NCJ Number
153456
Journal
Journal of Crime and Justice Volume: 17 Issue: 2 Dated: (1994) Pages: 167-187
Date Published
1994
Length
21 pages
Annotation
Feminist criminology has become increasingly concerned about the complex ways in which prejudices based on gender, class, race, and ethnic discrimination combine to affect and structure social experiences.
Abstract
While radical feminists first analyzed patriarchy as a social structure affecting all women, both feminists and feminist-oriented criminologists are now refining the gender paradigm to encompass differences between women. The author attempts to illuminate refined feminist concerns by focusing on how the role of gender in highly publicized violent crimes is affected when class, race, and ethnicity are also taken into account. Three prominent cases are described: gang rape of a young woman in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1983; rape of a jogger in New York's Central Park in 1989; and murder of Yusef Hawkins in New York in 1989. Media saturation about the cases created a degree of community defensiveness that fed into pre- existing sexist and racist sentiments in traditionally-oriented communities. This media saturation played a role in the unfolding of events to the extent that it aroused anger at the community's helplessness and inferiority vis-a-vis its perceived class and ethnic position in the surrounding world. The author concludes that when highly publicized violent crimes involve the complex intersection of gender with simultaneous dimensions of class, race, and ethnic biases, an uneasy potential for competition between these variables is created. Therefore, a major task of feminist criminology is to account for the confluence of gender, class, race, and ethnicity factors in criminal acts. 16 references and 8 endnotes