NGAIRE NAFFINE - Feminism and Criminology

It is tempting to begin a book on feminism and criminology with a statement about the neglect of both women and feminism by the discipline. Certainly, a quick scan of the criminology section of any American or British library will turn up many standard student texts in which women and feminism play but a minor role. This exercise will confirm that criminology is still a discipline dominated by men, and that its subject matter is also male-dominated. Criminology, it seems, is mainly about academic men studying criminal men and, at best, it would appear that women represent only a specialism, not the standard fare.

Similarly, feminism as a substantial body of social, political and philosophical thought (indeed the subject of this book), does not feature prominently in conventional criminological writing. When feminism is formally allocated a place in a textbook, it is often to be found within the womens chapter, which is the chapter invariably on women as offenders and as the victims of crime. This is necessarily a constricted use of feminism. Alternatively, feminism is slotted into a chapter entitled Gender and Crime, which should deal at least with the implications of masculinity and femininity for the criminality of both sexes, but is often simply another, and misleading, way of designating the now compulsory chapter on women. Thus, feminism is either reduced to, or conflated with, the study of women and crime, implicitly a minor branch of the discipline of criminology. Feminism in its more ambitious and influential mode is not employed in the study of men, which is the central business of criminology. The potential of feminist analyses in criminology at large is, therefore, widely misunderstood and underestimated. The message to the reader is that feminism is about women, while criminology is about men.

A clear illustration of this interesting logic is to be found in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, a weighty volume (1259 pages) intended to present students with a comprehensive account of the current state of the discipline. There is no equivalent chapter on men.

By setting up the intellectual task as they do, the editors of the Oxford book are tacitly asking us to think of criminology as a discipline that is somehow free from the effects of gender when it is in its proper form. Gender is treated as a specialist topic (rather than integral to the analysis of crime), and then we discover that this specialism of gender actually refers to the study of women. In a few easy steps, the editors have established a standard case and an exception or speciality. The standard case is the study of men as non-gendered subjects and the speciality is the study of women as gendered beings. As Jonathon Culler has pointed out, this procedure of comparing a deviant with a standard case is generally assumed to be the appropriate one in any serious analysis, whatever the discipline. It is not peculiar to criminology. The method is to describe the simple, normal standard case of [whatever the topic], illustrating its essential nature, and proceeding from there to discuss other cases that can be defined as complications, derivations, and deteriorations.

The editors of the Oxford book perform precisely this manoeuvre. Gender, which predictably turns out to mean women, is treated as a specialism that can come late in the book. The main part of the volume, which is essentially about men (but not as sexed men and therefore not explicitly so), then appears as the natural heartland of criminology, its proper terrain. In criminology, as in other disciplines, it is men, not women, who supply the essential (and therefore unexamined) standard case. Men, themselves, are not compared with others to see what makes them specific and different.

American criminology texts employ a similar logic. In 1991, Stephen E. Brown, Finn-Aage Esbensen and Gilbert Geis published one of the many standard introductory textbooks of criminology tailored for the American student market. Criminology: Explaining Crime and its Context is some 730 pages long and divided into three parts: foundations of criminology, which introduces the subjects of criminology, criminal justice and crime statistics; theories of crime, which traverses the usual range of theories of crime; and types of crime. Women appear in the third section on criminal types. The reason that female crime enters the book this late in the day, well after the general chapters on theoretical criminology, is because theories of crime and delinquency until now largely have failed to incorporate gender variables.