Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 43

Historically, most criminology theories have been developed by men and about men and boys’ offending. Even when theories were about “why people obey the law,” the focus was on men and boys. The classical/positivist theories were very biological in nature, fraught with sexism, racism, and classism. The more recent biosocial and evolutionary theories (BSETs) have resumed many of these troubling assumptions and fail to examine structural and societal explanations for criminal behavior. Until the mid-1970s, most theorists made little attempt to account for women and girls’ criminality. Social bond theory (SBT), developed in 1969, once (finally) applied to girls, confirmed social bonds and controls account for some gender differences in offending, indicating that it contributes to understanding girls and women’s offending and to explaining the gender crime gap (addressed more in the next chapter). Power-control theory (PCT), developed in the mid-1980s, was also designed to address gender. It has mixed support and makes some sexist assumptions. More recent research addresses rethinking the (assumed negative) role of single mothers and mothering, but also fathering, and parenting, in general, and through less sexist, racist, and classist lenses (e.g., Schulze & Bryan, 2017). In 1975, for the first time, an approach was developed to explain women’s criminal behavior: women’s emancipation/liberation hypothesis (WLEH) (Adler, 1975; R. J. Simon, 1975). Unfortunately, this hypothesis was based on erroneous and sexist and class assumptions about the feminist movement and statistics, and the interpretations of data were often misleading. Given that studies repeatedly find no support for WLEH, and most of its premises contradict other theories, it is not clear why it is still tested, even if only occasionally. Notably, traditional strain theory never included abuse or other trauma victimizations, and general strain theory (GST) has rarely included these when they would seem to be such clear strains. Similarly, child abuse is rarely included in SBT tests, where parents’ abuse would seemingly be related to children’s attachment to their parents. The next chapter addresses some of the theories that have been explicitly designed to include girls and women and/or trauma and adverse life events, as well as some other theories that are more recent and offer potential for studying girls and women, gender, and the risks of offending.