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When women in foreign countries are sexually abused or sexually exploited by government employees, it is a human rights violation (e.g., Fitzgerald, 1992), but when the same thing happens in the United States, it is a "prison sex scandal" (e.g., Meyer, 1992) (excerpt from Baro, 1997).
Understanding of the role of victimization and traumatization in women's lives has recently begun to inform the growing body of knowledge on women's offending (Arnold, 1995; Faith, 1993). Examining the life histories of incarcerated women reveals an extensive and pervasive array of physical, emotional, and sexual abuses (Browne, Miller, & Maguin, 1999; Girshick, 1999; Lake, 1993; Owen & Bloom, 1995; Singer, Bussey, Song, & Lunghofer, 1995). Many of these women have experienced at least one form of sexual victimization in their lifetimes, many of them before the age of 18 (Bloom, Chesney, & Owen, 1994; Heney, 1990). For women with previous histories of abuse, prison life is apt to simulate the abuse dynamics already established in these women's lives, thus perpetuating women's further revictimization and retraumatization while serving time. Women's experiences of revictimization and retraumatization need to be addressed by prison staff, policy, procedure, and programming. A feminist framework may offer a lens by which to view these experiences and offer insight for change.
Arnold (1995) suggests that the interrelated processes that govern women's victimization and criminalization begin with abuse-including physical, sexual, economic, and racial. Through a process of "structural dislocation," institutional forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, and classism aid in the removal of girls and women from primary socializing agents such as families and schools. Facing lives filled with "poverty, illiteracy, substance abuse, mental illness, childhood sexual abuse, and an intricate web of life-threatening physical, psychological, racial, and social problems," many of these women's experiences mark their advent into the criminal justice system (Johnson, 2002, p. 103).
Feminist criminology has moved beyond examining the crimes of women, and has begun to examine the broader links that may explain women's offending. For example, a study by Widom (1989) found that abused girls were more likely than girls without histories of abuse to become criminals or delinquents. Girls who had been sexually abused as children also have an increased risk for adult arrest for prostitution (Widom &...