Vera Drake: Feminist Criminology

Feminist criminology has been around since the late 1960's and started out centered on speculations brought upon traditional theories of crime. Most traditional theories of crime didn't necessarily ignore women in the criminal justice system yet they generalized crime and what causes a person to turn to crime so that women who commit crimes are overlooked by the generalization. Not only are the numbers skewed when you look at gender in criminal justice offenders but there is also a certain bias in the criminal justice systems workers. In the movie Vera Drake there is a clear example of this when the investigator and the officer come into the movie. While watching you can easily assume that the female officer is treated and thought of much differently …show more content…
Shortly after Adler and Simon had published their works feminists were displeased with their theories due to the fact that the solution to prevent women from adopting more criminal behaviors was to prevent them from earning more women's rights. Being just the beginning of feminist criminology, the publications of Freda Adler and Rita Simon were soon a thing of the past as feminist criminology had started to suddenly expand immensely. Feminist criminologists began to look at men and women in the criminal justice system separately in order to identify specific tendencies each gender group may or may not have independently. Chensey-Lind and Faith argued that instead of looking at crime and social classes criminologists should start looking at gender and crime due to the amount of correlation that gender and crime has and the lack of correlation social class and crime have. Criminologists such as James Messerschmidt began to look at how people "do gender." What he was basically suggesting is that men will try to fulfill their masculinity needs whether that meant by traditional means or by turning to criminal …show more content…
The movie begins by following the main character Vera Drake through her daily routine. Vera is a housemaid for several different families who are well off as well as a wonderful housewife who enjoys doing what she does. Vera is the type of person who loves to make everyone happy and is always looking out for everyone but herself first. The movie then shifts to young woman named Susan, who is obviously born into a family who is well off, who has a young man over at her house who eventually forces himself upon her. Watching the movie for the first time this scene is a little random and out of the blue but eventually the scene starts to make sense as Vera starts to help out more than one girl a week. Shortly into the movie you see Vera go to the home a very nervous young woman and as the viewer you're not really sure what she is there to do. Come to find out that Vera is there to perform an illegal method of abortion for the young lady. Later on Vera meets with her friend Lily who the viewer finds out is the middle man/woman for women who are looking for an abortion. Throughout the movie Vera does her daily duties at the houses she takes care of and she comes home to mend to her family without taking a smile off her face. When I found out that she's performing illegal abortions, it almost seemed as if Vera