Gender, Crime and Justice

Revision – key things from last session A risk society is not one that has become more hazardous or

dangerous ... Rather, it is a society increasingly preoccupied with the future

Men are less fearful than women but more likely to be victims – does this lead to risky behaviour?

Whitehead differs from other theorists in using one concept of masculinity in explaining commonality between men and consequent broad patterns of violence between men.

Men tend to become involved in risky behaviour (example of illegal behaviours ie drugs and crime) more frequently and younger than women

Risky behaviours are a type of performance – a way of doing masculinity

Masculine anxiety leads to risky behaviour and can lead to tragedy (example the killing of Stephen Lawrence)

Plan

Case Study Global violence – no justice in a patriarchal

world Local violence – no justice in a patriarchal

society A failure to act? Policing Domestic Violence

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7931827.stm

Police - gatekeepers to the criminal justice system

Domestic violence - common anomalies or systematic failures of the entire system of criminal justice?

How is the policing of violence against women located at the intersection of gender, patriarchy, violence and justice?

Case Study - Tumi McCallum

http://gothamist.com/2007/08/08/victims_boyfrie.php

•15% to 42% high school students in America have had a violent experience within the context of a date. •40% of girls aged 14 to 17 know someone their age who has been hit or beaten by a boyfriend. •Females aged 16 to 24 are three times more vulnerable to intimate partner violence than any other age group. •Half of females aged 14 to 16 receiving child protection services, reported sexual and physical violence at the hands of a dating partner.

Global violence – no justice in a patriarchal world

Domestic violence is the major cause of death and disability for women aged 16 to 44 and that it accounts for more death and ill-health than cancer or traffic accidents (Council of Europe, 2002).

What is the use of such data? In their 5th Periodic Report to the United Nations CEDAW

Committee the Russian government estimated 14,000 women were killed by their partners or relatives

A UN expert on CEDAW, Aurora de Dios, was cited in Crawford (1998) as asking a group of women to guess in which country a woman suffered from violence every 20 minutes.

Do you know? Elman (2001:39) has argued how this illusion “rested on the denial

of violence against women” and the failure to adequate police and protect.

Geraldine Brooks (1995: 183) Kurdish women were raped by Iraqi soldiers “as part of the regime of torture ... Others had been raped as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands”.

The World Health Organisation suggests that “in many countries that have suffered violent conflict, the rates of interpersonal violence remain high even after the cessation of hostilities – among other reasons because of the way violence has become more socially acceptable” (2002: 15).

Local violence – no justice in a patriarchal society

Mapping UK's teen murder toll

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7777635.stm

Male Suspect/Killer Female

Suspect/Killer

Unknown

Male Victim (70) 67 1 2

Female Victim (13) 10 1 2

A failure to act? Policing Domestic Violence

Relatives had complained to police on 30 April that the teenager had been stalked and attacked by a man who threatened to kill her. In a statement Arsema's mother Tsehainesh Medhani said: "When my daughter was threatened, I went to the police seeking protection - sadly, this did not happen. I have lost a precious, beautiful and much-loved daughter who was kind, generous and loving”. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7440766.stm

The night before the attack he came into a bar where she was drinking and told a friend that he was "going to do her in". The following evening McDonald assaulted Ms Thomson during an argument in the grounds of a local church. His twin brother, Jamie, took her back to his house but McDonald followed them. He was thought to have left his brother's house when others there heard screaming from the hall. They saw that Laura was hurt and that McDonald had a knife in his hand. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7600615.stm

The judicial response to violence against wives generally reflects the same pattern of indifference, official inaction, and occasional unofficial reaction exhibited by police departments. (Dobash and Dobash , 1979: 217-218)

  Buzawa and Buzawa (1990:64) claimed that low rates of prosecution

and conviction enforce the persistent reluctance of police officers to become involved in domestic violence cases.

  Jordan (2004: 1420) reported that “victims of domestic violence face

low rates of prosecution”.

Amnesty International (2004) It’s in our hands: Stop violence against women. Oxford: Alden Press.

  Elman, R.A. (2001) ‘Unprotected by the Swedish Welfare State

revisited: assessing a decade of reforms for battered women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(1): 39-52.

  Human Rights Watch (2001) ‘Afghanistan: Humanity Denied’.

Human Rights Watch. 13(5).   World Health Organisation (2002) World Report on Violence

and Health. Geneva:WHO.