[Book review essay adapted for SOC 355 originally published in Social Pathology, 1997, 3(2):109-114]

Gender and Crime: An Introduction by Sandra Walklate. New York: Prentice Hall, 1995 JAMES W. MESSERSCHMIDT University Of Southern Maine Criminologists have known for centuries that crime is a gendered phenomenon. All criminological data reflect that men and boys both commit more conventional, syndicated, corporate, and political crimesand the more serious of these crimesthan do women and girls (Beirne and Messerschmidt, 1995). Indeed, gender has consistently been advanced by criminologists as the strongest predictor of criminal involvement. As Braithwaite (1989: 44) rightly points out, "any credible theory" must first and foremost address the fact that "crime is committed disproportionately by males. In her engaging and insightful book, Sandra Walklate dissects the issues surrounding gender, crime, and social control by scrutinizing a wide range of topicsfrom offenders, to victims, to the social control apparatuswithin the context of a feminist-inspired sociology of crime and victimization. The goal of this text is to introduce the major questions that feminist work has addressed in the disciplines of criminology and victimology, and to explore how these questions have furthered an understanding of "the crime problem." In addition to addressing "the causes of crime," Walklate also surveys the literature on gender and victimology, and the gendered nature of the law and criminal justice process. The book is divided into four key themes: 1) criminology, victimology, and feminism; 2) the fear of crime and sexual violence; 3) the law and criminal justice process; and 4) understanding crime through the lens of masculinity. Chapter 1 outlines the diversity of feminist thoughtliberal, socialist, radical, and postmodern feminismand its varying response to the masculine nature of criminology and victimology: liberal feminism has had the longest historical impact on criminology, which for the most part has concentrated on discriminatory gendered practices within the criminal justice system; socialist feminism has understood criminality through reference to social structures outside the criminal justice system (patriarchy and capitalism); radical feminism has concentrated on the interconnections between gender and violence, which resultingly compelled conventional criminology to embrace the patriarchal home as a place where much criminal behavior occurs; and postmodern feminism attempts to give voice to those silenced by "modernist" criminology. Walklate devotes the remainder of the book to illustrating how these feminist perspectives uniquely grasp three issues related to crime and victimization: the fear of crime and sexual violence, the nature of law and the criminal justice process, and masculinities and crime. In her examination of the "fear of crime" debate (Chapter 2), Walklate gives particular attention to the assumptions relating to risk and fear articulated by the Home Office, left realism, and feminism. She examines the first two views by exploring their implications for the question of gender. Walklate contrasts the Home Office approach of assigning a certain "irrationality" to those individuals in public settings where a disparity exists between levels of risk and levels of fear, with that of the left realist school that argues that once we understand the nature of victimization in both public and private settings, risk and fear are not irrational but "rational." According to Walklate, although left realism successfully challenges the "irrational" view of the Home Office, it fails to treat women's knowledge as "expert knowledge" and, therefore, remains locked into a conventional masculinist framework. As Walklate (pp. 68-69) declares, feminism

overcomes these problems because it transgresses: the public-private dichotomy by emphasizing the familiar and the familial as dangerous. From this perspective women are most at risk from men they know. This view questions the validity of the concept fear, preferring instead to talk of safety and un-safety, and raises fundamental questions concerning the presumptions around what is meant by rationality and/or irrationality, and in whose terms, as yardsticks of behaviour. Walklate goes on to point out how conventional criminology has employed a particular masculine world-viewso that it not only misunderstands the notions of risk and fear but, in turn, hides those fears experienced by men while marginalizing the reality of womens fears. In Chapter 3, Gendering Sexual Violence, Walklate explores three types of sexual violence: rape, child abuse, and domestic violence. The author chose these three because they challenge conventional definitions of what constitutes crime, illuminate the gendered nature of criminal activity, and pose fundamental questions for criminal justice policy. Logically, Walklate outlines certain of the substantive issues surrounding these crimes and how they historically have posed problematic questions for criminology. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two arms of the state, the police and the law. Chapter 4, Gendering Policework, constructs an appreciation of policework by documenting certain of the more recent policy developments in the policing of rape and battering, and the questions such developments raise. The author notes that women have been instrumental in both the implementation and the receipt of such services. Indeed, policewomen constitute the majority of officers in domestic violence units and correspondingly constitute the preponderance of victims of such crimes. Moreover, Walklate argues this should not be surprinsing given the restructuring of law enforcement in the 1980s to provide equal opportunity for women to become police officers (thus reproducing the gender division of labor) while simultaneously participating inalong with other societal institutionsthe cultural construction of the customer by reorienting policework from police force to police service (Jefferson, Sims, and Walklate, 1992). However, Walklate asserts that we must question the extent to which it is possible to respond to women as consumers of a police service in the absence of considering what the underlying essence of that service might be. Given that gender is extraordinarily institutionalized in policingthrough a militaristic framework that concentrates on the use of forceit is predictable, as Walklate observes, that women have not fared well as consumers of, and workers in, the profession of policing. In her discussion of criminal justice policy (Chapter 5), Walklate focuses on the manner in which the criminal justice process, through the application of the law, controls men and women. She examines how the law and the legal system are presumed to embrace a body of knowledge and a process rooted in neutrality. Yet, when examined closely, gender inequality leaps out; that is, female and male defendants are not processed through the system in equal ways. Through examples of trials for rape and battered women who have killed their violent partners, Walklate (p. 147) demonstrates how the presumption of abstraction, objectivity, and rationality deeply embedded in legal thinking unquestionably translates to male abstraction, male objectivity, and male rationality. Thus, although changing the law of rape, for example, to include rape in marriage will, to a certain extent, benefit some women, as a strategy of collective gain it is likely to be limited, unless our understanding of the law is put into a broader historical and political framework (p. 148). Walklate rightly concludes that focusing solely on changing the law disregards the underlying gendered presumptions of the law and the complex

ways in which these presumptions are given expression through the criminal justice process. Following her discussion of gendering sexual violence, policework, and criminal justice policy, in Chapter 6 Walklate turns to Gendering the Criminal. After thoroughly critiquing both sex-role and categorical theories, the author turns to an examination of doing gender as outlined by this reviewer in Masculinities and Crime (1993). As argued in that work, men construct masculinities in accord with their position in social structures and, therefore, their differential access to power and resources. Walklate (p. 173) further summarizes this perspective: In the context of crime this results in the consideration of three key locations: the street, the workplace, and the home. In each of these locations Messerschmidt provides a detailed account of the variety of ways in which masculinity is given expression to: from the pimp on the street to the sharp business practice of the rising white-collar executive, to the expressions of male propriety in the form of various violences in the home. My sole criticism of Walklates book is that she overlooks the fact that criminology (including feminist criminology) commonly examines gender and crime through a specific gendered lens that focuses on sex differences, while ignoring sex similarities, of crime. One result of this oversight has been, for example, that serious departures from what is considered appropriate female crime (such as violence by women) inevitably are ignored. Although Walklate omits any discussion of this criminological focus on difference, such a concentration on difference is apparent throughout her text. One example will suffice. Walklate (pp. 86-87) correctly points out that child abuse is subdivided into physical and sexual abuse, yet criminology overlooks the fact that (at least in the United States) women commit approximately 50 percent of child physical abuse (Beirne and Messerschmidt, 1995; Breines and Gordon, 1983). Because of its adherence to a sex-difference approach when examining gender and crime, criminology neglects the fact that gender patterns of crime may vary situationally and that women and men occasionally engage in similar types and amounts of crime. Indeed, there is a dearth of work on female violence generally. Thus, a different gendered lens (other than one that focuses on sex differences) would include women and femininities (along with men and masculinities), thereby allowing possible illumination of what in the past has been hiddenviolence by women and gender similarities in crime. In conclusion, I enthusiastically recommend Walklates book as both a professional resource and a teaching tool. I intend using it as a supplemental text in a Gender and Crime course I teach, and suspect that other sociologists and criminologists will also find it to be of pedagogical value for a variety of courses.