Aberrance, agency and social constructions of women offenders

Traditionally offending women are framed through essentialist discourses of pathologisation and the family. Hence, good women are constructed as passive, compliant. vulnerable to victimisation, and nurturers. Offending women are constructed within criminal justice processes as disordered, physiologically and psychologically flawed. Censure or sympathy dispensed to women within the system is contingent on a number of key factors: the type of offence, the category of women involved, and the way in which women interact and negotiate the discourses used to construct their aberrance. The focus of this thesis is offending women and how they are socially constructed through legal and penal discourses within the court and the prison. However this thesis rejects the essentialist framework which positions women as passive recipients of an omnipotent patriarchal criminal justice system and thus having no agency. Nor is this thesis about creating a new entity to encompass all offending women. Instead an ant-essentialist approach is adopted that allows the body, power, and women's agency to be theorised. This approach provides a more complex and detailed account of women's aberrance that acknowledges the divers range of women, their experiences and negotiations of the criminal justice processes. The combination of real women' lived expediences and an alternative theoretical framework provides a very different perspective in which to understand female offending