3.0 Women in Conflict with the Law: A Profile

In order to understand the literacy needs of women who come into conflict with the law, it is first important to understand the women themselves; who are they, where do they come from, and what motivates them? Traditionally, women have been under-represented in criminological studies. The typical justification of this oversight has been that women represent only a small minority of the people charged with criminal offences, and rarely pose a major threat to public safety. Despite these rationalizations, the fact remains that thousands of Canadian women are charged with Criminal Code offenses each year, and thousands more are at risk for developing criminal careers.

It is impossible to fully grasp the problems experienced by women in conflict with the law, without understanding the social context experienced by all women in Canada in the late twentieth century. While the feminist movement has enabled women to participate more fully in the traditionally male-dominated areas of education, the labour force and the political arena, the benefits of these advances are still not shared equally among all women.

Nor have women as a group achieved economic, educational or social parity with men. Holly Johnson (in Adelberg 1987) estimates that "one in ten women who lives with a man is abused by him, and one in two females will be the victim of unwanted sexual acts at some point in their lives.... ninety-eight out of every one hundred women will marry during their lifetime, and sixty-eight will end up living alone....upon divorce the average woman's income goes down forty per cent, while the average man's disposable income goes up seventy per cent .... The average income of families headed by women is half the average income of families headed by men. Fully forty-five per cent of female-headed families live below the poverty line compared to ten per cent a male-headed families."

In addition, women remain concentrated in part-time or low-paying jobs, making up 76% of all minimum-wage earners in 1981. This ghettoization of women's work means, in real terms, that the average woman in Canada still only earns 64 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Johnson states, "For the most disadvantaged women, those who comprise the majority of women who come into conflict with the law, equal opportunity remains a distant reality .... Women continue to be socialized to expect a limited range of functions in life which for the most part preclude economic independence and foster low expectations and low self-esteem.''

It is from this milieu that women come into conflict with the law. While early theorists on the subject of the "female criminal" hypothesized that these women were morally deficient, devious, or maladjusted to their natural role as women, more recent theorists have blamed the feminist movement for the rising numbers of women in conflict with the law. This latter school of thought posits that crimes carried out by women are caused by women abandoning their natural passivity and emulating men (who are presumably more criminally inclined).

When women in conflict with the law are examined as a group, however, a more complex picture emerges. These women tend to be young, poor, under-educated and unskilled. Native women are over-represented, as are those addicted to alcohol, drugs or both. Many have been physically or sexually abused either as children or as adults, and many are emotionally or financially dependent on abusive male partners.