Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 25

The original and positivist studies of female criminality were conducted between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century. The most prominent researchers included Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (1895/2004), W. I. Thomas (1923, 1967a, 1967b), Sigmund Freud (1933), and Otto Pollak (1950). These studies were grounded in the belief that biological determinism accounts for female criminality: Whereas men are rational, women are driven by their biological constitutions. Positivist approaches were informed by four main assumptions: (1) Individual characteristics, not society, are responsible for criminal behavior; (2) there is an identifiable biological nature inherent in all women; (3) offending women are “masculine,” which makes them incompetent as women and thus prone to break the law; and (4) the differences between male and female criminality are due to sex, not gender, differences. The classical theorists have been accused of viewing women as turning to crime because of their “perversion of or rebellion against their natural feminine roles” (Klein, 1973, p. 5).

In addition to the sexist nature of the classical studies, they also have been classist, racist, and heterosexist, focusing on wealthy, white, straight, married women as the “feminine” standard. These theorists’ works are reviewed in the following sections. The historic legacy of racial criminalization is the U.S. history of equating a specific race with crime and the ongoing discrimination, assuming crime is biologically inherent to every race but white (Delgado, 1994; Hernández, 2017; Russell-Brown, 2009), including Black/African Americans (Hernández, 2017; Muhammad, 2010), Indigenous/Native Americans (Hernández, 2017; Ross, 1998), Latinx Americans (Flores, 2018; Hernández, 2017), and Asian Americans (Hernández, 2017). Notably, racial criminalization is even more heightened for immigrants of Color, regardless of whether they have become citizens (Flores, 2018; Hernández, 2017), and President Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric and practices regarding Latinx immigrants have increased equating Latinx people with crime (Flores, 2018), an association that is highly inaccurate. More specifically, research on the percentage of Latinx immigrants (and sometimes total number of Latinx residents regardless of citizen status) in an area is unrelated to the crime rate, or is actually a protective factor, with more Latinx residents related to lower crime rates (Light & Miller, 2018; Ramos & Wenger, 2019; Tosh, 2019; Wadsworth, 2010).

Similarly, before the 1970s it was customary practice in countries of the Global North (colonizers) to equate what we now refer to as LGBTQI+ with “criminal” and “deviant” (see Woods, 2015). The deviancy and criminal labels were applied to queer people for being gender nonconforming (if they were women/girls who presented as masculine or men/boys who were feminine) and for being sexual deviants for being attracted to their same sex (Woods, 2015). Queer criminology scholar Woods (2015) found that although the 1970s were key in the beginning of LGBTQI+ pride, LGBTQI+ people became invisible, disappearing from mainstream criminology and delinquency theories (p. 133).