ABSTRACT
Among the many important debates generated by late twentieth-century feminist criminologists, two stand out. First are those studies concerned with equity versus chivalry. ‘Chivalry’ had been introduced by a much older generation of criminologists (Pollak 1950; Mannheim 1965) to explain lower levels of recorded crime by females. Broadly, they argued that all aspects of law enforcement and criminal justice systems operated a benign and protective regime in relation to women and girls, so that they were criminalised less and punished far more moderately than their male counterparts. Feminists not only challenged these ideas (they were not usually the subject of empirical testing) (Smart 1977; Heidensohn 1985) but they proposed an alternative interpretation: that women, or some particular groups of women, were treated as ‘doubly deviant’. These equity studies, as they came to be called, covered courts (Eaton 1986), sentencing (Daly 1994) and for the most part did not discover chivalrous treatment.
