Sex violence crime Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Sex violence crime - Essay Example This will affect the way in which criminality is ascribed, the influences of gender creating differences in the way in which the system will treat one gender in compared to another. When someone defies their gender, primarily a woman, and commits a crime that is outside of how her gender is defined, it sets society on a rampage. Even more so, if she does not publicly display enough emotion about a traumatic event in her life she can be condemned for the crime at the center of the event without the evidence supporting this eventuality. 2. Criminality and stereotypes Women have always been seen as the more passive sex, their role within society dominated by their inability to gain the physical strength that men had the capacity to gain. In the nineteenth century, especially, women from the perspectives of the Victorian aesthetics were vulnerable and needed to be taken care of by men. There were two spheres of influence that divided the sexes: men belonged in the public sphere where wom en belonged in the domestic sphere. The passive nature of a woman meant that she was incapable of making adult decisions (Davidson and Laydor 1994). Therefore, as the twentieth century began to emerge and the rise of feminism began to change that point of view, the foundational idea of how women were framed remained based upon the connotation of innocence and demure passivity that had previously been the standard. The way in which men and women interact, even when it concerns violent behaviours, is also framed by social premises that stereotype and define interaction. According to Elder (1991), stereotypes about gender are also bound up in stereotypes about race, thus creating not only a disharmony of gender relations, but of race relations. The pervasive idea of the black male aggressor against the white female victim creates an idea that there is a male archetype that represents violence with a female archetype which represents victim. The concept of the ‘other’ in wh ich inhuman attributes are connoted upon the genders in relationship to their gender can be seen in most societies. Elder (1991) goes on to discuss that in the Australian society there is the same type of connotation upon the Asian male, which puts him within the framework of the ’other’, not understood and dehumanized. Asian men are seen as a threat to the social grouping of white females through drugs and sexuality, a departure from the similar threat seen in the United States and Britain of the black male, although the black male represents a threat more often associated with violence (Elder 1991). Therefore, it can be shown that gender relationships are also complicated by race relationships, the individual parts of the whole complicated by the belief in stereotypes that ’define’ social positions within society. The objectification of men, women, and race all provide for definitions that create foundations for how society will view an event that takes place. Under this scenario, when a man commits a violent crime against a woman, it will be viewed, first on the basis of gender, and then on the basis of race. A white woman who is beaten by a white man will be viewed with slightly less threat than a white woman that is beaten by a black man. Where the stereotypes impact the public view on an event, the way in which it is treated through publicity, trial, and in punishment