Maureen Cain

Maureen Cain (born 1938) received her bachelor's degree from London School of Economics in 1959, and she attained her PhD from the London School of Economics in 1969.

After graduating from LSE, Cain became a professor.

Cain's three main teaching posts have been:

Some of the courses she has taught include:

Cain also became a frequent visitor of Cambridge University between 1981 and 1987.

President of the British Society of Criminology from 2003 to 2006.

Cain's interests have been as broad as looking and studying the major works of Marx & Engels "Sociology of Law" to looking into "Society and the Policeman's Role".

Cain's more current teaching and research interests have come from her years in Trinidad teaching at The University of the West Indies.

While in Trinidad she studied Women, Crime and Social Harms.

Cain's original interest and her PhD dissertation was "Society and the Policeman's Role", which is noted for being ahead of its time in feminist criminology.

Cain then moved away from criminology to look at "The main themes of Marx's and Engels' sociology of law" then she returned to a look into policing when she wrote "Racism, the police, and community policing: a comment on the Scarman Report”. Cain then wrote “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the sociology of Crime” and today she is about to publish a new book called “Globality, Crime and Criminology” due to be available for sale 30 July 2010.

Article Review – Towards Transgression: A new direction in feminist criminology

Cain's major argument in Towards Transgression were that there are: three traditional approaches of feminist criminology – 1.

Unequal treatment 2.

The nature of female criminality and 3.

Women as victims.

Cain argued that each of them has tested the limits of traditional criminological formulations.

And then she said there is a new emergence of an alternative approach called "Transgressive Criminology".

Cain argues that there are two parts to Feminist Criminology – 1.

The traditional feminist criminology and 2.

The shift towards transgression:

1. The Traditional Concerns of Feminist Criminology

Equity studies

a) Traditionally men and women have been treated differently. In the article we see that women were given lesser penalties because of their sex. A consistent finding was that girls dealt with by the courts for behavioural offences were more likely to be incarcerated than their male counterparts. These equity findings bring up many political and academic questions as to why and how the world we live in can be equalised. We (Criminologists) cannot explain why the treatment and punishment is the way it is. Lastly men and women, boys and girls are treated as categories. They are measuring the social construction of gender rather than the issue of sex differences.

Female Criminality

b) Early female criminology information was found based on self-report surveys about illegal activity. The results from the self-report surveys found that girls were worse than what was originally perceived, but girls still were not as bad as boys. The women studied seem to have all of the advantages possible. The self-report surveys were important because they were the beginning of looking at men separately from women.

Women as victims

c) The first area of victimisation that women tended to experience was when they are beaten by unsuccessful partners to re-claim dominance. The second area of victimisation is that against women and children, which “touches a political nerve” and male defence claim is an unthinkable claim against women and children. This creates an uneven balance between men and women and children. The third victimisation for women is rape, which tends to be quite political. It was also found that the home was the most dangerous place for women and girls to be victimised.

The fracture of criminology

d) Women seem to be “entangled in or confronted by a hegemonic web which is resistant to every attack.” Cain suggests that this demonstrates that feminist criminology must be transgressed.

2. The Transgressive Alternative

Transgressive strategies

a) Three transgressive strategies demonstrated in the article: i. Reflexivity; “enables us to see that everyone who comes into contact with women seem to be preoccupied with female sexuality and with a range of gender approved ways of behaving”, ii. Deconstruction; “the examination of discourse and the examination of internal logic and the ways it is deployed”, iii. Reconstruction; “it involves getting women or girls outside or beyond discourse and enables them to transgress”.

Studying women

b) Every woman is defined as “that which is not a man”. Hegemony is the reason women have pushed for “women only” spaces. For example, in Sexual Harassment calls, women had to be uncomfortable in their jobs. Men often said that the women ‘misunderstood them’. Cain says “Speaking of the unspeakable is both difficult and dangerous”. Cain argues that Transgressive Criminology will give ‘Women only’ studies a place in criminology and give it both political and theoretical validity.

Starting from outside

c) Feminist criminology must start with the exploration of the woman's entire life. We must look at the social construction of gender; we must look at the female penal system, and look at the conventional vs. the radical.

Studying men

d) 1. “Gender is a relational concept” – men and masculinity exist in comparison to women and femininity. If we exclude men from research then we are basically doing to men what was done to women traditionally. 2. “Women are constituted in their absence occupied by men” – Police, Judges, Lawyers are male dominated professions and the absence of women may play a role in how women are treated. 3. “We must study men because Lombroso found that most criminals are from the working class” – men dominate the working class and traditionally most criminals have been men. Reflexivity and self-help e) Practitioners, Guards and other support staff need training, self-reflection about the typical routines, need to decipher between control images and images which express reality.

Women and Politics