In sum, understanding the distinction between sex and gender informs us that most differences between men and women and boys and girls are societally based (gender), not biologically determined (sex). Although this is encouraging in that we are more likely to be able to change society than we are to alter biology (and the ethics of biological changes are daunting), this book examines how gender differences are strongly entrenched in tradition and have negatively affected the lives of women and girls, including in the criminal legal system. Furthermore, sex differences, such as the ability to become pregnant, have also worked to women’s disadvantage in employment and many law cases.
Importantly, then, gender is a social (not biological) construct, but in some sense so, too, is “sex” when it has historically, and often currently, been decided by doctors whether intersex newborns are “boys” or “girls” when they do not clearly fit into one or the other of the female-or-male gender/sex binary. In trying to view gender as beyond a binary, I use the terms female and male reluctantly in this book given the biologically heavy associations with those words. But it is also very cumbersome to use phrases such as “girls and women” and “boys and men” so I still sometimes use female and male, if reluctantly, also recognizing that sex and gender are nonbinary. It is also necessary to stress that similar to sex, race, too, is socially constructed. A large body of research documents the phenomenon that biological racial categories do not exist (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Haney-López, 2006; Mendez & Spriggs, 2008; Wing, 2003; Zuberi, 2001). This is not to deny the very real practices and experiences of sexism and racism, but rather to understand that sex and race are socially constructed, and the social construction has been used to deny rights to Indigenous, African American, Latinx, and Asian American people (Hernández, 2017).
What Are Feminist Methods?
It is useful to recognize that not only does feminist theory distinguish itself from many theories (other than Marxist and radical theories) in its efforts to be applied and result in societal and political changes (praxis) but also that in many senses, feminist theory purports a variety of means of collecting data, particularly in terms of hearing women and girls’ voices. For example, Maher (1997) writes in her book on women crack users that she was partially motivated to conduct her research because of the ways these women were presented as “monsters” in the media: “I want to present the accounts of a group of women we hear much about but little from” (p. x). Additionally, it is important to address the idea that feminist theory and methods are not designed to understand women exclusively. Notably, to fully address male offending, using feminist theory and applications of masculinity can help explain males’ likelihood of offending. Instead, historically criminology researchers designed theories to explain boys and men’s criminality and then, sometimes, tried to “fit” them to girls and women (also known as “the add-women-and-stir approach” and “the generalizability problem”) (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988; Naffine, 1996).
The maleness of crimes is true of the United States of America, of Britain, of Australia and indeed of all Western countries. Men are the vast majority of violent and non-violent offenders…. In view of this remarkable sex bias in crime, it is surprising that gender has not become the central preoccupation of the criminologist, rather than an afterthought. Surely it would be natural to ask the “man question”: what is it about men that makes them offend and what is it about women that makes them law-abiding? (Maher, 1997, p. 6)
The focus on method in criminology has been “empirical criminology,” or rather, how can we scientifically understand such important criminological and criminal processing questions as “Why do (some) people commit crimes?” “What policies best deter offenders from future offending?” “How are decisions made by the police, prosecutors, judges, parole review boards, and others?” “How frequently do different types of crimes occur?” “What increases people’s chances of victimization?” and “How can victims of crimes best recover?” We can approach answers to these research questions empirically (scientifically) through many methods. Although more research focuses on or includes women, an ongoing problem is when gender/sex is simply used as a control variable in statistical models. It is usually more appropriate to at least conduct separate models for males and females to determine if the variables are operating the same in significance, power, and direction.
Feminist methods might mean composing more sensitive questions to quantify a rate or determining how best to construct interview, survey, and focus group items about the research questions that need to be asked. Concerning the issue of more sensitive questions, for example, it was common before the 1980s to measure rape occurrence as the number of rapes reported to the police. Feminist researchers later began asking women directly, knowing that many rape victims do not report their victimizations to the police. Next, it became apparent that asking women whether they have been raped “lost” a number of rapes, given that many raped women and girls (and we now know, raped men and boys) do not define their experiences as “fitting” the legal definition of rape. Now it is known that the best method to capture rape rates is to ask study participants whether they have been “forced or coerced to have sex” rather than simply to ask, “Have you been raped?” The former wording captures a far more accurate measure of rape.
Finally, feminist research methods, perhaps more than any other method, have attempted to focus on the relationship between the researcher and those studied:
Insofar as women’s perspectives and experiences are subordinated in scientific inquiries and the larger culture, feminist researchers seek to eliminate hierarchies of knowledge construction. We are sensitive to our place in such hierarchies, so we disclose the multiple, historically specific positions we hold in relation to both study questions and participants. (Presser, 2005, p. 2067)
Presser’s (2005) study of males convicted of violent crimes (including rape) is a prime example of reflexivity, where she consistently addresses the way power relations between the interviewees and her (the interviewer) became part of the data. For example, the ways some of these men mildly coerced and threatened her during data collection not only influenced the method but also the findings. Feminist standpoint theory is a starting point for many feminist studies and stresses that “the way we do research is framed by our standpoint” and our perception of “knowledge is always situated, as our materially grounded and socio-culturally formed standpoint within a particular society influences what we can know about our world” (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019, p. 247). Dengler and Seebacher (2019), in their work on decolonial and socioecological transformations, warn that Global North feminist researchers need to “overcome our situatedness and partiality by including heterogeneous voices and perspectives from other lived realities both in the Global South and the Global North alike” (p. 247). This caution can be expanded to those of us who have never been incarcerated or even arrested but who are conducting research on incarcerated adults and children.
Criminological feminist research methodology, then, involves many choices, including the research topics, means of collecting and interpreting data, understanding the researcher’s relationship with the participants, reflexivity (the critical examination of the research process itself), and a commitment to policy and action.