Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 14

The title of this book was chosen to reflect the strong theme of invisibility in the three major areas covered in the book: (1) women and girls as offenders, (2) women and girls as victims, and (3) women professionals working in the CLS. Before the 1980s, the research on women, girls, and crime was scant, practically invisible. It was as if their victimizations, offending, and existence were unimportant or meaningless. With the second wave of the U.S. women’s/feminist movement (the 1960s and 1970s), more women hoping to study what is now referred to as feminist criminology, were accepted into law school, and criminology, psychology, social work, and sociology advanced degree programs, resulting in feminist criminology growing at increasing rates. The first edition of this book was published in 1996, when there was far less research published on women, girls, and crime, and most of it was in the United States and England. Fortunately, this research has significantly expanded not only in the United States and England, but around the world. However, this makes it much more difficult to adequately include all this research, so the book’s focus is on the United States.

This book is dedicated to the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (#MMIWG). Later in this book we will come back to MMIWG, but it is necessary to identify colonization and resistance to it as very much related to feminist criminology, just as slavery is. The same could be said about the United States that is stated in this quote from Canada’s 2019 MMIWG Report:

In the 16th century, “explorers” commissioned by European states arrived in what is now Canada to claim newly “discovered” lands for their benefactors, with the purpose of drawing out its resources for their funders in Europe. They were looking for resources—loot—and hoped to find them in the Americas. While the term “explorer” may suggest a kind of harmless searching or wandering, these voyages were anything but that. Instead, they set the stage for a full-scale assault on Indigenous Nations and communities that has lasted nearly 500 years. (National Inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019, p. 234)

Historically, women and girls were left out of victimization and offending studies or, if included, were typically done so in sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and other stereotypic ways. A study of U.S. and British criminology publications from 1895 to 1997 found “a glaring and persistent deficiency” in the representation of women and girls in criminology studies, which was attributed at least in part to the underrepresentation of women criminologists (Hughes, 2005, p. 21). Similarly, historical accounts of criminology often ignored women criminologists’ contributions to the field (Laub & Smith, 1995).

On a more positive note, significant pro-feminist changes have occurred: Criminology scholarship and university curricula more often include women and girls, and academia is producing more feminist and queer scholars and publishing outlets (such as journals). Moreover, intersectional feminist criminology is more routinely expected in publications. The growth of feminist and intersectional scholarship is evident in every new edition of The Invisible Woman, whereby there is far more research to review on women, girls, and LGBTQI+ as offenders and victims, and within the context of race, class, sexuality, and so on. Unfortunately, a 2015 study found that although women’s representation as authors in criminology journals indicates increases over time, they are still very underrepresented in six mainstream (compared to the two gender-specialized) criminology journals (Eigenberg & Whalley, 2015). Similarly, a study of pictures in “Intro to Criminal Justice” textbooks found there were three times as many depictions of men as women per chapter (Love & Park, 2013). When women did appear, they were most likely victims or peripheral people. Men were five times more often than women to be portrayed as any category of CLS professionals (i.e., police officers, judges and lawyers, and guards) and seven times more than women as police officers (which, we will find in Section III of this book, is the least gender diverse of CLS jobs).