Stephen Jones
Criminology and Criminal Justice 2008; 8; 147
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808088992
The online version of this article can be found at: http://crj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/2/147 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:
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Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2008 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) and the British Society of Criminology. www.sagepublications.com ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 8(2): 147–164
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808088992
Partners in crime:
A study of the relationship between female offenders and their co-defendants
STEPHEN JONES
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
Criminologists have paid relatively little attention to the relationships between male and female co-offenders. Most of the published research has been published in the USA and relates to the streetlevel drugs economy. In this project, 50 sentenced adult women were interviewed in an English prison about their criminal involvement with co-defendants. The picture that emerged revealed the widespread use of devices by males ranging from various forms of manipulation to direct physical coercion in order to ensure female compliance with their criminal activities. These findings stand in contrast to statements in some of the more recent literature, which seek to emphasize women’s agency in their offending behaviour.
The implications of these findings for the criminal liability and sentencing of women are discussed.
Key Words agency • co-defendants • coercion • sentencing • women
[Myra Hindley] described how Brady had once drugged her, and when she came round he was leering over her. She said she thought her life was in danger … But the letter also revealed her obsession with him and a few months after sending it she asked her friend to destroy it. She was by then completely in Brady’s thrall.
(Ritchie, 1988: 32)
147
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 8(2)
Hindley was a woman of competent understanding … The argument that she was not the ‘actual killer’ must be put in perspective. Her role in the murders was pivotal. Without her active participation the five children would probably still be alive today.
(Lord Steyn, R v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex part
Hindley, House of Lords, 30 March 2000)
Introduction
Reports of women’s involvement in crime have always been considered newsworthy and likely to capture the public’s imagination. This is not simply because female offending is relatively uncommon: the condemnation heaped upon the ‘fallen’ woman is greater than that which would be experienced by a man in the same situation. Despite the greater freedoms enjoyed by women nowadays, there remains an underlying belief within many sections of society that they should conform to their traditional roles of wife and mother, and any significant lapse which can be related to criminal behaviour will result in their portrayal as ‘doubly deviant’—both offenders against society and contraveners of the norms governing their expected sexrole behaviour (Heidensohn, 1970).
Particular interest has been shown in women who have committed violent or sexual crimes with men, particularly where the victims were children. Perhaps the most notorious case in Britain was that of Myra Hindley who, together with her boyfriend Ian Brady, was involved in the torture and murder of several children in the early 1960s. Although it has been claimed that Brady was the instigator of the crimes (see earlier), it was Hindley who remained a national hate-figure until her death in 2002. In recent years she has been replaced in the public imagination by Maxine Carr, the girlfriend of the child murderer Ian Huntley. Yet Carr’s only conviction was for perverting the course of justice, which resulted from her providing the police with a false alibi for Huntley on the day of the killings. (Indeed, the jury’s verdict suggests that it did not believe that Carr thought Huntley had committed murder at the point she decided to give a false alibi.) Rose West is another woman who became notorious following her conviction for murders committed with her husband, Fred. However, it has been suggested that there was little evidence to support her conviction and that she was effectively condemned by the jury both for the association with her husband and her sexually deviant lifestyle (Masters, 1996).
The level of interest shown by the media in every little detail of the involvement of Hindley, West and Carr with their male partners is in stark contrast to the interest shown in the relationships between women and men who are involved in everyday routine criminality. Nor have criminologists devoted much attention to this area. Research into female offending has concentrated more on abuse, both physical and sexual, or women’s experience of imprisonment. Studies of co-offending are usually based on juveniles in
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Jones––Partners in crime general and boys in particular. This article considers the phenomenon of adult co-offending: certain features of women’s involvement with partners or friends which appear to have been closely related to, or even precipitated, their criminal behaviour. It draws on interviews conducted by the author with imprisoned women about their relationship with their co-defendants. Research literature
A central feature of the research literature on male–female criminal collaborations is the role played by the women: were they fully independent agents exercising a rational choice to act in a particular way; or were they effectively coerced into behaving the way they did? In other words, were these women ‘offenders’ in the full sense of the term, or should they be seen as essentially ‘victims’?
Most of the earlier studies portrayed adult women who offended with men as having occupied a secondary role. For example, Ward et al. (1979) concluded that women burglars were ‘supporting players’ and that it was the men who played the main part. This was also found in research into adult heroin addicts by Covington (1985), where the men were in charge of organizing the thefts to obtain the money to purchase the drugs. Pettiway
(1987) reached the same conclusion from his study of adult female drug users in Miami and New York.
In the more recent studies there is a greater chance of finding researchers who go out of their way to emphasize that women had not become involved in criminal partnerships through the influence of men. Yet a close study of their findings does not always fully support this conclusion. Gilfus (1992) conducted in-depth interviews with 20 imprisoned women. Although she was keen to point out that ‘most of the women were quick to take responsibility for their actions’ (1992: 81), her data suggest that, for a significant number of them, involvement with overbearing men could be related to their criminality: ‘Fourteen of the women had … serial relationships with men who shared and encouraged their drug abuse and illegal work, and who used violence to keep the women “in line”’ (1992: 81). In research by
Alarid et al. (1996), all the women entering a Texan ‘boot camp’ during one year were asked to comment on their involvement with accomplices and the extent to which male co-offenders had influenced their criminal behaviour.
(There was also a racial dimension to the research, which is not discussed here.) More than half (58%) of the women claimed to have played a ‘primary role’ in their most recent offence. However, of the women whose latest offence involved an accomplice almost half claimed that the crime was initiated by a male. Also, those women who offended with a man were likely to commit more serious offences than those who did not.
In a study of 37 predominantly African-American women imprisoned on Rikers Island, New York, Richie (1996) did not make such claims for
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 8(2) the women’s individual agency. Instead, she considered that they were the victims of ‘gender entrapment’. According to Richie, this notion ‘helps to show how some women are forced or coerced into crime by their culturally expected gender roles, the violence in their intimate relationships, and their social position in the broader society’ (1996: 133). Some of the women she interviewed had been coerced into offending by their male partner. In several cases the men had set up the women to be arrested by planting weapons or drugs on them. Richie reported how the women were generally seeking intimacy and had become emotionally dependent on the
(usually abusive) men to such an extent that a desire to please them transcended any misgivings about their behaviour that they might otherwise have had.
The notion of ‘gender entrapment’ or ‘policing’ is also found in a study by Welle and Falkin (2000) of 60 women in drug treatment programmes in New York City and Portland, Oregon. The authors drew a distinction between ‘romantic’ and ‘non-romantic’ co-defendants. The former were found to be particularly vulnerable to the manipulative activities of the partners and their associates. In group discussion, some of the women disclosed that domestic violence had been used in order to force them to commit the crimes. However, even those who ‘consented’ to participate in the criminality of their partners claimed to have been consistently threatened and physically harmed by them in other areas of the relationship. Women with romantic co-defendants were also likely to be pressurized by their partners into participating in their plea-bargaining plans. Welle and Falkin described this as ‘relationship policing’ and contrast it with the typical reluctance of conventional policing agencies to become involved in issues of domestic violence. The authors concluded that: ‘Women with romantic codefendants experience a continuum of policing in which abusive partners exclusively police women at home and augment already intensified state efforts to police women on the street, in jail or prison, and on parole or probation’ (2000: 61).
Mullins and Wright (2003) looked at the way in which issues of gender affected the practices of 36 male and 18 female residential burglars in
St Louis, Missouri. They found that many of the women claimed to have been coerced into their first, and sometimes subsequent, burglaries. Some of them said they did not even know their boyfriend was planning to commit a burglary until they arrived at the crime scene, at which stage it was very difficult to back out.
Two studies of women’s involvement in the New York street-level drugs economy during the 1990s came to somewhat differing conclusions. Baskin and Sommers (1998) interviewed 170 women who had committed serious violent crimes in New York. Only one-quarter of these had been committed with male accomplices; indeed, more crimes had been committed with other women. Baskin and Sommers reported that most of their interviewees rejected both the suggestion that they had been ‘forced’ into crime and the idea that they had made a ‘rational choice’. The authors considered that
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Jones––Partners in crime
‘within contemporary drug markets, women made decisions to participate based on a logical evaluation of career options’ (1998: 94; see also Sommers et al., 2000). On the other hand, Maher (1997), while not specifically considering co-offending, challenged the view that women have gained any sort of equality in the drugs business or created for themselves a new niche in the expanding crack market. The drugs market had not become ‘an equal opportunity employer’ (1997: 19). Although Maher did not consider that drug dealers tried to ‘entrap’ women into crime, she acknowledged ‘a range of situations in which men appear to have gained more direct social control over women involved in the street-level crack scene, including … sexwork–client transactions, and dealings with male drug users, dealers and
“house men”’ (1997: 10).
Using data from the American National Incident-Based Reporting
System, Koons-Witt and Schram (2003) examined the relationship between co-offending and type of violent offence. They discovered that, whereas females committing crime alone were more likely to be involved in aggravated assaults, those who co-offended with males usually committed more serious offences involving guns. The authors’ findings reflect those of
Alarid et al. (1996) that females were more likely to have a much higher involvement in both drug-related and violent crime when they offended with males.
More recently, Anderson (2005) has claimed that previous researchers have ‘neglected vital “behind-the-scenes” action’ and that women’s agency is ‘fundamental to the social and economic organization of the drug world and earns them various forms of capital among their similarly situated peers’ (2005: 375). These ‘forms of capital’ are said to include women’s control of the household; the usefulness of private residences (run by women) for drug-dealing; the economic advantages (including for the family) of women’s extra purchasing power; and their subsidizing of partner’s drug addiction by going out to work.
Much of the research that has involved a consideration of women’s relationship with co-offenders has been conducted in American inner-city areas and concerns organized drug dealing and related violence.1 This in itself raises questions as to how relevant the findings are to the British experience.
However, it is perhaps the ethnic and racial dimension that provides the most significant difference. The American drugs literature in particular is dominated by accounts of rivalries between African-American, Latino and
White groups. Therefore, when looking at relationships between male and female co-offenders in the USA, it is necessary to allow for the effects of different cultural loyalties.
A rare example of British research into the practices and relationships of female drug users is Taylor’s (1993) study in Glasgow. Although keen to emphasize the women’s willing participation in drug use, Taylor found that most of the women had moved from soft to hard drugs as a result of male influence. This could happen in three ways: male partners could directly introduce them to the drugs; they could make them easily available or
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 8(2) socially acceptable; or they could provide a role model for the women as to how to purchase and use the drugs. Subsequently, the men would seek to influence all aspects of the women’s behaviour, typically through the use of violence. Data and methods
Between December 2004 and December 2005 all sentenced women aged 21 or over who passed through one English prison were given a letter inviting them to be interviewed about their experience with a co-defendant.2 It was usually possible for the letters to be delivered by the researcher in person and this proved valuable as it enabled the women to ask questions about the research. Most of the women approached had not had a co-defendant, but this would have been very difficult to ascertain in advance. Fifty women with co-defendants agreed to be interviewed. These were conducted in private and tape-recorded. The interviews were of a semi-structured nature.
Having been asked several background questions about themselves and their co-defendants, the women were then engaged in a more general conversation about the relationship they had with these people and how they came to commit offences together. Although the particular focus was on male co-defendants, this was not stipulated as a requirement for participation in the research in case it was interpreted by potential interviewees as an encouragement to criticize their male associates.3 In the event, a large majority of the women who agreed to be interviewed did talk about their criminal activities with men.
Far more interviews would have resulted if the women had simply been asked to talk about the part played by other people in their offending.
However, the adopted approach of focusing on co-defendants was designed not only to make the project more manageable but also to provide objective evidence that the two (or more) of them really were ‘in it together’ to an extent which attracted accomplice liability.4 Nevertheless, it became apparent from the interviews that many women have been influenced to commit crimes by men who have never been prosecuted.
A question arises as to the appropriateness of a male researcher conducting interviews with vulnerable and often damaged female prisoners, and whether complete and accurate accounts can ever emerge from such encounters It is possible that some women did not want to talk about their experiences to a man. Others clearly did not want to talk to anyone (a few
‘could not see the point’ of the research). This is not the appropriate place for a full discussion of research ethics.5 However, it appeared that the commonest reason for women declining the offer to be interviewed was that they had not had a co-defendant. (Indeed, a large number expressed a desire to talk about other issues.)
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While it is not claimed here that the interviewees were a representative sample of imprisoned women who had stood trial with male co-defendants, it is worth considering their characteristics and comparing them to those of female offenders more generally.
The women were fairly young: 58 per cent were aged 21–9 and 74 per cent were aged 21–35. National statistics show that around 80 per cent of sentenced women entering custody are under 40 (Home Office, 2006). The male co-defendants were a little older, with about 75 per cent aged 21–40.
It appears that the males in such partnerships are usually a little older.
Research by Sarnecki (2001) into 22,000 offenders in Stockholm aged under 21 found that, on average, the males were 3.8 years older than their female co-offenders. Sixty-four per cent of the women in the present study had children, with the commonest number being two. Of those, more than
38 per cent were teenagers when they gave birth to their first child. About half of the women were tenants at the time of their conviction and about a quarter described themselves as being ‘of no fixed abode’. The remainder either lived in their own or partner’s home, or with their parents. Onethird of the women claimed to have been employed at the time they committed the offence. In research for the Home Office, Hamlyn and Lewis
(2000) found that 66 per cent of a sample of imprisoned women had dependent children under the age of 18, 58 per cent were living in the social rented sector before coming to prison and 30 per cent were in paid employment. Drug use was a prominent feature in the stories that were told to me.
More than three-quarters of the women were serving their sentence for offences that were drug-related: usually the crimes had been committed to obtain money to purchase drugs. The most common convictions were for burglary and theft. On the other hand, only 18 per cent of the women were serving their present sentences for offences relating to the possession or supply of drugs. In the NEW-ADAM project (Holloway and Bennett, 2004) 71 per cent of a sample of women arrested and taken to 16 police stations over a 2-year period tested positively for drugs (excluding alcohol). Most of the arrests were for property offences.
The nature of the relationship
An important difference between the American research studies discussed earlier and the present study is that, whereas the former tends to concentrate on the question of who played the dominant role in the offending acts, the present study is more concerned with examining the personal relationships between the co-defendants. These could be classified in various ways.
In this analysis they are categorized in terms of the levels of dependency that emerged from the women’s stories.
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(A) Women in a coercive relationship with their male co-defendant who committed a crime as a result of a direct threat or use of physical violence from him
Six of the 50 women fell into this category, including Lois who was forced to commit a robbery:
Lois:
SJ:
Lois:
SJ:
Lois:
I had a knife put up to me and I was made to go into a property and take the person’s money but the person grabbed hold of me and like tried touching me up, I pushed him off me, and the next minute my partner put a knife up to him.
Right, so it was your partner who put a knife to you.
To make me go in the house.
Had he, I mean, you must have been a bit surprised when he pulled a knife on you, to say the least.
He used to beat me up and things like that.
Bronwen was popular with the other prisoners and always prepared to help out someone in trouble. However, she had a history of abusive relationships with men, which had clearly left a scar. The latest one had landed her in prison:
He’d been bullying me and beating me for a couple of weeks and told me I had to go into Tesco’s with him, I went into Tesco’s, I went into the women’s toilets and he walked around the store, filled a trolley full of Stella Artois crates and when I come out the toilets the trolley was full and he just told me that whatever happens just say that they have been paid for, and we got caught. Rachel was a bright and intelligent young woman who had attempted to study for a university degree. However, the horrific level of violence and intimidation she suffered had made it impossible to do this:
He used to make me do things and stuff, credit cards and things but this particular offence I was actually shopping with my children at the time, and he came into the store and he was stealing and he was on bail for other offences and he told me ‘If you don’t say you done it, I’ll kill you’, this that and the other, so I took the blame for him. The police knew it wasn’t me but because I said it was me they took me in and interviewed me and I got charged with it.
I couldn’t go, tell anyone the truth, he beat me up straight away, put me in hospital all the time, I wasn’t allowed to speak to nobody, if my own brother came and knocked the door he would beat me up and say I was talking about him, and giving him money and then I just got to the stage I was so petrified I wouldn’t do anything whatsoever, I would just sit in the corner, do whatever he said, cook his meals when he asked, he would beat me up saying I cooked dinner too quick, really silly psychotic things, he would just take speed for weeks and weeks on end and then he would come home and relax or he would lock me in for a week at a time, or tie me up, he used to
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Jones––Partners in crime be just bizarre, but I was so scared of him it was unbelievable, he used to threaten to do things to my parents, he used to threaten to rape my little sister if I left him, so I just stayed with him for everyone else’s sake.
In contrast, Morag was an older woman, with a lot of prison experience.
Yet she too had suffered badly at the hands of a co-defendant:
Morag:
SJ:
Morag:
SJ:
Morag:
SJ:
Morag:
SJ:
Morag:
We went over there, I thought we was going for a holiday, friends was over there already, … and I was young then … I were only 18, and he sweet-talked me into swallowing drugs to bring them back over.
Right.
And I got a beating as well.
Right, were you using at the time?
No.
And this was, you said that you got beaten when he told you to do it.
Yes, I was over in Jamaica, I didn’t want to do it and he just went mad, he beat me with his shoe, so in the end I just done it.
Was that the first time he had been violent to you?
No, he had put me in hospital loads of times.
Siobhan was angry that she had been threatened with violence by her codefendant, but had resigned herself to how she would react if he were ever to use it:
On two occasions he did [threaten violence], but that was—no there is no but about it, on two occasions, yeah, he did—but he never actually physically hurt me … If he had hit me, I probably would have put up with it because I was a heroin addict and I needed the drugs, and he knew where to get big amounts from, he knew, it was his little business if you know what I am saying.
Overall, one-third of the women claimed that they had been in violent relationships with their co-defendants. Furthermore, more than one-third volunteered the information that they had been abused in childhood, although they were not specifically asked about this.6 Other research findings suggest that that this figure is on the low side. The New York City study by Baskin and Sommers (1998) found that 36 per cent of the women were abused by a member of their immediate family, 26 per cent by someone from their extended family and 40 per cent were severely beaten by a family member on a regular basis. In England, Morris et al.
(1995) discovered that almost half of a sample of 200 women prisoners reported a history of physical abuse and nearly a third had experienced sexual abuse.
In a Home Office survey by Caddle and Crisp (1997), imprisoned mothers were asked about their reasons for offending. The answers include
‘boyfriends’ activities’ (25%), ‘helping a partner’ (20%) and to ‘escape abuse’ (13%). Unfortunately, the report does not contain any elaboration of these responses.
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(B) Women who committed a crime as a result of men’s expectation or association
This was the largest category, with 40 per cent of the interviewees indicating that they had felt at the time that they should, in effect, ‘stand by their man’. Usually, the men were manipulative or abusive.
Manipulation could be practised in various ways. A number of women recounted how their co-defendants had introduced them to drugs. Tonia initially thought that this might be an act of friendship:
No, I was going out drinking, you know, that is how our relationship started off with going out drinking together, and then, yeah, he said ‘Do you want to try some again?’ and then, yeah, he was looking after me, giving it,
[chuckles] he wasn’t looking after me because he was giving me that, but I thought that at the time.
She then realized that, instead, it could be used against her by her codefendant when in need of fix: ‘Once it was like “Oh Tonia, I’m really ill,
I can’t do anything, you are going to have to, because I have looked after you all these years”, you know.’
Helen also came to appreciate that it was in her co-defendant’s interests for her to stay on drugs:
Because when I was in for shoplifting, when I was in prison before and he was on the out, he was worried he was going to lose me then because I was clean then, I was talking about getting clean and going to London and all this and that is when he used to come and visit me and he tried to keep me on drugs in prison, to keep hold of me here.
The idea of male drug users living off the earnings of their female partners has been referred to as the ‘Easy Rider Syndrome’ (Wellisch et al., 1970). In her study of female drug users in Glasgow, Taylor (1993) found evidence of this ‘arrangement’. Not surprisingly, it was resented by the women.
An alternative form of manipulation was for the man to persuade the woman to take all the blame for the crime. Nina thought this was natural because of her boyfriend’s criminal record:
Nina: He just started a fight and I broke the fight up and I like stuck up for him and said it was me that did the man as well.
SJ: You said you had done it.
Nina: Yeah, just to get him a discharge.
SJ: Is that because he had a kind of a bad record?
Nina: Yeah … They love me in the police station because I just plead guilty straight away.
Chris was even willing to sacrifice her clean record for the good of her co-defendant: Yeah, I wanted him out of jail, and seeing as I was a clean character with …show more content…
no criminal record or anything else, it just didn’t appear to me that getting a
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Jones––Partners in crime criminal record would affect me as much as it did and put me in here, so I did it last year, stupidly … I’ve never actually committed an offence that is on my criminal record.
Becky was in a relationship where she was used to having to take the blame for her boyfriend:
Becky: We both got arrested but there was more evidence on me than what there was him and he’s not long been out of prison and he was on his licence so if he was to get charged with it he would get a licence recall and sent back to prison and so we agreed between ourselves that I would take the blame, which I said stupidly that I’d be a girl and not in as much trouble, that they would go more lenient with me than what they would do with him.
SJ: … When, on the previous occasions, there were several occasions when you agreed to take the blame for things he had done, did he ever try to persuade you to, or was it just an understanding that you would take the blame? Did he have to try to persuade you or did you just assume that that was what you ought to do?
Becky: He tried it a couple of times because he knew he would go back to prison; I think it was only something stupid like shoplifting.
SJ: But he didn’t use force on you or anything?
Becky: Not physically, no.
SJ: But emotional.
Becky: Yes, he’d say that if he went back to prison he would lose everything and he wouldn’t be able to cope and there would be no point living any more.
It was rare to find a case where a woman had resisted such a plea, but
Emma provided one example:
He done it, because I was in prison and he was in prison, he kept writing to me saying, ‘You take the rap for this’, ‘You plead guilty on these ones’, you know he wanted me to do it, but as soon as I had that letter I just handed it straight to my solicitor.
Judith speculated on what it is that makes women stay with such manipulative people:
SJ:
Judith:
There must be something attractive about these people, some time when you first meet them I suppose and …
Some people say you must love the bad boys, innit, but …
Whereas Judith seemed resigned to her life continuing in a similar pattern,
Chris had used her first custodial sentence to form a strong resolve that she would never have anything to do with men like her co-defendant ever again:
SJ:
All right, you’ve been in love with the guy, but he has not tried to pressurize you directly?
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Chris:
SJ:
Chris:
SJ:
Chris:
Oh no, I have had domestic violence and everything off him.
Really?
Yes, and I still stayed with him, but I think being in here has made me do a lot of growing up and it’s made me realize that men like that just won’t fucking learn, and that’s why I finished with him two and a half months ago.
This is like the final straw.
Yeah definitely—no, the final straw should have been when he first laid a hand on me but, stupid of me, I went back.
The explanation offered by Charlotte could probably have been given by many of the women:
Most of the people that are in prison have been sexually abused which normally leads them to committing crimes … [I suffered from] sexual abuse and being [being] beaten up by people taking advantage of me. It’s hard for me to explain, but basically I’ve wanted them to love and they’ve abused my love and respect by drugs and that, and by getting me going out and doing jobs.
Taylor (1993: 91) cites a comment from Mondanaro (1989) describing the view ultimately reached by many such women: ‘not believing they are capable of being loved, they settle for being needed’.
Despite the high levels of abuse and manipulation, it is revealing that, just as in the American research, few if any of the women went as far as to deny any responsibility for their own actions. A typical response was that of Gwen:
I don’t kind of hold it against him because I know that I make my own choices, you know, I made the decision to go along with his plans, but I do feel that he took advantage of me at a very vulnerable time: I had left home,
I’d left my children and I believe that he fed me drugs and fed me alcohol and he talked me into his plans so, yeah, in that sense I do, but I’m more angry with myself for allowing him to do that.
(C) Women who committed a crime through love
Legendary stories of male and female co-offending (both real and fictional) often account for the woman’s crimes as resulting from her infatuation with the man. As is shown in the opening quotation, the behaviour of the murderer Myra Hindley is sometimes explained in these terms (Ritchie, 1988).
In a small number of cases in this study women claimed that they had been led into crime through infatuation with men who, it subsequently transpired, had merely used them. Brenda, an articulate middle-aged woman, was one such an example:
Brenda: I feel, I feel used, and I feel let down because I am the kind of individual where I do trust people and I do not want to ever not to trust people, I don’t want to go down the route from one extreme to the other but I think it has made me very wary, you know.
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SJ:
Brenda:
Of people in general or …?
Well no, people that say that they care about you. It’s one thing to be used by someone who doesn’t care about you but it’s extremely hurtful to discover that someone that you have cared about and you believed cared about you actually didn’t.
On other occasions, the loved man had—while not being abusive or manipulative—had acted in such an irresponsible way that the woman had decided that she would have to break the law in order to support him.
Jennie’s fiancé had absconded from prison:
I was going to visit him there and everything was fine and you know, he was getting on really well, he was a few months away from getting his tag and about one o’clock in the morning … I had a phone call, it was John, he’d jumped over the fence and run off, and I wasn’t really happy with him but I thought well he’s done it now I might as well just go and meet him, which I did, and we then left everything that we had in the flat and we went on the run together … I was pretty angry with him and I still have a go at him now—‘If you hadn’t been to jail I’d be living in our flat and you’d be home’—and, you know, it’s took me a long time to get my head around it, in fact I couldn’t even write to him for a few days because I was so angry with him, but the minute I took off with him
I knew that if I went that day, it didn’t matter whether we stayed away for six months or six days, we were in the same amount of trouble.
(D) The co-defendants were ‘equal’ partners in the crime
Although the accounts given by a clear majority of the women indicated— at the very least—coercive or manipulative behaviour on the part of a male co-defendant, in about one-third of the interviews it appeared that the woman had been a willing participant in the crime. Gemma made it clear that she would not be pushed around:
When I’m out, and if I’m not with my old man, I go out earning with someone else and, if they are there, then they are there; no-one tells me I have got to go out earning for money.
Victoria had been physically violent to her co-defendant:
What it as, though, I was sleeping in [his] flat and I fell asleep and when I woke up my cousin told me that the bloke had had his hand down my trousers, so I tied him up to a chair and put duck tape round him and put fishing wire in his
mouth.
Yet in some of these cases it seemed that the relationship was not as equal as the women believed, even when they were prepared to accept full responsibility for their actions. Perhaps they did not want to admit—either to themselves or others—that they had formed an emotional bond with such an inappropriate partner.
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Judith was aware of the problem:
I don’t know what it is, you’d think about all those years of being with them sort of people, you’d know the signs before you got too deep with them but you don’t. They are good at hiding that sort of thing, you know.
(E) The co-defendant was a woman
Five of the interviews were with women who had female co-defendants.
None of these involved any allegations of threats or coercion. Four of the women, all of whom had husbands or male partners, had committed crimes with ‘girlfriends’. Three of these involved shoplifting or burglary, and the fourth had committed an assault. Only the fifth woman was critical of her co-defendant, who also happened to be her partner, and this did not relate directly to the commission of the crime in question—it was because the partner had been responsible for introducing her to drugs.
Conclusion
Not all the women on the inside were bad though. Many had ended up there simply because of bad choices, often to do with men, which had made them spiral out of control. Women who’d helped a boyfriend cover up a crime, aided a man who dealt drugs, been abused as children and become involved in prostitution or drugs …
(Cannings with Lloyd Davies, 2006: 199, quoted in Corston, 2007)
Although this group of 50 imprisoned women is not necessarily representative of female offenders in general, the high level of coercion—both mental and physical—exercised by their male associates at least suggests that a substantial amount of female co-offending may be explicable on this basis. The interviews show that women who became emotionally involved with men with criminal lifestyles stood a good chance of being dragged into their lawbreaking activities, even if it was against the women’s better judgement. In some cases they even agreed to take the blame for their man when they themselves had not broken the law. The situation has been clearly exacerbated by the proliferation of drug addiction. Although the women blamed the start of their addiction on their male partners in only a small number of cases, in many others it was apparent that men would manipulate an existing addiction to ensure submission and compliance.
Whereas earlier researchers generally had little difficulty in describing their female subjects as having acted under the influence of men, some of the recent feminist writers have been at pains to highlight women’s agency—that they have control over their own decision making, that they have ‘choice’. The view of Anderson (2005) that even menial domestic work can ‘empower’ women who live with drug dealers exemplifies an extreme form of this argument. Yet, as Maher put it, ‘The positioning of
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Jones––Partners in crime women as victims constitutes an enduring stumbling block for feminist theory’ (1997: 11). Victim status is allowed if it results from physical or sexual abuse, but apparently not if it involves women’s playing a coerced role in joint criminal activity with men.
Rumgay (2004) has pointed out that the criminal justice system relies on a clear distinction between a wholly innocent victim and a completely guilty offender. However, the interviews with these 50 women suggest that the dichotomy of ‘rational agent or unwilling victim’ in relation to female offenders may often be false. The real question is whether such abused and manipulated people are necessarily in a position to exercise the degree of control that ought to be required before criminal liability is imposed. Even if there is an absence of strong evidence showing a direct causal link between childhood abuse and subsequent offending (Home Office, 2000), it is likely that one effect of the abuse is to render the woman susceptible to strong and domineering men (Hooper, 2003).
One possible way of reflecting women’s reluctant or coerced partnership in crime would be a modification of the existing legal defence of duress. The idea that many women commit offences under the substantial influence of men is not new in English law. Until the Criminal Justice Act 1925, there was a presumption that a woman who committed a crime in the presence of her husband had acted under his coercion. This meant that she was entitled to be acquitted unless the prosecution could prove that she had initiated the offence. Although the law still provides a defence of duress to a person (male or female) charged with a criminal offence, it requires threats of death or serious injury that a ‘reasonable person’ would be unable to stand up to. The defence would therefore have been of little use to most of the women in this sample, as their coercion would generally not have reached the required threshold of severity. Moreover, even if the defence were altered so that it could be established on the basis of lesser threats, there is still the likelihood that women would be far too scared of their co-defendant to raise the issue in court.
Perhaps a more realistic approach would be the introduction of changes to the law and practice of sentencing female offenders. Punishments imposed on convicted women have been increasing in severity. The female prison population has grown dramatically, and the evidence suggests that this is more a consequence of changes in sentencing patterns than any overall increase in the seriousness of offending (Home Office, 2006). There have been calls for the imprisonment of women to be almost completely abolished (Carlen, 1998) or at least severely curtailed (Corston, 2007). The
2007 Corston Report stated that: ‘The government should announce within six months a clear strategy to replace existing women’s prisons with suitable, geographically dispersed, small, multi-functional custodial centres within 10 years’ (2007: 35). However, such an announcement has not yet been forthcoming.
Although the Government has shown some sympathy with the problems posed by the offending behaviour of the vulnerable in society, there has
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Notes
I would like to thank my colleague, Richard Young, for making some helpful comments on an earlier draft; Sarah van Mastrigt of the University of
Cambridge for showing me some of her own research; and Toni Walsh of the
School of Law, University of Bristol, for transcribing the interviews. Any remaining errors are entirely my own responsibility.
1
2
3
4
5
6
There is a substantial amount of literature on women who have committed sexual offences against children with men. Although in some cases similar issues to those discussed in this article may arise, in general this sort of abuse warrants a separate discussion and is not considered here.
Women under 21 were excluded, as at the time it was considered that their relationships might be more similar to those of juveniles and thus involve different issues to those of older women. In hindsight, this might have been an over-cautious approach. However, it is certainly the case that most of the older women were very pleased that they were separated from the younger ones, whom they viewed as loud and troublesome.
Unconvicted women were excluded for ethical reasons. It would be inappropriate to discuss the alleged offence with a prisoner who could still change their plea at trial.
The names of the women have been changed.
Once the decision had been taken to ask the women to talk about male or female co-defendants, it was inevitable that some of the interviews would be less useful than others. However, all the information provided helped to establish an overall picture of co-offending which was necessary before a proper analysis of the male–female relationship could be undertaken.
Information about the women’s date of birth and address together with details of her conviction and sentence was checked on the prison’s computer system. Beyond that, anything they said has been taken at face value.
It would obviously have been useful to have been able to hear the man’s version of events but this would have been impracticable.
An interesting discussion of the problems that can arise from conducting interviews in a custodial setting can be found in Mary Bosworth’s (1999) research in three English women’s prisons.
The prison staff were anxious about the potential ‘fallout’ from discussion of such sensitive topics, as they felt they could not guarantee adequate backup support.
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Jones––Partners in crime
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