title: Crime, prostitution, drugs, and malingered insanity: female offenders' resistant strategies to abuse and domination.
abstract: Mizrahi female offenders have been described as passive victims propelled into crime, prostitution, and drug abuse as a result of traumatic childhood and life course experiences. This qualitative study adopts a postmodern critical orientation and Foucault's bottom-up microsocial analysis of power to examine the trajectories of resistance of 8 female offenders who break the silence to tell their life story. Analysis of narratives, informal conversations, and more focused, in-depth interviews with these women allow the deconstruction of the stereotype of the passive and helpless female offender. Using the sensitizing concepts of control, agency, and resistant efforts and letting the data speak, this research reconstructs female offending as a hidden script of resistance against intolerable socioeconomic deprivation and extreme forms of abuse.
authors.affiliation: Department of Criminology, Bar-Ilan University, Western Galilee Campus, Acre, Israel. geigerb@netvision.net.il
authors.forename: Brenda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Geiger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003415:Crime / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008306:Malingering / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology; D016728:Self-Injurious Behavior / Q000453:epidemiology; D011477:Sex Work / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012930:Social Dominance; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology*