Gender and Crime: A Reader

Section 1) Engendering the Agenda
Criminological Theory: its ideology and implications concerning women
Challenging Orthodoxies in feminist theory; A Black Feminist Critique
Girls’ Troubles and 'Female Delinquency'
Twisted Sisters, Ladettes, and the New Penology: The Social Construction of 'Violent Girls'

Section 2) Engendering the Victim
Women Fight Back
Typical Violence, Normal Precaution
Women and the 'Fear of Crime': Challenging the Accepted Stereotype
Women's Violence to Men in Intimate Relationships: Working on the puzzle

Section 3) Gender and Social Control
Troublesome Girls: Towards alternative definitions and policies
Magistrates Explanations of Sentencing Decisions
Women's Imprisonment in England and Wales: a penal paradox
Black Women and the Criminal Justice System

Section 4) Engendering Masculinity
Boys will be Boys
Structured Action and Gendered Crime
Masculinities and Crime: Rethinking the 'Man Question'
Gender, Class, Racism, and Criminal Justice: against global and gender-centric theories for poststructuralist perspectives

Section 5) International Developments
Constituting the Punishable Woman
Globalization and Violence against women-inequalities
You Deserve it Because you are Australian: the moral panic over 'ethnic gang rape'
Genocide and the Social Production of Immorality
Conclusion: Gender and Crime – the Legacy?

Focusing explicitly on questions of gender and crime, Evans and Jamieson guide the reader through a range of classic and groundbreaking studies, highlighting key contributions and debates and providing an indication of the new directions an engendered criminology may take us in coming years.

This engaging reader is divided into five sections, mapping the theoretical, empirical, and practical developments that have endeavoured to identify the ways in which gender informs criminology. Issues addressed by the readings include:

• Female offending
• Gendered patterns of victimisation
• The gendered nature of social control
• Masculinity and crime
• Placing gender in an international context

Evans and Jamieson’s powerful concluding chapter clearly sets out the achievements and the challenges that the gender and crime question has posed for criminology. They argue that unless the question of gender remains at the forefront of criminological endeavours, criminology will fail to offer an agenda informed by an understanding of social justice that strives to be attentive to both victims and offenders, whether they be male or female.

Gender and Crime is key reading for students of criminology, criminal justice and gender studies.