about white women drug offenders often included pictures of their

families on a couch and discussions of a new drug program, while women of color were

often portrayed as hopelessly drug addicted, and getting re-arrested and re-committed as a

result (Brennan et al. in press).

In an era of around the clock news coverage as well as the use of crime as entertain-

ment, the media often misrepresents the majority of women who break the law and hides

the circumstances of women who act with violence. Women who act violently are por-

trayed in the news as ‘‘irrational’’ and even ‘‘demonic,’’ especially if they act against

children (Grabe et al. 2006). By paying much more attention to violence by women than by

men, the media suggests (incorrectly) that women are well represented among violent

offenders (Naylor 2001; Schlesinger et al. 1991). Documentaries, televised news, and talk

shows portray imprisoned women as violent and sex-crazed (Cecil 2007), and ‘‘crack

298 M. Chesney-Lind, M. Morash

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moms’’ are blamed for damage to unborn children (Humphries 1999). Especially racial and

ethnic minority women are described as abnormal and individually flawed (Mann and Zatz

1996). Evidence that women are not and never have been as violent or criminal as men

contradicts both media images and official punitive responses. The potential for such

portrayals to influence responses to women offenders deserves more attention, because

arrest statistics but not victim surveys show a narrowing in the gender gap for assaults

(Schwartz et al. 2009), and arrests of women for drunk driving are out of proportion to

behavioral indicators (Schwartz and Rookey 2008).

Conclusion

Beyond the idea of the increasing role of globalism and of the media—including video

footage that we can now carry with us in our pockets—we would contend, there is a

continuing need to better theorize feminist notions of patriarchy and systematically explore

how patriarchal privilege is enforced though routine criminal justice practices. Borrowing

from work of feminist political scientists like Walby (1990) which early on identified that

liberal notions of ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ greatly disadvantaged women, we must expand

our thinking about the links between the observed patterns of women’s victimization,

women’s offending, and women’s experience with the criminal justice system within the

context of patriarchy. The question of how masculinities or some other forces create the

gender gap in criminality also begs for an answer.

We must also think about how feminist theorizing assists us in building a less violent and

more just world, including systems of crime control that take us out of the penal regimes of

the past century. Feminist criminologists have challenged the masculinist bias in their field,

and they continue to do so today. As an example, both of us firmly believe that the

assumption that fields grow and develop out of male styles of interaction and argument, or

what might be called ‘‘mental combat,’’ is a flawed way to think about intellectual work. We

instead think that what builds knowledge is open conversation, real respect, and real lis-

tening. Given the growing significance of crime policy and the criminal justice system in an

era of ‘‘governing through crime’’ (Simon 2007) and mass incarceration of women in many

parts of the world (Carlen 2002; Carlen and Toombs 2006; Lee 2007; Mauer 1999), the

feminist perspective on crime in modern society remains all the more vital. Feminist

criminologists have proposed alternatives to the expensive and damaging status quo. For

example, drawing on Gilligan’s (1982) understanding of the importance of care in girls’ and

women’s moral thinking, Daly and Stubbs (2006) suggest that restorative justice may track

with the feminist values of care and valuation of relationships as an alternative to the current

emphasis on justice. Such notions of reconciliation, truth telling and social responses to law

violating that heal rather than punish and incapacitate will not only better reduce crime but

also humanize the current de-humanizing systems of punitive courts and institutions, jails,

and prisons that can oppress and destroy not only those held within them, but those who are

employed to serve as guards and wardens.

Theory as a tool to fuel the disassembly and replacement of destructive processes in the

name of crime control and prevention is long over-due both in the US and in all the

countries that are tempted to emulate the penal regimes the US as become so reliant upon.

Does the new century offer any hopeful signs for such a conversion in theory? One can only

hope that the right wing control over the political process, which established crime as a code

word for race in national politics is finally winding down (and losing power in the United

States). One would wish that this were a product of moral outrage, but it is also explained by

Transformative Feminist Criminology 299

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demographics. Simply put, the desire to ever expand the racist, sexist, and homophobic

rhetoric has run into a numbers problem. Once you seek to criminalize huge swaths of all

minority groups in the US while also seeking to dramatically contract on women’s access to

safe and legal birth control, you have alienated enough large constituencies to no longer hold

national public office (Hadi and Chesney-Lind 2013; Livingston 2013).

In considering the future, we are cautiously optimistic that a feminist approach to the

crime problem might be heard. Regardless of the odds, though, our work is informed by the

expectation that we act as feminists to improve the social world in which we have found

ourselves. This means, of course, that we again face the query: what constitutes feminism

and being a feminist? Here, we’d like to conclude with first wave author and activist

Rebecca West’s wry, and as it turns out, timeless observation:

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people

call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a

doormat or a prostitute (West and Marcus 1982)

In this article, we hope we have established that being called a feminist is not an insult or a

signal that one cannot do good, scholarly or scientifically valid work (Faludi 1989; Sprague

2005). Instead, engaging in feminism and feminist theory offers all of criminology

incredible intellectual vitality and a recommitment to go beyond the collecting and

disseminating of knowledge to seeking a just, equitable, and healthy world for all.

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