6 - Self

Summary

Through my analysis of women’s responsibility for crime, in this chapter, I engage with this unitary story of criminal responsibility from two perspectives and make two main arguments. First, I argue that, on the level of legal form, women’s responsibility for crime is marked by particularity and specificity, rather than generality and universalism, making women’s responsibility for crime distinctive. This particularity and specificity has been the product of two dynamics, relating to violence by women, and violence against women. In the first of the dynamics giving rise to the distinctiveness of women’s responsibility for crime, which was dominant up to the mid-century century, violence by women was pathologised and women’s responsibility for crime was constructed as diminished or circumscribed. In the second dynamic, which has been dominant since the last decades of the twentieth century, the rise to prominence of violence against women – in particular, domestic or family violence – has recast women’s violence as responsive – by which I mean comprehensible only by reference to what has already happened – and reconstructed women’s responsibility as an amalgam of agency and victimhood/survivorhood. Each of these dynamics has generated atypical responsibility forms which do not fit the unitary story of criminal responsibility.