A Rejoinder: Only a Boys’ Game
| Date | 01 December 1995 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00048658950280S106 |
| Published date | 01 December 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
A
Rejoinder:
Only
a
Boys’ Game
Elizabeth
A
Stanko’
In his comment, Professor Sherman casts me as intolerant of alternative forms
of criminology. Any seasoned feminist (and we are varied and different)
working within criminology has experienced (and may indeed continue to
experience) intolerance in
so
many forms; I can hardly imagine that my
impatience with Sherman’s work could be considered intolerance to
criminology. Can someone such
as
Sherman really cast himself as the
oppositional Galileo? If
so,
those of us
his
mainstream criminology has tried
to marginalise for over twenty years must be the Salem witches. Enough said.
My main worry in the debate about the police and domestic violence is that
all too often diversity of response is sacrificed to law and order politics,
especially within the
US
(see eg the recent commentary on republican
criminology and victim advocacy in
Law
&
Society Review
(Munger ed
1994).
In spite of the masculinist, patronising and condescending style of Sherman’s
comment, he illustrates one important point. He asserts that ‘one of the
clearest methods scientists can use to test hypotheses about the causation of
human behaviour’ is a randomised, controlled trial. What were we able to
predict from these controlled experiments? Did we learn about or interrogate
the ‘causation’ of domestic violence? Why was this irrelevant to the study?
Did we learn about the ‘causation’ of police decision-making? Why was
police discretion not problematised? Did we learn about the processes of
alleviating and supporting those confronting violence from known others? If
policing had had a contradictory effect on the actions of different abusers in
different circumstances, how did women themselves compensate for the
inability of the criminal justice system to intervene on behalf of their safety?
The tragedy of the controlled experiments on which Sherman touts his
expertise to predict ‘human behaviour’ is how little those working with
domestic violence from ‘the front line’ can learn from his work. Perhaps his
work on the Canberra Re-Integrative Shaming Experiment (RISE) will
provide to those working with young offenders, the qualitative, contextual and
process information so lacking from the policing experiments.
Give me diversity any day, as long
as
it at least values different women’s
voices and experiences in its considerations. And when the complex and
creative strategies women use to escape men’s violence become the core
components of research on the prevention and elimination
of
violence against
women, and
are
funded to the same levels
as
those
of
the deterrence studies,
hopefully such lessons about, and support for, diversity would arise. I look
forward to the day variety actually prevails, and is properly funded, in
criminology.
-~
*
Reader in Criminology, Bmnel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex
UB8
3PH, UK.
52
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