Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 55

LCT research conducted on boys and men has generally found considerable support. Although LCT would seem ideal to study offending and resiliency to offending in everyone’s lives, including the potential to better understand how this is gendered, traditionally, LCT research focused on boys (including as they became men) (De Li, 1999; Laub, Nagin, & Sampson, 1998; Loeber, 1996; Moffitt, 1990, 1993; Nagin, Farrington, & Moffitt, 1995; A. R. Piquero, Brame, Mazerolle, & Haapanen, 2002; A. R. Piquero, MacDonald, & Parker, 2002; Sampson & Laub, 1990, 1993; Shover & Thompson, 1992; Stattin & Magnusson, 1991; Tremblay et al., 1992). Moreover, like GST, LCT tests rarely include maltreatment and other trauma variables, which are seemingly obvious strains (GST) and life events (LCT) (e.g., A. R. Piquero & Mazerolle, 2000). In some sense, this is “excusable” given that the researchers are dealing with existing longitudinal data sets that began data collection in times when there was significantly less interest in females and gender and when the prevalence of child abuse, especially the sexual abuse of boys, was unknown. On the other hand, it is somewhat remarkable how infrequently these LCT (and GST) studies ignored or glossed over both leaving girls out and/or not accounting for childhood abuse and other traumas.

One of the rare earlier LCT studies that included girls (and boys) barely mentioned or reported on gender, and although it collected detailed information on sexual activity, it failed to account for whether it was consensual (Olds, Henderson, Cole, & Eckenrode, 1998). Similarly, a 2000 edited book, Life-Course Criminology: Contemporary and Classic Readings (A. R. Piquero & Mazerolle, 2000), includes many of the studies reviewed in this section. Unfortunately, throughout the entire book, gender, abuse, and trauma—seemingly important distinctions in early development, life experiences, and subsequent offending—are rarely mentioned. Farrington (1992) drew on three large longitudinal British data sets, at least one of which included girls (as well as boys). Unfortunately, Farrington barely addressed any findings about gender or girls/women. Another LCT study provided no empirical data but stressed the need for comparative studies across countries or even allowing for various structural locations within a country (including the United States) as important “next steps” for LCT (Laub & Lauritsen, 1993). Unfortunately, the authors do not mention gender and appear to be interested in race and class only as “structural location” variables.

Another seeming attempt to include gender in LCT is Loeber and Hay’s (1997) lengthy article promising information on gender differences, titled “Key Issues in the Development of Aggression and Violence From Childhood to Early Adulthood.” Remarkably, this article scarcely touches on social learning or the many ways that boys’ aggression is tolerated or even encouraged whereas girls’ aggression is punished. Nor do the authors address the gendered nature of childhood abuses and, therefore, how this influences development. Instead, we learn that “some degree of aggression is age-normative, at least in boys” (p. 373), and “it seems probable that girls during the preschool period outgrow aggression more speedily than boys” (p. 388). There is no indication why this is probable, and other studies suggest that girls do not “outgrow” aggression so much as their aggression is disproportionately punished compared with boys, and this is most profound for Black and Brown girls (Annamma et al., 2019; Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Evans-Winters et al., 2018; J. Flores, 2016; Gion, McIntosh, & Smolkowski, 2018; Lopez, 2017; M. W. Morris, 2015; Shange, 2019). Finally, Loeber and Hay (1997) are comfortable identifying “gender differences” and “prediction” as the only key words for the article when their tables and figures are composed solely from data on boys. Therefore, although LCT may and now has been meaningfully applied to girls and women, this did not occur regularly until more recently, and there is still significant room for improvement.