Offending Girls

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, panic about girls’ offending in Britain reached fever pitch. No longer sugar and spice, a ‘new breed’ of girl, the hedonistic, violent, binge-drinking ‘ladette’, was reported to have emerged. At the same time, the number of young women entering the youth justice system, including youth custody, increased dramatically. Offending Girls challenges simplistic and demonising popular representations of 'bad' girls and examines what exactly is new about the ‘new’ offending girl. In the light of enormous social and cultural changes affecting girls’ lives, and expectations of them, since previous British research in this area, the book investigates whether popular stereotypes problematising female youthful behaviour resonate with the accounts of criminalised young women themselves, and to what extent they have infiltrated professional youth justice discourse. Through the lens of original detailed qualitative research in two Youth Offending Teams and a Secure Training Centre – the first study of its kind since the 'modernisation' of the youth justice system over a decade ago – Offending Girls questions whether the ‘new’ youth justice system is delivering justice for girls and young women. It also contends that the panic about an ‘unprecedented crime wave’ amongst girls is not supported by robust evidence, but that the interventionist thrust which characterises contemporary youth justice has had a particularly pernicious impact on girls. It will be key reading for students and academics working in the areas of criminology, criminal and youth justice, education, gender studies, youth studies, social work, sociology and social policy, as well as youth and criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers.

The Female Offender challenges the long-standing tradition of male dominated criminology theory and research, which has taken little or no account of gender differences.

Presenting research that will underpin effective practice with women who offend, this unique and thought-provoking text aims to help professionals meet the needs of this group as well as providing a theoretical resource for policy makers and academics. The authors, coming from a variety of professional and research perspectives, discuss important issues concerning women in the criminal justice system, including: * the increase in custodial sentences for women * black women in prison * patterns of female offending * drug use and the criminal justice system * the needs of women on release from prison. Calling into question the relevance to female offenders of research conducted with men who commit crime, the contributors provide a comprehensive knowledge base on women and crime for professionals who work in this area. With a broad range of contributions, this book will be helpful to probation officers, social workers, policy makers and others who work with female offenders.

This Brief fills a gap in criminological literature, as there are few empirically-based studies on delinquency of adolescent girls. It provides results of a longitudinal study, The Pittsburgh Girls Study (PGS), which includes 2,451 girls, followed annually from age 10-19, the ages when criminal behavior tends to emerge. This study provides the most extensive and comprehensive investigation into the criminal offending and self-reported trajectories of offending of PGS participants, along with an in-depth examination of other criminal career dimensions. In five chapters, this short volume reviews the limited extent of girls' delinquency literature, presents data on girls' offending patterns (onset, persistence, specialization, and desistence), provides insights on gender differences by comparison with the Pittsburgh Youth Study, which focused on male offenders, and explores the theoretical and practical implications of the results. By understanding the origins and onset of criminal behavior in girls, researchers can begin to understand effective interventions and crime prevention. This Brief will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, as well as related fields such as sociology, public policy, and psychology.

Rates of female delinquency, especially for violent crimes, are increasing in most common law countries. At the same time the growth in cyber-bullying, especially among girls, appears to be a related global phenomenon.While the gender gap in delinquency is narrowing in Australia, United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, boys continue to dominate the youth who commit crime and have a virtual monopoly over sexually violent crimes. Indigenous youth continue to be vastly over-represented in the juvenile justice system in every Australian jurisdiction. The Indigenisation of delinquency is a persistent problem in other countries such as Canada and New Zealand.Young people who gather in public places are susceptible to being perceived as somehow threatening or riotous, attracting more than their share of public order policing. Professional football has been marred by repeated scandals involving sexual assault, violence and drunkenness. Given the cultural significance of footballers as role models to thousands, if not millions, of young men around the world, it is vitally important to address this problem. Offending Youth explores these key contemporary patterns of delinquency, the response to these by the juvenile justice agencies and moreover what can be done to address these problems.The book also analyses the major policy and legislative changes from the nineteenth to twenty first centuries, chiefly the shift the penal welfarism to diversion and restorative justice. Using original cases studied by Carrington twenty years ago, Offending Youth illustrates how penal welfarism criminalised young people from socially marginal backgrounds, especially Aboriginal children, children from single parent families, family-less children, state wards and young people living in poverty or in housing commission estates. A number of inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom have since established that children committed to these institutions, supposedly for their own good, experienced systemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse during their institutionalisation. The book is dedicated to the survivors of these institutions who only now are receiving official recognition of the injustices they suffered.The underlying philosophy of juvenile justice has fundamentally shifted away from penal welfarism to embrace positive policy responses to juvenile crime, such as youth conferencing, cautions, warnings, restorative justice, circle sentencing and diversion examined in the concluding chapter.Offending Youth is aimed at a broad readership including policy makers, juvenile justice professionals, youth workers, families, teachers, politicians as well as students and academics in criminology, policing, gender studies, masculinity studies, Indigenous studies, justice studies, youth studies and the sociology of youth and deviance more generally.

The Wiley Handbook on the Theories, Assessment and Treatment of Sexual Offending is a three-volume collection of up-to-date readings contributed by international experts relating to the assessment, intervention, and theoretical foundations of sexual offending. Includes in-depth and up-to-date assessment and treatment approaches for adult male, female, juvenile, and cognitively-impaired offenders Features contributions by leading experts in each specialized field from around the world including Bill Marshall, Bill Lindsay, and Tony Ward Offers cutting-edge theories of sexual offending, including the latest multifactorial and single-factor theories

This key book examines how we can prevent children from engaging in offending behaviour and therefore prevent the pre-school children of today from influencing the crime statistics of tomorrow.

"Lynne Haney is already an important voice in the sociology of welfare but this book marks her debut as a major figure in the sociology of punishment and the study of governmentality. Offending Women is a fascinating work that combines rich ethnographic detail with a structural account of the changing contours of contemporary governance. Its original contributions to prison ethnography, women's studies, and the sociology of the penal-welfare state will make it a reference point in each of these disciplines."--David Garland, author of The Culture of Control "Offending Women is an exemplary piece of work. Haney's writing is engaging, crisp, and smart. She brilliantly assesses the various intentions of the state and incarcerated women and clarifies how these intentions are based on orientations toward punishment and 'healing' that demand fundamental rethinking."--Rickie Solinger, author of Pregnancy and Power and co-editor of Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States "Lynne Haney brings together her stupendous skills as an ethnographer and her theoretical insights into how states work to explain how the treatment of imprisoned women has changed over the past decade. An altogether brilliant book."--Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin