Motherhood and Crime

Abstract

Women's criminal conduct is of growing interest to both criminologists and legal scholars, while the subject of motherhood has recently been embraced by feminist legal theorists. There are important insights into the social construction of women's identities where these two topics meet. To find evidence of a special relationship between motherhood and crime, students need only open their first-year criminal law casebook to the omission liability section. Most, if not all, of the cases concern mothers (or women in mothering roles) who failed to care properly for their children. These cases demonstrate that criminal law is more likely to impose an affirmative duty on mothers than other classes of people. I usually push my criminal law students to determine the extent of the obligation mothers owe their children when we discuss Commonwealth v. Howard. In this case, a mother was convicted of manslaughter for failing to protect her young child from her boyfriend's deadly abuse. Must a mother forego all self-interest, take on any risk, in order to avoid criminal liability? I ask. Must she even risk injury to herself in order to ensure her children's safety? At least one student will invariably respond: A mother must be willing to give up her own life in order to protect her children from harm.