Women and the Criminal Justice System: Gender Matters

Through out most of our na tion's his tory, women of fend ers have been largely in visi ble or “for got ten” in a sys tem de signed to con trol and re ha bili tate men. Ac cord ing to Mau reen Cain, in both crimi nol ogy and more broadly in the crimi nal jus tice sys tem, women and girls “ex ist as Other: that is to say, they ex ist only in their dif fer ence from the male, the nor mal” (Cain, 1990:2). This has meant that fe male vic timi za tion was ig nored, mini mized, and trivi al ized and that women's crime was over looked al most com pletely. For crimi nal jus tice pro fes sion als, the timehonored de fense of this pos ture was that there were so few women in the sys tem that ac count ing for gen der was not nec es sary.