Female Perpetrators of Interpersonal Violence

Women's and girls' involvement in interpersonal violence has received increased attention over the last few decades. During this time, girls' arrests for violent offenses increased more rapidly and decreased more slowly than arrests of boys for similar offenses, and the number of women incarcerated for violent offenses increased exponentially. This entry discusses explanations, hypotheses, and recent scholarship regarding women and girls as perpetrators of interpersonal violence.

The earliest criminological explanations for women's and girls' involvement, or lack of involvement, in interpersonal violence rested on researchers' essentialist understandings of inherent biological or psychological characteristics of women and girls. For example, early theorists concerned with the delinquent, deviant, or criminal behavior of White ethnic and immigrant populations argued that, in general, women and girls were “naturally” constrained from engaging in all forms of crime, including violence. The pseudoscientific arguments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also contained a racialized and, at times, racist dimension. In The Female Offender (1895), for example, Cesare Lombroso, a founding father of criminal anthropology, argued that only “savage” women are capable of violent crimes, and he cited the Hottentot, a Negro woman, and a Red Indian woman as examples of “savages.” According to Lombroso, “civilized” White women did not engage in violent crimes because it was inconsistent with their feminine nature.

Serious, critical investigations into women's and girls' participation in interpersonal violence did not [Page 256]appear until after the 1970s. This scholarship was ushered in by Freda Adler's liberation hypothesis, which posited that as women become more like men in social status and position, women's participation in traditional male crimes, including violent crimes, would also increase. While the liberation hypothesis was soundly discounted on empirical grounds-there was statistically no “new violent female offender” to explain-Adler's suggestion that there may be led criminologists to more critically examine patterns and trends in women's offending. The evidence produced by this burst of feminist scholarship and research on gender and crime offers a more complicated explanation for girls' and women's involvement in interpersonal violence. This research strongly suggests that external pressures or “push-pull” factors, such as economic marginalization, victimization, or addiction, help explain women's and girls' arrests for violent offenses in general and, specifically, why those who are arrested for violent offenses are more likely to be poor and non-White.

Recent scholarship critically considers how varying structural positions of girls and women produce interracial and intragender differences in arrests and sentencing for aggressive and violent offenses. The work of feminist criminologists reveals that girls' and women's troubles, and not changing attitudes or opportunities, structure girls' and women's involvement in interpersonal violence as well as their subsequent arrests and detention. Researchers who use a race, gender, and class framework or an intersection-ality in their analysis argue that some girls and women experience what feminist criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind refers to as “multiple marginality” as a result of their position in race and class hierarchies. Interracial differences in arrests thus reflect a double standard in criminal justice system responses to girls' and women's offending. For example, young Black women are more likely to serve time in detention facilities, while young White women are more likely to be placed in private mental health facilities. Recent research on girls' and women's arrests for aggressive or violent offenses strongly suggests that these increases reflect policy changes, such as the introduction of zero-tolerance policies in public schools, and not girls' increasingly violent behavior. Such research dispels the myth of a new violent female offender.

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