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Division
of Women and Criminal Justice
Book Review
In Praise of Joanne BELKNAP and her "Invisible
Woman."
Irene Froyland1, Sellenger Centre
at ECU, Western Australia.
When faced with
a book entitled "The Invisible Woman"
and descriptors such as "sex discrimination,"
and "Women - crimes against - USA"
one's first reaction is "Ho hum! Not another
one?" Nothing could be further from the
truth. The words to describe this book are "comprehensive,
academically sound, and totally readable."
Joanne Belknap's
work is three-dimensional, presenting women
as offenders, victims and law enforcers and
for at least the first two of these categories
it seems that Belknap is well on top of her
subject. In these pages the female offender
becomes real to us and we begin to understand
her pressures and motivations. Fortunately Belknap
does not apologize for, or excuse her. That
is left to the reader. She simply presents her
in all her complexity. The treatment of women
as victims is similarly rich. For too long women
victims have been presented as pathetic, weak,
shadowy beings whose very existence depends
on the goodness or evil of their male partners.
At least Belknap presents women as victims of
their culture as well as of their men, and she
portrays them as real players in their world.
We see the first glimmer of hope for female
victims as they begin to fight back. I look
forward to Belknap's third edition when we might
begin to see women as victims of crimes other
than crimes of physical violence committed by
their male partners, but in these areas Belknap
has served us well. It is in her summary of
women on the job that Belknap lets us down.
Where are women who are station sergeants and
police commissioners; shift officers and prison
superintendents? Their fight to win these jobs
occupied us last year. This year we want to
know about their challenges and successes; about
how the job changed them as well as how they
changed the job. Perhaps in edition three?
The real joy of
this book is that it is so soundly based in
research. Nothing seems to have evaded the eyes
of this thorough author. She presents every
idea as a debate between different researchers
and her conclusions are carefully drawn and
defended. The book would be worth reading for
its bibliography alone, but one would not want
to miss Belknap's summary and conclusions on
each issue. They leave the reader both satisfied
with the conclusions and looking for the next
instalment.
But most of all,
I applaud Belknap for the readability of her
work. Be it the anecdotes that add human interest,
her clear and elegant writing or her rare personal
revelations, I found this book eminently readable.
It is a book you don't lend to a friend until
you have thoroughly read it yourself, in case
you don't get it back. Some of Belknap's stories
made me want to leap on a chair and shout "Yeah!"
When she described the visible woman as human,
strong and female I felt good. But my lasting
impression will be of Belknap with her tongue
firmly in her cheek as she tells the story of
journalists' concern that Mondale almost selected
Ferraro as his running mate. "What if he
dies and she becomes president? She might go
through menopause and get us involved in a nuclear
war." Thank you Joanne Belknap.
Joanne BELKNAP,
(2001), The Invisible Woman: Gender Crime and
Justice (2nd Ed), Wadsworth, California, USA
1 Associate
Professor Irene Froyland is Director of the
Sellenger Centre for Police and Justice Research
at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
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