Abstract
Rises recorded for girls’ violence in countries like Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and United States have been hotly contested. One view is these rising rates of violence are an artefact of new forms of policy, policing, criminalisation and social control over young women. Another view is that young women may indeed have become more violent as they have increasingly participated in youth subcultural activities involving gangs and drugs, and cyber-cultural activities that incite and reward girls’ violence. Any comprehensive explanation will need to address how a complex interplay of cultural, social, behavioural, and policy responses contribute to these rises. This article argues that there is no singular cause, explanation or theory that accounts for the rises in adolescent female violence, and that many of the simple explanations circulating in popular culture are driven by an anti-feminist ideology. By concentrating on females as victims of violence and very rarely as perpetrators, feminist criminology has for the most part ducked the thorny issue of female violence, leaving a discursive space for anti-feminist sentiment to reign. The article concludes by arguing the case for developing a feminist theory of female violence.
Highlights
Global rises in female violence While males still dominate crime statistics as offenders and prisoners, a body of international and national trend data points to a consistent narrowing of the gender gap for officially reported crime and violence in countries like the United States (US), Canada, the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia
The argument which appears to have most currency among feminist and criminological scholars is that girls are not becoming more violent; rather, shifting modes of social control are having a net‐widening effect on offences defined as violent (Alder and Worrall 2004; Chesney‐Lind and Shelden 2004; Luke 2008; Sharpe 2012; Steffensmeier et al 2005)
The main shortcoming of not having a sophisticated feminist theory of female violence is that it leaves uncontested anti‐ feminist explanations that circulate widely in popular culture when instances involving female violence become public issues – as the case of Lynndie England illustrates – or when rises in female violent crime rates become registered in public consciousness and popularised as ‘girls behaving like boys’
Summary
While official reports of crime indicate that the gender gap has narrowed over the last two decades, Steffensmeier and his colleagues (2005) argue that this is due largely to several net widening policy shifts that led to increases in the arrest of girls for behaviour that, in the past, was either not policed or overlooked. By comparison, their analysis shows that a similar trend is not evident in longitudinal self‐report data.
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