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1 Feminist Criminology 3 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/femcrim1 and id is 1 raw text is: Feinikt Criminology Vole 11 Number 1 S nary 2006 3-5 2006 Sage Publications Il0I 17115 0 5105282898 hulp 1 ,_opub.com Editorial stedat http oni e.sagepub.com T he launching of a new journal raises the question of why this particular journal might be needed. This is certainly the case for Feminist Criminology, the official journal of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology. With a plethora of criminology journals, why indeed do we need one more? And equally important, just exactly what is feminist criminology? To answer these ques- tions, a review of the history of feminist scholarship in criminology as well as of the Division on Women and Crime is needed. The second question, what is feminist criminology, should perhaps be addressed first to more fully explain why this journal is needed. Realistically, it would be more appropriate to refer to feminist criminologies, as there is no single theoretical perspec- tive and no one methodology that dominate the field. Instead, feminist criminology is the label applied to criminological research and theory that places women at the center of the analyses. Prior to the late 1960s, most criminological theory was based on research focusing on the behaviors and experiences of males. Thus, the study of crime became equated with the study of male criminality. One has only to look at Hirschi's (1969) influential Causes of Delinquency to confirm this. The logic used implies that the study of male crime is sufficient to explain all crime. However, feminist criminologists began to challenge this androcentric dominance of criminology, arguing that to have a full understanding of the causes and consequences of crime, one must incorporate not only the male perspective but that of females as well. Otherwise, the picture is incomplete. Unfortunately, the majority of criminological research in the top-tier journals still either ignores women or treats gender as a control variable (Sharp & Hefley, 2004). My first inkling of this problem occurred in graduate school when I was introduced to Sampson and Laub's (1993) life-course explanation of control theory. As I read about the ways in which salient work and valued marital relationships could act as control mechanisms, I asked the question, But is the same really true for women? Or would children be more salient and, thus, more likely to cause women to desist from criminal activity? Because the criminologists in my program were mainstream in their approach, I had not yet been introduced to feminist criminology. However, the idea of this journal was born at that time. Theoretical explanation of female criminality is just one area that feminist crimi- nologists have examined. Conviction, sentencing, and the effects of sentencing are gendered as well and as thus, are fodder for feminist criminology. Like theoretical explanations of criminality, the study of responses to male crime cannot simply be extended to females. Not only do different factors contribute to engaging in crime but 3

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