Cameron Golden
Dr. Casey Citrin
Advanced Senior Humanities
8 April 2018
Gender Bias in the Criminal Justice System Script
Introduction
Hello, my name is Cameron Golden and I will be taking about the gender bias and the issue of gender neutrality in the US criminal justice system. The first issue I will be focusing on is the root cause for the violent crimes committed by women. Second, I will talk about how the US criminal justice system is biased in the orientation of the system and how it prevents an equal and fair trial and conviction of female offenders. The third issue I will be discussing is the way the law addresses homicide in domestic cases verses what is known as stranger violence and the underrepresentation of women receiving harsher …show more content…
overall, women are by far less violent than men in our society” (George 17). But out of the 13 percent of those women who are arrested: what is the root cause of their crimes if they are, in fact, less violent then men? The answer lies in looking in their past. Most of the violent crimes that are committed by women, are by those who have had histories of being physically and or sexually abused which “appear to be ‘instigators of delinquency, addiction, and criminality’” which is explained in Stephanie Covington’s “Gendered Justice: Women in the Criminal Justice System” on page five. A fact that is startling that I found Whitney George’s article “Women on Death Row,” he says “according to the Women's International Network News, every nine seconds in the U.S. a man abuses his female intimate partner,” and unfortunately, “sexual, physical, and emotional abuse are often ignored by authorities when they occur within the home. This forces women to defend themselves or their children, sometimes by murdering their abusive partner” (George 17). The victims of all murders committed by women are more likely to be …show more content…
Therefore, the experience of women in the criminal justice system is only based on broad understandings of gender in the social, cultural, economic, and political realms. Due to the fact that our justice system was based solely off of the male model during the founding of our nation and that women were legally connected to their husbands and had no say in terms of their treatment for many years, the result is that “[W]omen and girls exist as other: that is to say, they exist only in their difference from the male, the normal” (Covington 2). Since the definition of equality for women is to have rights that are equal to those of males, their equality does not include different needs as defined as needs different from those that are modeled in the justice system by males. This is the reasoning that they fall into the “other” category under the law, because there is no room for female needs in a male based system. In the Feminist reader, Simone de Beauvior explains how women are seen as the other, and not as the subject. We as readers can infer that this view has a direct correlation to the male based justice system. She says in her text The Second Sex, “[women are] defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential” (Beauvior