Research published in the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of Women & Criminal Justice  finds evidence of changes in police perspectives, actions, and policies toward women both as perpetrators and victims of crime. The study, Police and the War on Women: A Gender-Linked Examination Behind and In Front of the Blue Curtain, offers a straightforward examination into the current treatment of women from the criminal justice system by reviewing trends of female offenders, police responses to crimes against women, and policies and practices that may improve understanding.

Photograph of an FBI agent leading away an adult suspect arrested in the "Operation Cross Country II"; source FBI.gov, Wikimedia Commons

"We simply explored the extent to which the data suggest that the police are playing a role in what some in the media and scholarly world are calling the war on women," explained the authors L. Thomas Winfree Jr. and Christina DeJong in a joint statement. "We had no agenda or, as journalists and others like to say, no axe to grind. We are social scientists interested in what the evidence says and going where it leads us."

Using arrest data compiled over a 20 year span (1993-2012) from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the researchers found that arrest of females for all crimes increased dramatically each year — from 19.7 percent of all arrests in 1993 to 26.2 percent of all arrests in 2012. Conversely, male arrests have declined from 80.3 percent to 73.8 percent. "The sum total of these arrest statistics, generated as they are by the actions of public police, leads us to conclude that forces were at work on the arrests of women that were distinct and different from those that shaped the arrest statistics of men," wrote the researchers of their results.

The study also examines changes in police policies and practices toward women as victims of crime with an emphasis on violent victimization. In terms of police practices and policies towards women as victims of crime, the 20 year trend suggests that women have not fared well in the hands of the police. Mandatory arrest policies, which state that the police arrests all parties to a domestic violence situation, likely account for increases in disorderly conduct arrests for women, as well as arrests for simple and aggravated assault, when, in the latter situations, women may simply be defending themselves.

"There is no 'smoking gun' clearly indicating an ongoing *war against women," stated the authors. “At the same time, the empirical evidence and policy analysis are more than suggestive that some combination of gender-linked benign neglect, animus, or indifference towards women and their involvement with the criminal justice system is at work."

"The war on women was a term coined during the 2012 election cycle that referred to attempts to pass legislation that would limit women's rights, from control of women's bodies (with a particular focus on birth control, abortion, and the aftereffects of rape) to equal pay for women and their rights in the workforce (M. E. Gilman, 2014). One arena in which evidence of such a war's impact on women may be assessed is behind and in front of the blue curtain of policing. To what extent, then, does policing reflect culture that supports and facilitates a war on women? We review arrest trends for female offenders, discuss police responses to crimes against women, and examine policies and practices that may improve understanding of the criminal justice system's role in this war. We find evidence of changes in police perspectives, actions, and policies toward women as perpetrators and victims of crime. Specifically, at the same time that police undertook more aggressive enforcement efforts against certain types of female offenders, resulting in trends for women that were often the reverse of those for men, there was an absence of similar attention to laws and policies protecting women as victims."

Editor's Note:  Above paragraph from the publication detail at Michigan State University

Police and the War on Women: A Gender-Linked Examination Behind and In Front of the Blue Curtain

L. Thomas Winfree Jr. and Christina DeJong 

About Women & Criminal Justice 

Women & Criminal Justice is a peer reviewed journal that is published five times per year. The journal is committed to feminist scholarship that contributes to our understanding of female offenders, victims and practitioners, and especially is interested in analyses of the intersections of race, ethnicity, and class with gender. Such integrative approaches will contribute to theory and policy analysis in order to improve domestic and international responses to crime and victimization involving women and girls.