A group of women met Monday to discuss how females have been historically ignored and misrepresented in criminal research.
Merry Morash, an MSU criminal justice professor, recently completed a textbook entitled "Gender, Crime, and Justice: Advances in Understanding."
Morash said she wanted to create the book to provide a more accurate depiction of women in relation to criminal activity.
She said many of the past crimes committed by females have either been ignored or blamed on the fact that they were acting outside what was socially acceptable behavior for a woman.
"One of the most important findings very early on was that adolescent girls who are sexually abused frequently run away," she said.
Morash added when the women run away their coping mechanism is to prostitute, steal and take drugs to survive on the streets and to dull the pain.
"In essence, what happens to those girls is they are taken to court and then sent back home, or sent to an institution and then sent home. They are the ones criminalized, which doesn't make any sense."
Morash said other studies went as far as to say domestic violence against females was the fault of the female.
"In the 70s there were Freudian explanations," she said. "They talked about how women who were beaten by their husbands were masochistic.
"The authors explained that women's victimization was a result of their own masochism and that they would do things for their husbands to beat them up."
Gender stereotypes about how a woman should behave also propelled Morash to challenge prior research that suggested women precipitated rapes against themselves.
"This theory embodied many of the thinking patterns of men who do rape - the ideas that women were asking for it, that they didn't resist strongly enough, that they were provocative, or that they changed their minds too late," she said.
But the professor said she hopes to correct such misconceptions with her upcoming book, which will be available in the spring by Sage Publications.
Ana Williams, a Spanish and interdisciplinary studies in social science senior, said comparing reactions to male and female crimes was striking because they were received so differently.
"Males commit crimes and they're glorified by their friends," she said. "For women it's the opposite a lot of the times. She's looked down upon - it's not socially accepted for her to commit the same crime."
Sociology doctoral student and organizer of the event, Julie Hartman, said the feminist movement has a long way to go in terms of shifting people's opinions.
