Women, Crime and Criminal Justice: The State of Current Theory and Research in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

Some reversal of this long-established pattern occurred during the 1970s, particularly in America, and can be seen in special issues of major academic journals being devoted to women, crime, the law and the criminal justice system. 1 However, this paper will show that on balance Smart's characterization is still an accurate assessment of the situation in Australia and New Zealand. 2 This issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology is, therefore, a rare and specially welcome opportunity to explore in the local context some of the major themes and concerns that appear in the overseas literature on the subject. I will examine theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between sex/gender" and crime, criminal law, criminal justice and criminology. To anticipate the main general findings from this survey of the local scene, and without denigrating some internationally-informed, innovative and important published work (in particular by Hancock, Mukherjee and Fitzgerald, and Scutt),one has to conclude that Australasian "criminology of deviant women" (to borrow the title of a recent book by Adler and Simon) is still in the "traditional" mould. Traditional criminology has been described as taking one or both of two alternative orientations to female crime: (i) that "women are inessential and invisible" (Smart, 1976:1); (ii) that women's limited involvement in criminal behaviour is "sexualised, psychologised and syllogised" (Weis, 1976:17). In general and certainly until very recently one could confidently assert that Australia and New Zealand were good examples of the former: sex was an unimportant factor and females were either altogether absent from research and writing about crime and criminal justice, or when some females were included as research subjects, no male-female differentiation was made. For example, three textbooks on crime, delinquency and the justice system, all published in 1977, treat these topics as ones which implicitly or explicitly 'concern males onlyor predominantly. 4 There is one consistent exception to this pattern, a feminist lawyer (Scutt) who since the mid-1970s has continually picked up issues raised in the overseas literature and attempted to relate them to the Australian scene, and who has published extensively in legal, social and criminological journals.