GENDER, RACE & ETHNICITY:
ARE WE ALL EQUAL TO THE
LAW?
DR. TRUDE SUNDBERG
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
OUTLINE
• Looking back at how to look at numbers
• Unpacking gender statistics
• Who are the female offenders & what are the trends?
• Unpacking ethnicity & race statistics
• What has race & ethnicity got to do with it?
• Trends & characteristics
• What does this mean for theoretical explanations &
interpreting crime?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
RESPONDING TO ANY STATISTICS
1. What does this number measure?
2. Where does this number come from?
3. What other explanations are there for the claim
you’re investigating?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
RESPONDING TO ANY STATISTICS - PARTICULARLY
IMPORTANT WHEN WE ANALYSE GENDER &
ETHNICITY!
1. A measure is a way of understanding and
analysing the world
2. A number is collected by someone - who collects
it and how?
3. Are the ways in which we define, construct and
collect data impacting our findings on trends?
4. What other explanations are there for the claim
you’re investigating?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
PRISON POPULATION OVERALL
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
http://www.howardleague.org/december_2014/
2015
THE UK COMPARED
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
UK’S POPULATION
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
http://ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estimates-for-uk--england-and-wales-2015
scotland-and-northern-ireland/2013/info-population-estimates.html
GENDER & RACE
• Dimensions to take into consideration:
• Offenders & prison populations
• Different needs of different groups in prison (i.e. women versus
men)
• Different characteristics (age/religion/crime committed)?
• Types of offenses
• Who are defined as criminals?
• Stereotypes & discrimination – criminalisation of the poor?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
GENDER - REPETITION
• There is a clear difference between men and
women with respect to the nature, frequency, level,
continuation, and reasons for criminal activity.
• Male offending has been subject to a greater level
of theory based on everything (from race, class,
age, intellect, peers, family background, genetics
etc.) apart from gender.
• Gendered explanations, however, were
predominantly used to indicate the abnormality of
women’s criminality.
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
PRISON POPULATION: 85,567*
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
*As of Friday 20th Feb 2015. Source:
http://www.howardleague.org/weeklyprison-watch/ (accessed 23/02/2015)
GENDER / CRIME TYPE
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
GENDER & CRIME: ESTABLISHING THE
LINKS
• Around 80% of all known offenders are men.
• Men outnumber women across all the major crime
categories – burglary, robbery drug offences, criminal
damage or violence against the person – between 83%
and 94% of offenders are male (National Statistics, 2006).
• 80% of women offenders have criminal careers lasting
less than 1 year (55% for male offenders)
• Most known female offending is at the minor end of the
spectrum
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
SPECTRUM
(MALE: BLUE / FEMALE: RED)
Minor
Major
Men evident / represented across the spectrum
Non-payment of fines
rape
Handling stolen goods
paedophilia
Drugs offences
Minor assault
Women localised here
serious the offence
murder
armed obbery
Tail off with the more
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
MORE WOMEN IN PRISON?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
WHO ARE THESE WOMEN?
• “So many prisoners – especially women – arrive in
prison suffering the extreme health and social
effects of poverty, addictions and physical and
sexual abuse, surely, in the name of social justice
(or, less grandly, human compassion) it is desirable
that one objective of imprisonment be to ensure
that prisoners are released from prison in a better
state than when admitted”. (Carlen, 2002b,
http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Lacking%2
0Conviction%20the%20rise%20of%20the%20women's%20remand%20p
opulation.pdf)
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
UK’S POPULATION
• http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_290558.pdf
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
ETHNIC GROUPS, 2001 – 2011,
ENGLAND AND WALES
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
PRISON POPULATION & ETHNICITY
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
PRISON POPULATION & ETHNICITY
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
PRISON POPULATION & ETHNICITY
• British national prison population, 11% are black and 6% are
Asian. For black Britons this is significantly higher than the 2.8% of
the general population they represent.
• Overall black prisoners account for the largest number of minority
ethnic prisoners (50%).
• At the end of June 2012, 29% of minority ethnic prisoners were
foreign nationals.
• According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, there is
now greater disproportionality in the number of black people in
prisons in the UK than in the United States
• http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/projectsresearch/race
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
EXPOSURE TO CRIME
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
• http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/http:
2015
/rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/rdsolr2506.pdf
OFFENDERS BY ETHNICITY
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
WHO DO THE POLICE STOP?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
Stop & Search
‘Since 1995, per head of population in England and
Wales, recorded stops and searches of Asian
people have remained between 1.5 and 2.5 times
the rate for white people, and for black people
always between 4 and 8 times the rate for white
people.’
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
Stop & Search
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
• Paul Gilroy (1987):
– There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
– The Myth of Black Criminality
• Racial discrimination argument is supported by
others - Hall et al (1978) and Gordon (1988: 311):
“the association of black people with crime so firmly
made by the police and sections of the mass
media and the criminalisation of black people by
the agencies of the criminal justice system have
become central to racist ideology”
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
‘RACIALISATION’
“The process by which a particular group, or
its characteristics or actions, is identified as a
collectivity by its real or imagined
phenotypical characteristics, or ‘race’. More
broadly, the ways in which social structures
and ideologies become imbued with
‘racial’ meanings”
(Murji 2006: 334)
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
CULTURAL FACTORS
• Lea & Young (1982, 1984) Critique of tabloid newspaper article
(early 1980s) ‘BLACK CRIME SHOCK: Blacks carried out twice
as many muggings as whites in London last year’
• Analysis of the crime statistics: ‘Blatant moral hysteria’
• New realist perspective
– Intra-class & intra-racial
– Media & the left operate within ideological frameworks
which highlight inter-racial rather than intra-racial crime
• Identified problem of black criminality as laying with conflict
between 1st & 2nd generation (also see Fitzgerald, 1998)
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
• Critical approach to analysing the intersection and effects of
law, society, race and power.
• Socially constructed power and privilege offer advantageous
structures and opportunities to dominant groups at the
expense of minority or marginalised groups.
• Group identity becomes key: individualisation eschewed in
light of prejudicial stereotypes.
– i.e. does the act of one white man speak for ‘white men’?
– Why, then, are entire Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities
held accountable for the actions of a few?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
EXAMPLES OF RACIALISATION IN
CRIMINOLOGY
• Role of the media & authorities (police) in defining street crime
or mugging as activities characteristic of young black men
(Hall et al, 1978)
• Police’s continuing use of racialised statistics on street crime to
justify stop and search of racial minorities
• Stigmatisation of particular black sub-cultural styles
• Media & police constructions of a distinctively ‘Asian’
criminality
• Demonisation of ‘Islamic terrorists’
• Racialisation of whiteness - white criminal underclass, ‘white
trash’, ‘chavs’
• Historical persecution of Irish (particularly during ‘the Troubles’)
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
USE THEORY WHEN RESPONDING TO
ANY STATISTICS
1. What does this number measure?
2. Where does this number come from?
3. What other explanations are there for the claim
you’re investigating?
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
A CRITICAL VIEW - FROM USA
“Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are
portrayed as the purveyors of violence, traffickers of drugs,
and as envious of commodities that they have no right to
possess. Young black and Latina women are represented
as sexually promiscuous and as indiscriminately
propagating babies and poverty. Criminality and deviance
are racialized. Surveillance is thus focused on communities
of color, immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated,
the homeless, and in general on those who have a
diminishing claim to social resources”.
• http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Prison_System/Maske
d_Racism_ADavis.html
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
A CRITICAL VIEW - FROM USA
• http://www.breitbart.com/biggovernment/2014/11/27/cornell-west-the-end-ofthe-age-of-obama/
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
Gender & Race
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
GENDER & RACE
• In June 2007, there were five times more black British national
prisoners in prison compared with their white British
counterparts
• The proportion of black prisoners relative to the population was
7.4 per 1,000 compared with 1.4 per 1,000 for white prisoners),
and twice as many (3.6 per 1,000) mixed ethnicity prisoners
compared with white prisoners (Ministry of Justice, 2008).
• 29% of women in prison were from a black and minority ethnic
background.
• Of the British national population, 81% were white and 19% black
and minority ethnic.
• 25% of the women’s prison population were foreign nationals,
with the largest proportion from Nigeria and Jamaica (33% of
the foreign national population).
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
Drug offences & ethnicity hand in hand?
• 57% of BME women were imprisoned for drug offences,
compared with 27% of white prisoners.
• The proportion of black British women imprisoned for drug
offences (42%) was almost twice the proportion of white British
women (25%).
• Of the proportion of women imprisoned for drug offences:
• 65% were British nationals (73% of whom were white and 26% black
and minority ethnic)
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
Different problems amongst female offenders
• White women higher prevalence of drug misuse and different
patterns of misuse than some black and minority ethnic women
offenders.
• Particularly heroin, tranquillisers, amphetamines and cocaine, and also
reported significantly higher rates of psychological dependence (Borrill et
al, 2006).
• Marked ethnic difference in dependence, with 60% of white women
being dependent on at least one drug, compared with 29% of
black/mixed race British nationals:
• Significantly fewer black and minority ethnic women said that they
had problems with drugs on arrival than their white counterparts (18%
compared with 41%).
• • The same pattern occurs when comparing foreign national women
with British national women (14% compared with 38%)
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
MIXING IT UP
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
MIXING IT UP
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015
KEY POINTS
• Question the statistics - remember the 3 questions
• Differences men vs. women
• Types of crime, trends and characteristics
• Differences between and within ethnicities!
• Inter and intra group differences
• Critically investigate the way problems are
constructed, measured and perceived
© University of Kent Q-Step Centre
2015