Introduction
Gender is currently a central and established theme in explorations of criminal justice and criminology. Until a couple of years ago, it was thought that delinquency is mainly a man phenomenon and the crime realm is merely a male’s realm. The female crime topic was completely an ignored phenomenon. Traditionally, criminologists overlooked female crime. The miniature attention which was allocated to female criminals typically was narrowed to three frameworks: first is the contrast that assumed females’ lack of engagement in crime associated with male; second is research on prostitution; third is studies of the violent females’ depravity, the rationale being that because typical females are passive, the limited number of females who involve in violent offenses should be sick. Nonetheless, in modern time, female crime is drawing progressively more attention to the policymakers and the general public thanks to the nature of update issued in mainstream media. The topic of female crime is worth exploration since, in the last two decades, there have been intense increases in female violence rates. The paper seeks to review the trends on female violence and review the feminist theory and its application in explaining female crime arguing the case for a feminist theory of female violence.
Trends in Female Crimes
Whereas men still dictate crime data as convicts and criminals, a body of national and international trend statistics indicates a steady thinning of the gender gap for formally reported violence and crime in nations such as Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In America, for example, criminality trend statistics between 2000 and 2009 reveal approximately an eighteen percent upsurge in detentions of women below the eighteen years for attacks relative to only 0.2 percent upsurge for equally aged men (Carrington, 2013). In the same period, there were considerably greater upsurges in detentions of young women for driving while drunk and substance abuse breaches compared to men. Detentions of women below eighteen-year-old for disorderly behavior augmented by eight percent whereas the detentions of men below age eighteen dropped by eight percent in the identical time frame (Carrington, 2013).
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In Australia, whereas young males still outstrip young females under Australian childhood judicial management, the gender gap is thinning (Beatton & Machin, 2018). For instance, in Australia’s biggest jurisdiction, through fifty years of pattern statistics (from 1960 to 2012), the proportion of girls to boys appearing before the NSW Juveniles’ Court of law for criminal issues contracted from about 1:14 during the year 1960 to about 1:4 during 2012 (Beatton & Machin, 2018). Although fluctuations in statistics meanings and including laws over that kind of a lengthy period pose statistics quality problems, nonetheless, the trend is very reliable it can’t be merely accredited to the numerical artefact.
In Wales and England, a key study of young women committing from 2000 to 2005 established that the sum of juvenile female criminals has increased by roughly eighteen percent in the last 5 years and that the rate of aggressive crimes for young women more than folded in the same time frame (Carrington, 2013). In the period from 2003 to 2006, the number of violence reported for young females in England augmented by seventy-eight percent (Yodanis, 2004).
Similarly, crime statistics for young females’ violence have been increasing in the past few decades. Acts purposed to yield injury (that is, violent crimes) represented about 36.5 percent of all the issues for which girls appeared before the NSW juveniles’ law courts during 2012, relative to only 13.8 percent in 1989 (Carrington, 2013). Past statistics are not analogous because of fluctuations in the recording and definition of violent crimes. By contrast, in the unchanged period, the rates of violent associated crimes for which young boys appeared before the Juveniles’ Courts in NSW increased less vividly, from about 10.7 percent during 1989 to roughly 22.2 percent in 2012 (Carrington, 2013).
A different ten ‐ year survey (from 1999 to 2010) for the same jurisdiction, came to a similar deduction that aggression was increasing more rapidly for young females than young men (Cook & Winfield, 2013). The study, which employs administrative derivative statistics grounded in statements recorded by the law enforcement, established that the sum of young female lawbreakers amplified by around thirty-six percent, against an eight percent upsurge in young male criminals over the unchanged 10-years’ time ‐ frame (Cook & Winfield, 2013). Amongst the leading 10 offences for young females, shop ‐ lifting was the main, representing twenty-one percent of those wrongdoings that drew the attention of law enforcement. Non ‐ domestic violent attacks were the second main ranking crime reported to police, representing eleven percent of young female crooks against seven percent of male young lawbreakers (Naffine, 2015).
Undoubtedly, for some time, formally reported numbers of violence for young females grounded in testimonies to the law enforcement have been rising in nations such as Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. The trend seems to be triangulated by victimization statistics showing that girls are attacked mainly by their peers or friends in early teenage and by qualitative surveys of young female violence.
Nevertheless, there is a petite settlement as to the reason behind the rising of these levels. The discussion is apparent in 2 comparing article printed in Criminology, a leading journal in the discipline worldwide. Whereas formal reports of criminality show that the gender gap has thinned in the past several years, some claim that this is principally because of numerous net broadening policy changes which caused surges in the detention of young females for conduct that, formerly, was either overlooked or not policed. By constructing, the analysis reveals that an analogous trend is not apparent in longitudinal self ‐ report statistics. On the contrary, others contend that the gender gap thinning is real (Chesney-Lind & Morash, 2013). The longitudinal analysis including the time between 1973 and 2005 compared patterns in National Crime Victimization Survey statistics, grounded in self ‐ reports, with data in the Uniform Crime Reports which are grounded in police detention statistics. The study concluded that ‘women ‐ to ‐ men offending level proportions for simple assault, robbery, and aggravated assault have augmented with time and that the contraction of the gender gap is very analogous to trends in UCR detention statistics (Chesney-Lind & Morash, 2013). Whereas admitting that the thinning of the gender gaps – particularly in the 1990s – was mostly because of declines in men crime rates instead of big upsurges in women crime rates, the authors concluded that the matter is real and deserves thoughtful consideration in imminent research (Carrington, 2013).
A main matter in the debate is if statistical rises in women crimes are produced by less severe crimes being conveyed to the system or alterations in policing and policy that unduly affect young females. Skeptics highlight that the big fraction increases are partially the outcome of small amounts and partially an impact of declining quantities of young men coming to the courts and police’s attention. Overall, reasons for the increasing level of women violence continue to be controversial (Cook & Winfield, 2013). The question is whether these trends are the effects of novel approaches to social control, evolving techniques of data recording, modifications in policy and policing styles, alterations in outlooks to women offending, or upsurges in women’s violence.
Review of the Feminist Theory on Female Crime
A big portion of feminist criminology has increased thanks to radical crime concepts. Feminist crime theory investigates the impact of gender dissimilarities on criminality phenomena. The feminist approach maintains that the low rate of crime amongst females may be justified by the sex-specific socialization context (Van Gundy, 2013). The norms and values set by culture and the ‘envisioned’ female role model imply that females have less chance to engage in criminal activities.
The claim that seems to have the greatest currency amongst criminological and feminist academics is that young females are not becoming more aggressive; instead, ever-changing methods of social control are imposing a net ‐ broadening impact on crimes defined as violent (Houston, 2014). Equally, Chesney-Lind and Morash (2013) contend that meanings of young females’ violence are socially built, and numerical rises in girl violence could be partially justified by girls’ augmented discernibility in community spaces, a broadening of behavior considered intolerable and biased evaluations of numerical statistics (Carrington, 2013). This theory broadly repositions girls’ violence within a framework of less severe, relational and social violence which happens typically in young female peer networks context. The arithmetical increases in female juvenile violence are then accredited largely to changes in approaches to policing. Termed as ‘up crimming’, this method of social control involves the criminalization of less severe types of females’ ‘disorder’, for instance, women who communicate their sexuality, who inhabit public space, and who are rebellious or boisterous (Houston, 2014). In line with this justification, young females’ violence is commonly believed to be less severe on the aggression scale relative to boys but, significantly, there are reduced thresholds for interfering when young women involve in aggressive behavior relative to boys. Therefore female juvenile violence generates over ‐ reaction, or rather, a bigger officious social reaction.
The growth in female violence is to a certain degree an outcome of changing modes of policing and governance– particularly the change from sexualizing to criminalizing females’ crimes over the past thirty years or so. Novel sorts of analysis, methods of documenting and reporting criminality statistics, and shifts in outlooks to female crime represent some of the upsurges of aggression documented for girls. Nonetheless, its extent is not known. Even though the effect of changing approaches to governance happened principally with the elimination of welfare crimes status during the 1980s-1990s, not in the past two decades’ period in which increases in formally documented female aggression have been most evident (Van Gundy, 2013). In this time, two socio ‐ cultural changes have happened that theoretically can be affecting the increasing levels of female violence. The first shift concerns changing cultural constructions and social anticipations that normalize ‘ladette’ culture and appreciate the violent femme. The second shift concerns the effect of novel kinds of social online networking which reward, normalize, and provoke girls’ violence.
Intensified nervousness regarding the behavior of girls has changed over the past several years from sexual promiscuity to the ‘aggressive, violent bad girl’ (Chesney-Lind & Morash, 2013). Ladette behavior is normally linked to working-class masculinity like excessive smoking, acting tough, fighting, swearing, being troublesome at school, drinking, and being impolite to educators. Also, Ladette behavior is likely to be characterized in the mainstream media as ‘girls entering the violence realm which formerly belonged to young men. Girls’ superficial shift from feminine conduct to a masculinized anti ‐ social, aggressive style is habitually associated with new, violent cultural descriptions of females shown on television and in films, for instance in films such as Mean Girls and the reality television show called Ladettes (Carrington, 2013). Similarly, youth raised in the 21st century are the earliest group to interact online, with face ‐ to ‐ face social communication to generate a novel form of social communication. There exist cumulative evidence that social media networking has generated new opportunities and new risks for girls. Whereas numerous girls exploit the internet positively, many young women across the globe utilize it to air their physical battle with other females.
The Case for a Feminist Theory of Female Violence
Feminism has been erroneously held accountable for the documented increases in female violence and crime in standard culture. Within this setting, reports of increasing levels of female violence and crime have inclined to be confronted with prevalent skepticism from feminist academics, plausibly defensive given mythologies which simplistically hold responsible girl power, equal opportunity, or the increase of females’ freedom or feminism as the main cause. The roots of this myth ‐ creation commenced in the 1970s with the contentious ‘sisters in crime’ proposition that claimed that, as females became more equivalent to males, so will the character and incidence of females’ crime, aggression and violence (Houston, 2014). During the 1980s the statement was improved to infer that girls were progressively exhibiting explicit violence, partially since females’ freedom had enabled them bigger sexual and economic freedom and undid certain limits and casual social controls on classic sex roles. The key weakness in the claim that feminism results in augmented female violence and crime are that explorations of female crime constantly show that a small number embraces females’ liberation. It is implausible that proponents of feminism are to be found amongst criminal women and delinquent girls (Cook & Winfield, 2013).
Women violence challenges profoundly deep-rooted norms followed by feminists, policy-makers criminologists, lawyers, media commentators, and parents. The criminological model has a protracted history of essentializing aggression as a capability related primarily to young men, disregarding the capability for the women to inflict and participate in violence (Yodanis, 2004). Therefore, it is not surprising that women's libber criminologists also have ignored feminine violent criminals – supposing females are mostly not perpetrators but victims of violence. Also, feminine violence defies long ‐ believed feminist insight into femininity as the nonaggressive gender, set against the vast masculinity of aggression (Smart, 2013). Therefore, feminist academics have been hesitant to own up the issue of females’ violence, favoring repositioning of women violence in a setting of less severe, relational and social aggression which happens typically within the setting of girls negotiating peer systems, or as females utilizing aggression in self-defense against aggressive companions. Nevertheless, there is a problem justifying most cases of women violence as an outcome of social control, victimization or vulnerability of a certain form (Chesney-Lind & Morash, 2013).
There exists a limitation to the refutation of females’ capability to cause violence and engage in behavior that numerous feminists will rather ascribe to males. Smart (2013) asserts that the portrayals of the violent female as the victims instead of the culprit originates from a denial to permit the female gender to seem personally or morally blameworthy. Public, academic and legal discussions might try to settle this strain by forming an aggressive female as ‘victimized’, ‘evil’, ‘bad’, or ‘mad’ (Carrington, 2013). Therefore, feminism inclines to strengthen the victim paradigm by repositioning an aggressive female’s actions in a diminished responsibility setting. The refutation of the presence of real woman violent criminals is an outcome of obsolete gender essentialism as well as feminist idealism regarding femininity passivity. As a result, female criminals who are determined accomplices in violent acts tend to be lacking in feminist examination; rather, they are termed as girls behaving like boys, media beat ‐ ups, social paradigms, or victim of net ‐ broadening strategies that ‘upcrim’ females’ violent conduct (Carrington, 2013).
Whereas the settings in which aggression takes place might have gendered perspectives – forsaking essentialist models which construct violence as per a gendered binary – implies that, once females engage in a violent act, they can’t be alleged to be behaving simply like males. This is to say that, in non ‐ essentialist contexts, there is nothing integrally masculine or feminine regarding violence (Van Gundy, 2013). Models that hold feminism responsible, such as the sisters in crime theory that supposes females are acting more like males, or the ladette theory that draws on the concept regarding masculinization of femininity, are therefore de-robbed of their descriptive power.
Conclusion
Among the main accomplishments of feminist criminology is directing critical attention to the point that males’ violence significantly outdoes that for which girls and women are culpable. However, what remains mostly absent from feminist criminology, is the refined model of girl’s violence which take into consideration the context, power relations, politics, sex dynamics, in addition to the intersectionality of definite cases of women violence. The key weakness of the absence of a refined feminist theory of girl’s violence is that it leaves unchallenged anti ‐ feminist reasons which spread extensively in mainstream culture once a case entailing female violence becomes a public matter or when rises in rates of girls’ violent crime become recorded in public perception and popularized as young females acting like young men. Driven by anti ‐ feminist criticism politics, feminism remains, in numerous cases, mistakenly blamed for incidences and rises in female crime. Then, the key challenge for imminent feminist exploration, is how to more persuasively describe the historical changes in gendered trends of violence, instead of just erase, rationalize, or deny them. Feminist models of violence should be contextualized instead of essentialist and abstract. A feminist model of girls’ violence should be created through collective exploration between practitioners, academics, in addition to violent females, in order to capture the varying voices and perspectives. For feminism to be pertinent in the criminological, political, cultural and public debates regarding intensified social alarms concerning mounting female violence, a successful and influential strategy should conquer the silence .
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