Police and the War on Women: A Gender-Linked Examination Behind and In Front of the Blue Curtain

Abstract

The war on women was a term coined during the 2012 election cycle that referred to attempts to pass legislation that would limit women's rights, from control of women's bodies (with a particular focus on birth control, abortion, and the aftereffects of rape) to equal pay for women and their rights in the workforce (M. E. Gilman, 2014). One arena in which evidence of such a war's impact on women may be assessed is behind and in front of the blue curtain of policing. To what extent, then, does policing reflect culture that supports and facilitates a war on women? We review arrest trends for female offenders, discuss police responses to crimes against women, and examine policies and practices that may improve understanding of the criminal justice system's role in this war. We find evidence of changes in police perspectives, actions, and policies toward women as perpetrators and victims of crime. Specifically, at the same time that police undertook more aggressive enforcement efforts against certain types of female offenders, resulting in trends for women that were often the reverse of those for men, there was an absence of similar attention to laws and policies protecting women as victims.

Keywords:

• war on women
• arrest trends
• violent crime victimizations
• police policies

Notes

In 1965, William Friedkin's police documentary The Thin Blue Line popularized the notion that the police stood between members of the law-abiding public and the criminal element, although Los Angeles Police Department's Chief William Parker is generally credited with originating the phase (Peak, 2012).

The presence of officers of color does not guarantee that racist practices will disappear, as shown by the experiences of Black officers (Alex, 1969; Bolton & Feagin, 2004; Leinen, 1984).

Mission creep is a term that has been used to describe how the involvement of the United States in Vietnam went from giving advice to the South Vietnamese government to, after the Bay of Tonkin incident, a full-scale military engagement with the nation of North Vietnam (Karnow, 1997; see too Taw & Peters, 1995). Mission creep refers to a situation in which a clearly defined goal is achieved or morphs into something not specifically intended at the outset, often with disastrous consequences. Similar concerns are expressed contemporarily about the U.S. military's involvement in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East (see, e.g., Etzioni, 2012). Even U.S. domestic policing agencies have been accused of mission creep, especially with the creation of fusion centers that essentially merge the war on terror with the war on crime (Monahan, 2009).

Recall that rape was not included in this analysis.

We thank Meda Chesney-Lind for suggesting this explanation.