WHAT ABOUT THE WOMEN?

 

A FEMINIST COMMENTARY ON CRIME INSIDE PUBLIC HOUSING UNITS*

By

 

Walter S. DeKeseredy

Ontario Institute of Technology

Faculty of Social Science

Oshawa, Ontario

Canada L1H 7K4

Walter.DeKeseredy@uoit.ca

 

Claire M. Renzetti

Dept. of Sociology

St. Joseph’s University

Philadelphia, PA

19131

(610) 660-1680

crenzeti@sju.edu

 

*The authors would like to thank Shahid Alvi, Stephen Muzzatti, Martin D. Schwartz, and Thomas Vander Ven for their comments and criticisms. Please direct all correspondence to Walter DeKeseredy.

 

          In a recent article, Ireland and colleagues (2003, p. 5) correctly point out that, “valid scientific knowledge about the extent of crime among public housing residents is actually extremely limited.” In fact, to date, most of the information on violent and other offenses occurring in North American public housing communities is produced by journalists who portray crimes committed by and against those who live there as little more than “aberrations in an otherwise well-functioning system” (Reiman, 2001, p. 173).  Ireland et al.’s (2003) work is an important contribution to refining our understanding of crime in public housing because it provides rich data that challenge myths and stereotypes about the criminogenic consequences of being isolated in “cities-within-cities” (Venkatesh, 2000). For example, their Rochester, New York self-report data show that adolescent public housing residents are not at higher risk of committing violent crimes than members of the same age group not living in public housing.

          Based on Ireland et al.’s (2003) research, it appears that, contrary to popular belief, violence is not a “ghetto-specific” crime in Rochester (Wilson, 1996). However, are all types of violent crime committed by adolescents equally distributed in that city? What would Ireland et al.’s data look like if violence against women items were added to their interview schedule? Surprisingly, these questions were not raised in several essays written in reaction to Ireland et al. (see Lab, 2003; Popkin, 2003; Venkatesh, 2003). But these are not trivial questions, given that 90% of the more than 1.27 million public housing households in the U.S. are headed by women (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000). Of course, one study cannot address every social problem, and our intent here is not to attack or diminish the important scholarly contributions made by Ireland et al. (2003). Rather, our main objective is to refocus empirical, theoretical and political attention on what happens to women inside public housing units, an issue that has thus far received selective inattention in the extant scientific literature on crime in these social settings.

PRIVATE CRIME IN PUBLIC HOUSING

          Less than a handful of studies have examined male-to-female violence against women in North American public housing, but they show that the extent of this harm is much higher than that found in the general population. For example, conducted in six public housing estates located in an Eastern Ontario city, DeKeseredy et al.’s (1999) Quality of Neighborhood Life Survey (QNLS) uncovered an incidence rate (events that occurred in a one-year period) of 19.3% using a modified rendition of Straus et al.’s (1996) revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS-2). Certainly, this figure is markedly higher than those gleaned by the majority of North American representative sample surveys that used a similar measure, including Tjaden and Thoennes’ (1998) National Violence Against Women Survey (1.9%) and Statistics Canada’s (1993) national Violence Against Women Survey (3%). Still, the QNLS rate is much lower than that generated by Renzetti and Maier’s (2002) study of 36 female residents of public or Section 8 housing in Camden, New Jersey. In that study, 33 percent of the women were victimized during the year before being interviewed, and 50 percent were assaulted by a husband/ex-husband, boyfriend/ex-boyfriend, or an acquaintance (e.g., a friend, a neighbor).