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  3. Criminology has treated women’s role in crime with a large measure of indiff

Criminology has treated women’s role in crime with a large measure of indiff

游客2024-12-15  0
问题     Criminology has treated women’s role in crime with a large measure of indifference. The intellectual tradition from which criminology derives its conception of these sexes maintains esteem for men’s autonomy, intelligence and force of character while disdaining women for their weaknesses of compliance and passivity. Women who conform as pure, obedient daughters, wives and mothers benefit men and society. Those women who don’t, that is, are non-conforming, may simply be one who questions established beliefs or practices, or one who engages in activities associated with men, or one who commits a crime. These women are doubly damned and doubly deviant. They are seen as "mad" not "bad". These behaviors frequently lead to interpretations of being mentally abnormal and unstable. Those doing the defining, by the very act, are never defined as "other", but are the norm. As "men" are the norm, women are deviant. Women are defined in reference to men. In the words of Young, "sexual difference is one of the ways in which normal is marked out from deviant". So why do these differences exist within the criminal justice system and society as a whole? In order to understand why offending and punishment differs between genders it is important to acknowledge and analyze past perceptions, theories and perspectives from predominant sociologists and criminologists of that time towards women in society.
    Up until the turn of the century, women were primarily perceived as sexual objects and expected to remain within male dominated ideologies such as homemaker, carer and nurturer taking second place after men. Women who strayed from the norm were severely punished, void of any opportunities to explain their actions. Perhaps interventions from Elizabeth Fry in the early nineteenth century campaigning for women to be housed in separate prisons from men and offered rehabilitation could be marked as the starting point for intense studies being conducted into relationships between women and crime. The conception at that time was that women must be protected from, rather than held responsible for their criminal actions. Unfortunately, such intervention only caused coaxing rather than coercion, that is, women became segregated even more as individual members of their community.
    Later in the late nineteenth century, Lombroso and Ferrero wrote a book called, The Female Offender. Their theories were based on "atavism". Atavism refers to the belief that all individuals displaying anti-social behavior were biological throwbacks. The born female criminal was perceived to have the criminal qualities of the male plus the worst characteristics of women. According to Lombroso and Ferrero, these included deceitfulness, cunning and spite among others and were not apparent among males. This appeared to indicate that criminal women were genetically more male than female, therefore biologically abnormal. Criminality in men was a common feature of their natural characteristics, whereby women, their biologically-determined nature was exactly opposite to crime. Female social deviants or criminals who did not act according to pre-defined standards were diagnosed as pathological and requiring treatment, they were to be "cured" or "removed".
    Other predominant theorists such as Thomas and later, Pollack, believed that criminality was a pathology and socially induced rather than biologically inherited. As Thomas says, "the girl as a child does not know she has any particular value until she learns it from others". Pollack believed, "it is the learned behaviour from a very young age that leads girls into a ’masked’ character of female criminality", that is, how it was and still is concealed through under-reporting and low detection rates of female offenders. He further states, "in our male-dominated culture, women have always been considered strange, secretive and sometimes dangerous". A greater leniency towards women 6y police and the justice system needs to be addressed especially If a "true" equality of genders is to be achieved in such a complicated world. [br] According to the passage, the women’s qualities expected in the male-dominated society are all the following EXCEPT
选项 A、purity.
B、obedience.
C、greed.
D、devotion to sexuality.
答案 C
解析 细节推理题。首段第3句话提到女子被认为是纯洁和顺从的，故排除A、B；第2段提到女性被认为是sexobject，故可排除D项；C项“贪婪”在文中并未出现，故为正确答案。
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