Contemporary Obsession With Violent Female Offenders, Essay Example

Introduction

On November 2nd, 2007, the slain body of Meredith Kercher, a foreign exchange student from Britain studying in Perugia, Italy, was discovered by the Italian police. Police soon ascertained that someone murdered Kercher in her home, a residence she shared with an American exchange student named Amanda Knox (Annunziato, 2011). Three days after the body was discovered, Italian police detained Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s then boyfriend, followed by Patrick Lumumba who was Knox’s employer. What ensued was a complex matrix of trials and acquittals in which the media covered extensively, especially in the United States, Britain, and Italy. Various factors were taken into accounts in the media reports, including police corruption, the vagaries of the Italian criminal justice system, and, in particular, Knox’s central role in the perpetration of such a heinous and violent crime. Many observers decried how the media crucified her, which can only be explained by contextualizing Knox’s case in gender discourses on crime (Cooper & Rafferty, 2011). Multiple men were accused of sexually asssaulting Kercher, yet the media zeroes in only on Amanda Knox, subsequently scrutinizing her words, behavior, actions, and personality throughout the long, protracted trial. Indeed, a cultural fascination with the violent female is imbued with various meanings and can only be understood through feminist criminology and other gender paradigms.  Female offenders are usually viewed as victims who perpetrate crimes out of self-defense or as deviant criminals whose behaviors diverge from typical feminine actions. Such firmly embedded cultural norms for violence pervades the West’s gendered society, which has resulted in the germination of a scholarly debate regarding how female and male offenders are perceived and how such views undergird the differential treatment noted in the criminal justice system (Russell, 2013). The violent female offender has become a contemporary obsession not only because–in comparison to men–heinous, violent crimes are rarely perpetrated by women, but also because such behaviors deviate from traditional gender norms and expectation. The case study of Amanda Knox showcases how the media discursively portrays female perpetrators and underscores how the perceived infraction of gender norms and expectations ostracizes females as deviant, violent, and bad.

Female criminality as an epistemological branch of inquiry has a relatively short history. Pollak (1950) recognizes that “the criminality of women is a neglected field of research,” which is why “our mental picture of the criminal [is] that of a male violator” (Pollak, 1950, p. 1). As such, female criminality has historically been underreported or merely ignored due to women’s traditional biological and social roles, thereby discursively framing female criminality as one embedded in a narrative of chivalry. Female offenders, because of their stereotypical irrationality and weakness, have been preferentially treated by the criminal justice system. However, such intimations are eschewed by other scholars and viewed as outdated. Navigating through the murky terrain of feminist criminology is necessary to fully comprehend why such an obsession with the violent and dangerous female offenders persists into the modern-day. Historically, women, madness, deviance, and criminality have been intrinsically linked. A prominent figure within female criminology and criminal epistemologies, Frigon (1995) proffers a comprehensive review of the concepts of deviance and madness in discourses on femininity. She does so by tracing historical notions of the female as mad, deftly exploring infanticide, female protesting, and witchcraft. Of paramount importance are connections to psychiatric and psychobiological interpretations of madness that pervade conceptions of the female as mad and dangerous. Frigon(1995) thus maps and situates this genealogy within broader questions of female criminality, thereby situating theories on criminality, gender expectations, and femininity within this historical context. Only through understanding the history of the nexus between the violent woman, deviance, and madness can one truly comprehend how obsessed contemporary society is with the violent and dangerous female. Moreover, Heidensohn (1985) further contends that to fully understand female criminology, research must perceive of crime as a social construction and rely on theories of female conformity and gender stereotypes to attain nuanced understanding of female crime and the female offender.

Theoretical Framework: Double Deviancy and The Female Criminal

A general societal and cultural preoccupation with the dangerous and violent female criminal has developed, especially as feminism has fused with criminology in popular public discourses. The field of feminist criminology germinated during the 1950s, which resulted in the proliferation of theories regarding how female offenders are treated and on women’s violence in general. A significant part of the extant corpus of literature on female offenders focuses on gender role expectations and gender stereotypes (Brennan & Vandeburg, 2009, p. 144). As a result, there remains a tendency to examine how female behavior in conjunction with gender expectations impacts perceptions and treatment of the offenders within the criminal justice system. Although there is a gap in the literature regarding perceptions of female offenders, the majority of the scholarship considers female victimization, the chasm between female and male offenders, and how various factors affect how female offenders are treated within the criminal justice system (Grabe et al., 2006, p. 138). Feminist criminology has profoundly focused on theories regarding the portrayal and representation of female offenders in Western society. The theory accepted by the majority of feminist criminologists is known as the double deviance theory, which contends that female criminals are punished not only for the crime they perpetrate but also for comporting themselves in a manner that eschews their gender norms and expectations (Frigon, 1995). The theory insinuates that “bad” women are those who act contrary to their proscribed gender roles on purpose and thus, by extension, rendered manipulative, nefarious, and sinister.

Nonetheless, many scholars find currency in the double deviance theory, arguing that there exists ground for its veracity and applicability. Chesney Lind (1999) postulates that there are grounds for the double deviance theory, arguing that women act unfeminine when they commit violent crimes. As a result, the criminal justice system treats them more punitively, and the media is more captivated and obsessed with the crime, than they are when women commit crimes, such as a crime of passion, that conforms to the expectations of their gender (Grabe, 2006, p. 139). Grabe at al. (2006) multiply attests to this contention through a cogent analysis of major American newspapers and the coverage how violent crimes perpetrated by women. Incidents in which women transgressed societal and cultural gender roles through violent behaviors, or waged against children, the media lambasted them through negative journalistic treatment. Those women who did not transgress their gender norms received very to little coverage in the American mainstream media. Thus, women become double deviants for committing a crime in the first place while also acting in a mad, irrational way, which deviates from normative feminine behavior.

Ascertaining the motives behind why female offenders engage in such violence can often be found disseminating in popular discourses. It is common in the media coverage of female crime in the western world for members of the media to proffer a theory regarding the impetus of committing a criminal act. Naylor (1995) argues that violence perpetrated by women profoundly undermines the rudimentary structures women’s non-violent, biological nature. As such, the media tends to describe female violence as the manifestation of their sinister nature and utter madness. The dearth of studies and literature on female motives for violence accounts for why the media takes it upon itself to proffer an explanation. The “rarity” of violent, female murderers and criminals is the reason for the. Indeed, news about violent male criminals inundate news stories and media coverage, which renders news about violent male offenders a quotidian feature of life. A violent female offender, however, rarely is reported on unless it is so outrageous that it merits international coverage. This double standard in the media and attitudes towards male and female offenders exists merely because women are still perceived as incapable of such cold actions. Crime clearly becomes socially constructed as a mail enterprise then females rarely participate despite the fact that statistics have proven otherwise. Until crime as a social construction becomes divorces from a masculine ethos, a contemporary obsession for the violent and dangerous female offender will persist in media coverage and in public discourses.

Media Representations of The Violent and Dangerous Female: The Case of Amanda Knox

The case study of American Knox provides fruitful and relevant terrain in which an analysis of critical discourse can be conducted through how Knox was portrayed as a female perpetrator in British and American tabloid print media. Applying theories on female offenders to the Amanda Knox case examines scholars to assess whether the media’s depiction of Knox aligns with pre-existing notions about female criminals. Knox’s entire case has essentially focused on how the media has discursively framed the defendant. Cadwaller (2011) noted in the Amanda Knox case that the media has time and again characterized as female criminals and offenders as either sexually deviant and libidinous, or as dainty, demure, and most likely not a true criminal. The large majority of the media outlets opted to represent her as a sexual harlot who is predisposed to unthinkable violence (Cadwaller, 2011). Tabloids–which, in the eyes of the masses, retained a didactic function that often perpetuated normative mechanisms for social belonging (Conboy, 2006). It does so through sensationalized news coverage in order to promote human interest stories. Tabloids reach to a broader audience because the lexicon is kept quite simple, so even those who have low literacy levels can still consume in media stories. As such, tabloids function as the prime mechanism through which information and popular ideas can be diffused in a celeritous fashion (Conboy, 2006, p. 5). As such, in the Amanda Knox case, tabloids function as a means to identify, construct, and convey various concepts of gender identity vis-a-vis ideological and linguistic means.

Through a meticulous analysis of British and American tabloids surrounding the Amanda Knox trial, scholars ascertained that the media perpetually made references or insinuations about the sexual behavior of Amanda Knox both implicitly and explicitly. Such references undergirded various narratives of sexual deviance, which is why the public rendered her guilty even though various courts found her innocent. Various articles refer to Knox as “Foxy Knoxy” (Lawton, 2007). Such a label ignores Knox’s personality in addition to her actual role in the Kerch’s murder. Readers thus speculate, generalize, and draw conclusions without knowing any details about the case. Furthermore, Lawton notes that sexuality and guilt within public discourses are often intrinsically linked, which is buttressed by the fact that tabloids time and again viewed the crime as one motivated by sex. Deviant sexuality, transgressing social and cultural norms, and violent crime all intersect in the Amanda Knox case and underscores how crazed an obsessed contemporary society is with regards to the violent and dangerous female offender.

Conclusion

It is unequivocal that there remains an obsession in the media when female offender commits and dangerous and violent crime, thereby rendering them “bad” or “mad” for transgressing the expectation of their gender. Crime is a social and cultural construct through which one can learn about the gender mores a particular society is structured by. There still remains historiographical and empirical gaps in comprehending how social stereotypes of femininity and female expectations shape perceptions of female offenders. This dearth of adequate research on this subjects is due to a propensity to research only certain types of female offenders–the violent, the mad, the sexually deviant–over others. For example, in the contemporary western world, there has been a pronounced preoccupation of media depictions of female criminals on death row, or overly hostile and violent female offenders. As a result, it remains quite challenging to situate gender and criminality discourses within a broader context of female offending. Ultimately, it is clear that Knox was limned as a sexual deviant who transgressed the boundaries of femininity in ways that were socially and legally unacceptable. As such, the media went into a frenzy in its coverage of the Amanda Knox trial, perpetuating the image of Knox, regardless of her proven guilt, as a deviant, violent and bad woman. This case retains currency because it calls into question how the media perpetuates various stereotypes about women, which results in observers attributing a crime committed by a female to deviant female behavior. Indeed, proper, emotionally sound, virtuous, and rational women could never commit such heinous crimes. If a woman does not evince virtue or stability, then she is rendered dangerous by society at large.

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