New government female offender strategy

[FeminismandWomensFights]

This seems in principle a good policy- all about keeping prison as a last resort for women and being evidence-based around dealing with women’s offending.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/female-offender-strategy

This is presumably because we know the risk to society is typically lower from female-pattern offending compared to male-pattern offending.

But... if anyone can self ID as female... then presumably it’s no longer safe to assume that statistical differences about offending between sexes are accurate any more?

So the public could be put at risk by these policies of relative leniency for women offenders. Because these will be applied to what is actually Male-pattern-offending (ie crime perpetrated by those who don’t identify as male)

Women who might be at risk of offending etc are then also less likely to be targeted appropriately by these women-focused prevention initiatives.

Nor will women criminals be able to benefit from this new prison ‘as a last resort’ type of policy. Because with self-ID, the evidence will soon no longer show that ‘women’ could or should benefit from this type of policy. It won’t be evidenced to be safe to make those assumptions any more.

The only logical and safe action for the public will be to handle women’s crime in the same way that we currently do with male-pattern offending.

Which is personally unjust to the women who commit crime. Taxpayers will also be unnecessarily funding women in prison and trying to put back together (via social support) the impact on their children of having a mum in prison etc.

The impact of self ID on statistics is going to have a vast amount of unintended and very vulnerable casualties.

I agree, but with women and children bearing the brunt of the problems that will inevitably result, nobody will care.

I feel like there needs to be a government statement about how they are going to be handling the issues of self ID and of mantaining reliable government statistics. This type of issue must be cropping up in so many areas- health, education, as well as justice.

I agree and (again) this is something that the government has failed to recognise in an impact assessment of the GRA proposals.

More than half the women in prison (53%) have been victims themselves of sexual, emotional and physical abuse by the men in their lives, from childhood. They are more likely to be the primary carer for children, and the children are more likely to suffer significantly from the term of imprisonment.

According to the Prison Reform Trust, they need to have community centres based around Women's services, to enable them to deal with the underlying causes of offending.

They differ in all respects from men who identify as feminine.

Nor will women criminals be able to benefit from this new prison ‘as a last resort’ type of policy. Because with self-ID, the evidence will soon no longer show that ‘women’ could or should benefit from this type of policy. It won’t be evidenced to be safe to make those assumptions any more.

Agree, sadly. Always women bearing the brunt of what males do.