„Casualties of Community Disorder” evaluates professional interviews with 170 women who committed violent crime in New York and portraits the social structure around those female offenders.
The book itself is devided into seven chapters but can be restructured into three parts that relate to the main questions Baskin and Sommers tried to answer: “How are women’s careers circumscribed specifically by gender? And what accounts for the increasing pull of certain groups of women into the world of violent crime?”(p.7)
In the introductory part the authors not only criticise earlier studies by saying that they mainly saw women as passive parts driven by male offenders but also provide detailed information about the effect of deindustrialization, the …show more content…
The early confrontation with violence and drug abuse affected their development and influenced their mindset. This impact is also described by Bronfenbrenner and Morris who argue that: “Child development takes place through process of progressively more complex interaction between an active child and the persons, objects and symbols within its immediate environment.” This meant for the early onset women in the interviews that growing up with violent parents, siblings and neighbours promoted their propensity towards violence. This process was carried on by teachers who grouped the deviant children. For the later onset group who were not involved in violent crime before the age of 15 on the other hand peer pressure played a far more important role according to Baskin and Sommers. Since they do not provide any reasons for the change from prosocial to delinquent peers and give no information about the parents of the later onset group one can assume that these young women actively chose to be around the deviant peers. This change in the influential factors from family to peers was evident in the group of interviewees but the number and choice of the women involved can be criticized. In order to prove authors’ theory one would need a larger group of women who committed violent offences because 170 is a relatively small number to base criminal theories on. The interviewees should also not all be from the same are. That way, areal factors like neighbourhood and social structure can be considered as
The book itself is devided into seven chapters but can be restructured into three parts that relate to the main questions Baskin and Sommers tried to answer: “How are women’s careers circumscribed specifically by gender? And what accounts for the increasing pull of certain groups of women into the world of violent crime?”(p.7)
In the introductory part the authors not only criticise earlier studies by saying that they mainly saw women as passive parts driven by male offenders but also provide detailed information about the effect of deindustrialization, the …show more content…
The early confrontation with violence and drug abuse affected their development and influenced their mindset. This impact is also described by Bronfenbrenner and Morris who argue that: “Child development takes place through process of progressively more complex interaction between an active child and the persons, objects and symbols within its immediate environment.” This meant for the early onset women in the interviews that growing up with violent parents, siblings and neighbours promoted their propensity towards violence. This process was carried on by teachers who grouped the deviant children. For the later onset group who were not involved in violent crime before the age of 15 on the other hand peer pressure played a far more important role according to Baskin and Sommers. Since they do not provide any reasons for the change from prosocial to delinquent peers and give no information about the parents of the later onset group one can assume that these young women actively chose to be around the deviant peers. This change in the influential factors from family to peers was evident in the group of interviewees but the number and choice of the women involved can be criticized. In order to prove authors’ theory one would need a larger group of women who committed violent offences because 170 is a relatively small number to base criminal theories on. The interviewees should also not all be from the same are. That way, areal factors like neighbourhood and social structure can be considered as