Women who challenge - Nacro

CHAPTER 2Women who challenge: women offenders and mental health issuesWho are we talking about?The scale of the problemMental health issues cannot be considered inisolation, so we begin by looking at the widerperspective of how the criminal justice systemimpacts on women and what bearing this mayhave on their mental health.Our starting point is to get a picture of the scaleand nature of the problem presented by womenoffenders. So why women offenders generally,when our primary concern is female mentallydisturbed offenders? Notwithstanding that theyare not classed as such, many women offendersshare many of the characteristics of those whoare labelled as mentally disturbed. They areaffected by many of the same factors andcircumstances or have had similar adverse lifeexperiences that have contributed to theircurrent behaviour and state of need. It is,therefore, relevant to consider the group as awhole. Despite the media hype about theincrease in girl gangs, female violence andfemale criminality, it is still the case that womendo not commit much crime. Figures included inthe Home Office publication Statistics on Womenand the Criminal Justice System 1 , which arepublished under the requirements of section 95of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, provide a clearpicture of the scale and nature of femaleoffending. The statistics contained in thischapter come from this publication, exceptwhere otherwise indicated 2 . Data in relation tomale offending are included to provide acontext without which the significance of thedata on women would be liable to be lost.The role of women in criminal activity is still farexceeded by that of men; only 19% of knownoffenders (that is those who have beencautioned for, or found guilty of, committing anoffence) in 2000 were female. Of the totalnumber of offenders found guilty or cautionedin 2000, only 315,700 were women comparedwith 1,336,800 men. The majority of youngoffenders simply grow out of crime but girlsgrow out of crime more quickly than boys. Thepeak age of self-reported offending for girls is14, compared with 18 for boys, so that, once1 Home Office (2001d) Statistics on Women and the Criminal JusticeSystem London: Home Office2 Other statistics, such as those from the British Crime Survey, whichmight otherwise be preferable in providing an overall picture ofoffending, do not contain any gender breakdownover the age of 17, the number of maleoffenders exceeds the number of femaleoffenders by a rate of about three to one.This difference between men and women interms of the scale of the problem is clearlydemonstrated by a comparison of the figures forlifetime prevalence of offending. Figuresillustrating the criminal careers of those born in1953 show that only 8% of women had beenconvicted of an offence by age 40, comparedwith 34% of men, and only 1% of women hadreceived a custodial sentence by that age,compared with 7% of men. Likewise, a closerexamination of convicted offenders born in1953 shows that, in the case of women, 78% hadbeen convicted only once by the age of 40whereas, in the case of men, the proportionconvicted only once is much smaller at 55%.Women are also shown to be less persistentoffenders: 83% of female offenders have acriminal career lasting less than one yearcompared with 60% of male offenders.Pattern of offendingIt is not only in terms of the volume of crimecommitted that men and women differ but alsoin terms of the nature of the crimes committed.In 2000, 88,900 female offenders were foundguilty or cautioned for indictable offences,compared with 386,200 male offenders. The topthree categories of indictable offence were thesame for both male and female offenders but anexamination of the figures makes it clear thatthis should not be taken to be indicative of adegree of parity between male and femaleoffending – see table overleaf.The crimes most likely to be committed by girlsunder 16 include criminal damage, shoplifting,buying stolen goods and offences of minorviolence. With increasing age, the proportionsinvolved in theft and handling and fraud andforgery increase so that women form a largerproportion of those arrested for these offences(21% and 27% respectively) than for any otheroffence.It has been argued that criminal behaviour bywomen, and especially the predominance ofproperty crime, can be explained by economicfactors – women are generally poorer than menin capitalist societies and, particularly as singlepage 7