Book contents
- Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914
- Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Explaining Crime and Gender in Europe between 1600 and 1900
- Part I Violence, Space and Gender
- Part II Prosecution and Punishment
- Part III Representation of Crime
- 9 Girls, Young Women and Crime
- 10 ‘Monstrous and Indefensible’? Newspaper Accounts of Sexual Assaults on Children in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales
- 11 Gender and Dutch Newspaper Reports of Intimate Violence, 1880–1910
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Girls, Young Women and Crime
Perceptions, Realities and Responses in a Long-Term Perspective
from Part III - Representation of Crime
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2020
- Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914
- Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Explaining Crime and Gender in Europe between 1600 and 1900
- Part I Violence, Space and Gender
- Part II Prosecution and Punishment
- Part III Representation of Crime
- 9 Girls, Young Women and Crime
- 10 ‘Monstrous and Indefensible’? Newspaper Accounts of Sexual Assaults on Children in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales
- 11 Gender and Dutch Newspaper Reports of Intimate Violence, 1880–1910
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter consists of a literature review of girls’ and young women’s crime and deviance from a long-term perspective. It shows how certain themes have dominated European discourses and realities of female juvenile delinquency across several centuries and up until the present day, and how these various threats and transgressions have been countered by recurrent strategies. In assessing sexual misconduct, theft and vagrancy – three crime categories that were prevalent among prosecutions of young women – it identifies powerful and enduring narratives centering on concerns about girls’ sexuality and independence. Finally, in comparing responses to female juvenile crime and deviance across Western Europe since the eighteenth century, certain ‘solutions’ have proven dominant and very enduring: institutional confinement of criminal and problem girls on the one hand, and the pathologisation of female (juvenile) crime on the other.
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- Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 , pp. 173 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020