Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 59

Studies conducted since the late 1970s are very consistent with what was later identified as PT. Most of the following studies are described in chronological order by the date they were published. First, between 1970 and 1975, J. James and Meyerding (1977) interviewed more than 200 women and girl prostitutes/sex workers in a large western city in the United States, finding far higher rates of coerced sex, intercourse at a young age, and incest experienced by these women and girls than were reported in existing research on nonincarcerated (community) women and girls. They identified the women and girls’ childhood sexual victimizations as risk factors for becoming prostitutes and for the pattern of sex work for survival. Silbert and Pines (1981) interviewed 200 racially diverse (69% white, 18% African American, 11% Latina, 2% Native American, and 1% Asian American) current and former prostitutes in the San Francisco Bay area, ranging from 10 to 46 years old. Although two thirds of them came from middle- or higher-income families, almost 90% reported their financial situation at the time of the interview as “just making it” or “very poor” (p. 408). Silbert and Pines found (1) three in five reported sexual abuse before the age of 16, with an average of two sexual abusers each; (2) two thirds of the sexual abuse victims were abused by fathers or father figures (stepfathers, foster fathers, and mothers’ common-law husbands); and (3) 10% were sexually abused by strangers. Furthermore, childhood sexual abuse frequently led to running away from home, which led to prostitution and other street work. Finally, when asked why they started prostituting, 90% said it was because they were hungry, needed money, and had no other options available to them (p. 410). Notably, M. Farley and Barkan’s (1998) study interviewing street sex workers also found three fifths reported child sexual abuse.

Chesney-Lind and Rodriguez’s (1983) intensive interviews with sixteen incarcerated women found half were raped as children, three fifths (62%) reported a range of sexual abuse victimizations (rape and/or other sexual abuses), and three fifths disclosed severe physical child abuse. Similar to findings of Silbert and Pines (1981), about 90% of the women reported involvement in prostitution/sex work, and for most, this was an outgrowth of running away from home in their teens and financial/survival needs. Chesney-Lind and Rodriguez (1983) also reported how subsequent drug dependency was related to further entanglement with the law.

Arnold (1990) conducted intensive interviews, participant observation, and questionnaires with 60 African American women prisoners. Consistent with what is now labeled PT, but also with Kenney’s (2002) concern noted earlier that LT does not address the victimization of major trauma and the subsequent stigmatizing and shaming such victims often experience, Arnold (1990) describes how the incarcerated women she interviewed were labeled and processed as deviants and delinquents as young girls “for refusing to accept or participate in their own victimization” (p. 154). This refusal led to their alienation from three primary socialization institutions: family, educational systems, and occupational systems. This dislocation, in turn, led to their entry into “criminal life.” Arnold documents how patriarchal families and family violence, economic marginality, racist teachers, and poor educational systems individually and collectively produce environments leading to the criminalization of girls, where they are alienated in their own homes, schools, and communities. Furthermore, Arnold reports that these women and girls often “self-medicate” with drugs in attempts to numb the pain from their violent experiences and pasts.

Although many published studies are consistent with, and can be referred to as, PT testing (as done in this chapter), this theory or perspective was first labeled “pathways” in 1992 in Daly’s article “Women’s Pathways to Felony Court: Feminist Theories of Lawbreaking and Problems of Representation.” Daly analyzed women’s felony court presentence investigation reports (PSIs). Although there was considerable overlap in the women’s experiences (e.g., childhood abuse victimization, battering by an intimate partner, and alcohol/drug dependency), she identified five categories of offending women: street women, harmed and harming women, battered women, drug-connected women, and other. The street women were consistent with E. M. Miller’s (1986) definition in her classic ethnography Street Women; these are women who survived significant physical and psychological damage as a child and/or adult and ended up hustling on the street to “eke out a living” (Daly, 1992, p. 37). Harmed and harming women acted out from childhood abuse and neglect, were then labeled “problem children,” developed alcohol problems, and harmed others because they were angry from being “done wrong.” Battered women were in or just out of an intimate relationship with a very violent man, and this abuse is what brought them to court. Although there are battered women in the other categories, these women were in court for hurting or killing the man who abused them during a violent incident the man started. Daly’s drug-connected-women use or sell drugs often due to their relationships with male partners, their children, or their mothers. The battered and drug-connected women tend to have the least extensive (including no) criminal records. Finally, Daly’s other women had no or limited chemical dependency or abusive partner histories, and their crimes were economically motivated.

Gilfus (1993) interviewed 20 incarcerated women to understand their entries into street crime and found many of the women’s survival skills to avoid victimization were criminal; these “skills” included running away from home, using drugs, and prostituting themselves. The women were from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly the African American women. In addition to abuse and poverty, educational neglect and extremely troubling school experiences were prevalent in the women’s childhoods. The African American women reported significant racial violence in their childhoods, including a woman who, as a girl, had witnessed her uncle murdered by two white men. The women’s victimizations often led to offending, which often led to revictimization while living on the street, including rape, assault, and attempted murder. Many of the women also reported adulthood violent victimization perpetrated by their intimate male partners (domestic violence). Similarly, Comack (1996) interviewed 24 incarcerated women and, while not trying to excuse their offenses, highlighted how these women’s extreme adult and child physical and sexual abuses and subsequent offending cannot be removed from political, social, and economic analysis given their lives.

One of the most profound and classic PT studies is Richie’s (1996) research reported in Compelled to Crime, focusing on incarcerated women. In this work, Richie used life-history interviews to elicit women’s voices. Ultimately, she developed her theory of gender entrapment to understand the “contradictions and complications of the lives of the African American battered women who commit crimes” (p. 4). More specifically, gender entrapment involves understanding the connections between (1) violence against women in their intimate relationships, (2) culturally constructed gender-identity development, and (3) women’s participation in illegal activities. Two of the many important contributions of Richie’s research are her dispelling of myths about battered women regarding “why they stay” and her investigation into the impacts of race and racism and class and classism. For example, a major finding is that the African American battered women in her study appeared to have had a more privileged childhood family environment (e.g., felt loved and important) than the white battered women and the African American nonbattered women. Richie suggests this “heightened status” in their families of origin is what makes these women vulnerable to entrapment when they become involved with batterers: They become disappointed with their experiences in the public sphere where they encounter racism instead of a heightened status; thus, they refocus their goal on obtaining the perfect nuclear family. When the battering starts, they are optimistic about being able to “fix” things. In addition to identifying numerous ways that imprisoned women have been “trapped by the violence” in their intimate relationships as adults, she also reports their other pathways to crime,” including poverty and drug addiction.

The goal of J. W. Moore’s (1999) study of Latinx gang members and their families in East Los Angeles was to understand gang membership in terms of major themes relating to the family, including immigration and ethnicity, parental economic status, and the climate of the homes in which the gang members were raised. Ethnic identity was reported as confusing for many of these youths, as they were virtually all born in the United States yet were raised by their parents and treated by racist Whites as if they were Mexican. For both girls and boys, the racist experiences with Whites could lead to fights. The households in which they were raised were more reflective of “poverty” than of traditional extended Mexican families, and their parents typically had little formal education. A third of the male and two fifths of the female gang members reported seeing their fathers beat their mothers. When asked about their reaction to witnessing this, about half of the females and two thirds of the males reported “withdrawing in fear” (J. W. Moore, 1999, p. 167). Notably, the females were more likely than the males to try to intervene and stop their fathers’ abuse of their mothers or to fight their fathers themselves. About half of the boys and two thirds of the girls were clearly afraid of their fathers, often “with good reason” (p. 168). Girls were also more likely to be afraid of their mothers than were boys, and consistent with other research, girls tended to be far more restricted than their brothers by their parents. Although a few boys disclosed inappropriate sexual advances made to them as children, 29% of the girls reported incest, usually perpetrated by a father, but also by uncles, brothers, and grandfathers. Moore found that girls were more likely than boys to come from “troubled” families.