Women and Positivism

Roger Burke
Why Criminology neglected the study of
female offenders.
Explaining female criminal behaviour was for many years a neglected area of
criminology.
Due to low levels of involvement in crime and the associated
assumption that women are predominantly law-abiding.
By the age of 28,33 per cent of males and 6 per cent of females have been convicted
of a serious offence and this ratio has remained similar over the years.
Even in the case of shoplifting – an offence traditionally associated with women –
there are more males than females convicted.
In Britain 80 per cent of those convicted of serious crimes are male while only 3
per cent of the prison population consists of women. There are similar ratios
in the USA.
Explanations of Criminality
• The explanations of female criminality that did exist were founded very much
in the predestined actor model of crime and criminal behavior.
• The works of Lombroso – particularly The Female Offender – provide a
• fundamentally biologically determinist account of female criminality and,
while
• his methodology and conclusions have long been discredited, later biological
• and psychological writings on female crime (see Thomas, 1907, 1923; Davis,
• 1961, originally 1937; Pollak, 1950 and others discussed here) have relied at
• least implicitly on assumptions about the physiological and psychological
• nature of women to be found in his work (Klein, 1973).
• Lombroso proposed that crime is an atavism explained by the survival of
primitive traits in individuals. Based on this assumption he compared the physical
characteristics of convicted female criminals and prostitutes with those women
considered to be normal.
• Traits found to be more common in the ‘criminal’ group were defined as atavistic
and those found to possess a number of these were considered potentially
• criminal. Moreover, it was argued that women share many common traits
• because there are fewer variations in their mental capacities: ‘even the female
• criminal is monotonous and uniform compared with her male companion,
• just as in general woman is inferior to man’ (Lombroso and Ferrero, 1885:
• 122)
• ‘atavistically nearer to her origin than the male’ (Lombroso and
Ferrero, 1885: 107). Lower rates of female criminality were thus
attributed to women in general having fewer anomalies – or
variations – than men and this was explained by them being close to
the lower forms of less differentiated life.
• Lombroso proposed that women are inherently passive and conservative because their
traditional sex role in the family inherently prepares them for a more sedentary existence,
although he did propose a biological basis for this passivity as being related to the nature of
the sex act between men and women.
• He argued that the great majority of women are constrained from involvement in criminal
activity by a lack of intelligence and passion, qualities he associates with criminal women
and all men.
• In other words, the female offender is seen – within this indisputably biologically
determinist characterisation – to be masculine and the normal woman feminine.
• Lombroso observed that the skull anomalies he found in female criminals are closer to those
of men – either normal or criminal – than they are to normal women.
• The female offender often has a ‘virile cranium’ and considerable body hair
• but this masculinity is in itself an anomaly rather than a sign of development
• Finally, Lombroso and Ferrero (1885: 217) note that women have a lack
of property sense, which they argue contributes to their criminality:
• It is a notion that has been challenged on different levels: first, there
• is the simple assumption that women have a different sense of property
than men; second, if there is any credibility in that supposition then this
must be explained by the lack of female property ownership and non
participation in capitalist wealth accumulation, indeed, women have
been considered property themselves (Klein, 1973).
• Lombroso has nevertheless provided an enduring – a
• Lombroso has nevertheless provided an enduring – albeit invariably
• implicit – influence on the biological study of female criminality. Many later
• biological positivists commented on the passivity and lack of aggression on
• the part of women and readily proposed this as an explanation for their non
• involvement in criminal behaviour. Money and Ernhardt (1972) and Rose,
• Holoday and Bernstein (1971) propose – on the basis of studies conducted
• with rats in cages – that female passivity is related to the fact that men and
• women have both different brains and hormones,
• The generative phases of women theory is based on biological changes connected
• to the menstrual cycle and from this perspective, it is proposed that at times
• of menstruation women are reminded that they can never become men and
• the subsequent distress this engenders makes them increasingly susceptible to
• offending behaviour.
• The best known proponent of this thesis is Otto Pollak (1950) who also proposes
that the hormonal disturbance resulting from pregnancy and the menopause may
be a cause of female criminality.
• Dalton( 1961) studied this in female prison population but it was in-conclusive.
• While it remains unclear whether women engage in a higher incidence of
criminal behaviour during their generative phases, it is clear that the law has
accepted the condition as constituting mitigating circumstances in some
instances.
• Susan Edwards (1988) notes that in the nineteenth century premenstrual
tension (PMT) was frequently discussed as being an important element of a
defence in cases of violence, killing, arson and theft.
• Both she and Luckhaus (1985) refer to cases in the early 1980s where PMT
was successfully pleaded in mitigation with the outcome that murder charges
were reduced to manslaughter. This is an interesting finding because medical
evidence is divided about the existence of any such syndrome.