Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 18

In addition to acknowledging the invisibility of women offenders, women victims, and women working in the criminal legal system, it is important to recognize the overlapping of these categories in many women’s experiences. Given the extraordinarily high rates of gender-based abuse (see Chapters 7 through 9), it would be difficult to have women working in the criminal legal system who had not been victimized by GBA. Similarly, the offending chapters (Chapters 2 through 6), including some criminology theories (e.g., pathways and cycle of violence theories) address the well-documented relationship between gender-based abuse and other victimizations and offending behaviors. Many of these accounts suggest that the likelihood that prior victimization (especially gender-based abuse victimization) and offending (especially sex work/prostitution, running away, and drug offenses) are significantly related. For example, women and girls escaping abusive homes often have few legal avenues and engage in crimes such as sex work, selling drugs, and property crimes, in order to survive.

As discussed earlier, women victims, offenders, and professionals in the CLS have historically remained invisible. Because of the shame associated with sexual abuse and abuse by a partner, these crimes are not routinely reported to the criminal legal system, research interviewers, or even family members and health care officials. Similarly, offending women have remained invisible because, until recently, they made up less than 5% of the prison population. Although no actual count exists, U.S. prisons have housed, and continue to house, countless women who killed their very abusive mates as a last resort (e.g., Browne, 1987; Richie, 1996). Finally, roles for women professionals in the criminal legal system were largely nonexistent until the 1970s. The goal of this book is to make issues surrounding women and crime more visible, to trace the changes in society and the criminal legal system that have occurred, and to propose changes that still need to occur. But first, to understand these issues, it is important to have an understanding of feminism and the difference between sex and gender.