Women and Criminal Law: Victimization, Offending, and the Pursuit of Gender-Responsive Justice

Abstract

Women occupy a distinctive and often contradictory position within criminal law: they are markedly underrepresented as offenders yet disproportionately represented as victims of intimate and sexual violence, and the legal system has historically struggled to respond coherently to either role. This paper synthesizes research from feminist criminology, sentencing studies, and comparative legal reform to examine three interlocking questions: how criminal law has historically constructed female criminality, how courts treat women differently from men at the point of arrest, bail, and sentencing, and how legislative reform (e.g., the U.S. Violence Against Women Act, the criminalization of coercive control in the United Kingdom, and Indias post-2012 overhaul of its sexual-offence and domestic-violence law) has attempted to close longstanding protection gaps. Drawing on global imprisonment data and empirical sentencing research, the paper shows that the female share of the world prison population, while still small at 6.8%, is growing faster than the male share, and that gender continues to shape case outcomes through competing chivalry and evil woman dynamics that cut differently across offense types. The paper concludes that a gender-responsive criminal law agenda must simultaneously reduce the unnecessary criminalization and incarceration of women whose offending is rooted in victimization and poverty, while strengthening protective law for women who remain under-served as victims of gender-based violence. Keywords: feminist criminology; gender and sentencing; female incarceration; violence against women; coercive control; chivalry hypothesis