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As early as the first two decades of the 1900s, the two scholarly articles on incarcerated women anecdotally noted their risks of coming from chaotic homes, witnessing or experiencing intimate partner abuse, and/or being sexually abused (Guibord, 1917; Spaulding, 1918). There appears, however, to be a significant lapse before scholars once again took up the abusive and traumatic life histories of women offenders. Specifically, starting in the late 1970s, feminist scholarship has increasingly used women and girls’ voices to determine traumatic and other events that place girls (and women) at risk of offending. Unlike the longitudinal data collected over time on individuals by the LCT or CVT researchers (or using such existing prospective data), these studies typically collect data at one point in time, retrospectively interviewing incarcerated women (or girls) about their lives (recall Table 3.2).

Over time, this approach has come be known as the “pathways” and was first given “theory” status in 2006 (Covington & Bloom, 2006). Pathways theory (PT), designed by feminist scholars with little to no funding, has most typically sampled solely girls and women, with a major focus on sexual and physical abuse histories. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, the tenets of PT overlap with many of the tenets of LC and CVT but also with GST and SLT (discussed in Chapter 2). Fundamentally, PT posits that adverse life events, including trauma, can serve as trajectories to offending, and these adverse events may happen in childhood, adulthood, or both. The traumas included in PT are most similar to those in CVT, primarily focusing on child abuse victimization. But a key insight from PT research “is that girls’ and women’s survival strategies lead them into crime—essentially that the state tends to criminalize female responses to [surviving/resisting] abuse” (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2016, p. 314).

Table 3.3

Source: Data from Gunnison, E. (2015). Investigating life course offender subgroup heterogeneity: An exploratory latent class analysis approach. Women & Criminal Justice, 25(4), 223–240.

Notes: Data: U.S. National Youth Survey (Waves 4–7). Sample = 726 youth followed over time. Gunnison (2015) used latent class analysis to examine the differences across these groups: escalators, persistent de-escalators, persisters, and chronic fluctuators.