ABSTRACT
The case against the Gurnos women was based on exactly this kind of supposition, laced with gossip and prejudice. The case fed, in particular, on a contemporary preoccupation with powerful women-women ‘going too far’ in their invasion of male territory.39 There is no shortage of comment in newspapers about girl gangs, and girl violence:
‘Gender is erased in the crime rhetoric of the 1990s’ writes Beatrix Campbell, adding that girl gangs are a modern myth.42 Debates about the rise of female crime ‘have been a highly contended criminological issue since the 1970s’.43
Two things seem clear. Women, on the whole, have had a consistently lower ‘share’ of crime than men (by a factor of about 20:80) and criminologists made little of this disparity until the 1970s, when women and crime surfaced as a legitimate subject of study.44 Frances Heidensohn attributes the number of studies of violent women in the 1980s to a confrontation with older debates reemerging in new forms: ‘The notion of the especially evil woman, the ‘witch’ of mythology, had stalked the texts of earlier writers.’45
