NCJ Number
176188
Date Published
1996
Length
194 pages
Annotation
This volume tells the stories of battered black female inmates of the Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York City, and uses the concept of gender entrapment to examine the social conditions that make these women structurally and situationally unable to meet the competing and sometimes contradictory demands of contemporary social life.
Abstract
The author notes that the lives of these women are stigmatized and marginalized to an extreme. The discussion uses the concept of gender to describe the socially constructed process whereby black women who are vulnerable to men's violence in their intimate relationships are penalized for behaviors that are logical extensions of the racialized gender identities, their culturally expected gender roles, and the violence in their intimate relationships. Thus, the gender entrapment theory helps explain how some women who participate in illegal activities do so in response to violence, the threat of violence, or coercion by their male partners. The concept and the stories also suggest how some women's efforts to survive are not only discounted or invisible, but are also increasingly criminalized in contemporary society. The analysis concludes that better understanding of the effects of violence, marginalization, racism, and culturally constructed gender roles needs to lead to social change to provide many more options for black women so that fewer will be battered and incarcerated due to gender entrapment. Chapter notes, index, and 149 references