Introduction

Given the proportion of women in the criminal justice system, and particularly those in prison, it is perhaps understandable that the overwhelming focus in desistance research has been on men. Many important studies either neglect to include women, or ignore the differences in experience between genders (for example, Sampson and Laub, 1993; Maruna, 2001; Bottoms et al, 2004). In many ways desistance is experienced similarly despite gender, and this can be a wholly acceptable reason for a lack of research interest. However, research indicates that there are some common features of women's desistance that are markedly different to (or significantly more pronounced than) men's researched experiences (for example, Giordano et al, 2002; Leverentz, 2006). In addition, while many researchers talk of desistance as a process rather than an event, it is still rare to encounter a qualitative research design which attempts to take this position seriously in the investigation of desistance. With some exceptions, the desire to identify ‘successful’ desisters understandably proves more pressing than the possibility of examining the process of desistance as it unfolds. Yet this need not be the case.

Through the use of a micro-longitudinal, relational interviewing approach (Soyer, 2014; Leverentz, 2014), I followed a number of women through some months in their lives where they had experience of desisting from crime to some extent. This approach offers unprecedented access to the daily experience of women as they face the challenge of desisting, and lessens problems of retrospective interviewing after many months or years of offending-free behaviour. Yet this intensive qualitative approach raises questions of whether my findings are specific to women, or whether men would report similar experiences if they were interviewed in comparable circumstances.

In this chapter, I first look at understandings of lived desistance, introducing existing research on female desisters, particularly the role of identity in their experiences. Next, I introduce my own study and the methods used. Turning to explaining my findings, I examine why identity change may be important to female desisters and explore the impact of participants’ lack of confidence in themselves on their understanding of their own identities. In contrast to some other desistance literature (Maruna, 2001) which discusses people exerting an identity which they had not previously embodied, I show that many of my participants reclaimed a previous identity rather than creating a brand new identity in their desistance.