Indigenous Female Offenders Analysis

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Representations of Gender and Race Among White Female Offenders in Comparison to Indigenous Female Offenders
Power consistently strives to fix meaning to support their agenda. The process of criminalization is flawed because power relations intertwined with representations of the media can manipulate the topic at hand. Often, white, female offenders are safeguarded in the media due to their racial and gender identity. Sociologist Danielle Dirks examines this idea in her research, which suggests “women are viewed as victims of circumstance deserving of empathy and redemption rather than as criminals” (Dirks, Heldman, & Zack, 2015, p. 131). Empathizing with the criminal is common among white female offenders. Dirks highlighted in her research …show more content…

Furthermore, The Supreme Court refused to consider her crime in the context of the domestic violence, and failed to include her mental illness. No subsequent news articles were reported in major newspapers about Gladue’s case. The Supreme court refused for another sentencing hearing because it was a "serious crime of violence." While completely disregarding her Aboriginal status, they refused to also consider she was a domestic violence victim. The continued systemic discrimination against Aboriginal women in the Canadian justice system is partly because women offenders are viewed as immoral, deviant people. Yasmin Jiwani explains that the outcome of Gladue’s case is “contingent on how that story has been told before”. Wettlaufer has been dubbed one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers, this is considered an “extraordinary event” which fulfilled the “criteria of newsworthiness”. However, Gladue was not viewed as extraordinary criminal because “the frame of culpability governs Aboriginal women’s bodies in the news media” (Jiwani, 2011). Since Wettlaufer was a white woman, she is protected in the public space while Gladue’s mental illness was hardly …show more content…

Rimke Heidi discusses in “The Pathological Approach to Crime” that theories of crime and criminality emerge from the classical criminological theories, beginning during 17th and 18th centuries, specifically tackling popular misconceptions about crime and criminality in the 21st century. When the investigation began, all four articles examined in this paper followed a legal positivist approach to crime. Positivist criminology refers the idea that assumptions of criminality is inherent to the individual, and can be measured though the “biological, physiological and psychological” makeup of an individual (Heidi, 2011, p. 80). This was seen when Elizabeth Wettlaufer had just been charged, the Star came out with an article that questioned the credibility of the investigation because it seemed “unlike her” to have committed the crime. White skin is desirable in society and often news reports display patterns of symbolic boundaries that preserve power and meaning associated with whiteness. Rimke Heidi would suggest that Wettlaufer’s criminality was represented as inherently defective individuals suffering from pathology. To understand criminal behaviour, “biological and/or psychological factors and attributes are isolated and measured” (Heidi, 2011, p. 80). For example, Toronto Star reported that “the courts will have to closely

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