Introduction

Gender in relation to crime, victimisation and criminal justice has stimulated much research interest and policy attention. Empirical evidence appears to show that sex is a key variable in relation to criminality, with most crimes being committed by men, and certainly with serious and violent crimes being predominantly carried out by men. Much debate has therefore been generated regarding women's criminality, whether the empirical evidence can be taken at face value or whether perhaps other processes are at play that serve to conceal women's true criminality. For example, some commentators have suggested that the crimes that women commit do not come to the attention of the authorities (Pollak, 1950). Whilst some studies have suggested that women are dealt with more leniently by the courts, others have indicated that women are treated more severely (Walklate, 2001). However, sex discrimination as a phenomenon has proved to be elusive to establish.

Criminology, a discipline of modernity, has very much been dominated by Enlightenment philosophy and the utilisation of science to explore crime and victimisation. However, when applied to women, apparently neutral, objective scientific research has been found to be underpinned by sexist assumptions, thus being a far cry from value-free research. Indeed, within criminology, offenders have been assumed to be male rather than female so that women offenders’ experiences have been ignored, misrepresented and/or misunderstood. As a result, feminist researchers have challenged gender-biased distortions by using the voices of female offenders, and by focusing upon their experiences, to provide a more accurate picture of women offenders, their characteristics, their motivations and their contact with, and experiences of, agencies of the criminal justice system. However, this work has been criticised for viewing female offenders predominantly through a victimological rather than a criminological lens, for example, by viewing women as the victims of patriarchal institutions, so that women have constituted the criminological Other and their lawbreaking has not been viewed as real offending. Therefore, more recent positions have pursued an active engagement with the notion that women can be the perpetrators of crime, even violent crimes such as murder and infanticide (Davies, 2007).

Turning to the issue of victimisation, feminist work has questioned some of the male-orientated assumptions underpinning traditional victimological work, which has led to women's behaviour being judged and implicated in the crimes that have been committed against them.