ABSTRACT
The enduring theme from the literature on female offending is that their rate of offending is much lower compared to men and the nature of their offences is generally less serious (Heidensohn 1997; Blomberg and Lucken 2000; Gelsthorpe and Morris 2002). Nevertheless, in more traditional criminology, offending women were likely to be demonised as witches or harlots, pathologised as victims of their own biology or infantilised as inadequate or mentally unstable (Carlen et al. 1985; Walklate 1995). With the rise of the feminist movement of the 1970s explanations became centred on women as victims – their behaviour being the result of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, sexism, racism or classism (Snider 2003). However, more radical feminists considered that this notion posed a danger of viewing offending women as passive, accepting and lacking agency rather than seeing their behaviour as an empowering device to reassert their own personal identities through resistance (Walklate 1995; Bosworth 1999).
