Feminist Criminology - Are we justifying Women's Criminality?

Submitted by: - Yashvardhan Gullapalli

Introduction
Over the last decade, feminist critique of criminal law and the criminal justice system has
grown in popularity, addressing doctrinal, practical, and theoretical challenges. These
criticisms, as well as the reform ideas that accompany them, are widely considered to be
divisive. Yet, across a wide variety of topics, the feminist stance is based on a basic reality
that cannot be disputed: criminal law is obsessed with male interests and views from the top
to the bottom.
Feminist criminology is a subset of critical criminology that focuses on deconstructing
mainstream/traditional crime theories to their core. For a long time, feminist criminology was
not recognized because it lacked definition and defined bounds, and it, like many other ideas,
had flaws. The study of a crime, criminal behaviours, and the criminal justice system that
surrounds it is referred to as criminology.

Purpose
Feminist criminology addresses the limitations that exist in the criminal justice system, as a
result of which there has been a failure to consider the fact that there are some significant
differences in the male and female paths to committing a crime, as well as the types of
crimes, victimization, and punishments that they face. The research was based on the criminal
justice system's responses to male criminals as well as male crime. According to the
researchers and criminology students, it has always been expected that when investigating a
generic crime, it would be a study of male crime and that a crime committed by a woman will
be an outlier.
The lack of the feminine perspective is due to the fact that criminology and related sciences
have mostly overlooked women. Furthermore, while criminologists portray women as
offenders, they do it in a stereotyped manner, implying that women who commit crimes are
aberrant. To put it in other words, they have typically been shown based on their biological
nature and psychological condition. The production and building of criminological
knowledge, as well as its distribution, has been dominated by men. It's hardly a gratifying or
logically right answer to remark that women aren't the only ones who are overlooked, and the
study's omission of females raises some fundamental problems about the quality of the
studies conducted.

Genesis
Feminist criminology evolved in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thanks to the second wave of
feminism, which helped to bring to light the challenges that women faced when it came to
crimes in the public sphere. It was around the same period, during which Carol Smart’s
Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (1976), was published. It acted as a
catalyst in the field of feminist criminology by bringing the limelight towards a topic that was
mostly untouched by criminology academia, resulting in a spate of works and researches
popping up. One of the first concerns of this new wave of women's crime writers was to put
"women" on the criminological agenda, to show that most previous explanations of crime had
been explanations of male crime, and to argue that when women break the law, they do so in
situations that are often very different from those in which men break the law.

Role and Impact of Feminist Literature

The fact that criminals might be both male and female has been overlooked in earlier
criminologies. There has been a presumption that when we talk about 'offenders,' we're
talking about men. Furthermore, the discussion of female criminals expanded the individual
or biological pathology. Biological considerations were used to explain them. Another
notable influence of feminist literature is bringing attention to the treatment of women in the
country's criminal justice system. By addressing the historical premise of females benefiting
from chivalry within a male-dominated culture and consequently having more lenient
sentencing, it has helped to change the outmoded and nebulous assumption of "common
sense."
Due to the advent of feminist ideology, the much-neglected areas of legal study have started
to gain attention. For instance, crimes like domestic violence and female sexual abuse, which
are faced by women, sometimes even at their ‘supposedly’ safe home. Female writing has
helped in protecting girls and women against male violence and has raised questions about
how the victims or the survivors can be supported.
Finally, the highly gendered character of criminal activities has been highlighted, prompting
queries such as "why do females commit a small number of crimes while males commit a
large number?" There is a link between femininity and these relatively low crime rates, with
men being anticipated as the more probable offenders.

Conclusion
The focus on violence against women is undeniably a distinguishing feature that has been
actively exploited to draw attention to the issue on a global scale. The abuse of women in
Islamic nations, as well as traditional behaviours against humanity such as female genital
mutilation, are some of the other emphasis areas that serve as a foundation for the need to
further study feminist criminology and women's victimisation across the world.
Feminist criminology has evolved significantly and is undergoing certain modifications.
However, it may be noted and concluded that, despite the fact that feminist study has been
published, it remains neglected in many ways. Even major publications publish just a small
amount of feminist study, and textbooks pay only a cursory consideration to feminist
criminology theories and their relevance.