Abstract
Studies on female prisoners are limited in Africa. To the best of my knowledge, only one qualitative study was conducted in Uganda way back in 1995. The present study, therefore, fills the literature gap by extending research onto 30 female murderers in Uganda. By utilizing the feminist pathway perspective and the framework of sociological imagination by C. Wright Mills (1959), this study locates women’s victimization experience in the broader socio-economic, cultural and political contexts of Uganda. This sociological approach to studying female crime is important in showing the structural forces that shaped women’s victimization experience. The study attempts to answer four questions; (1) What forms of victimization did women experience before imprisonment?; (2) What circumstances shaped women’s victimization experience?; (3) How did women negotiate the victimization experience?; and (4) To what extent does victimization explain women’s pathway to offending and imprisonment? In a country like Uganda that is highly patriarchal, this topic is important not only for empowering women to tell their stories but, also, for generating knowledge to inform policy and practice. The patriarchal values in Uganda socialize women to be submissive to men. Women who murder may, therefore, find themselves in an isolated and helpless state because of violating both the patriarchal values and the formal law. This is why I chose a study that intends to bring out unique stories of women murderers. Purposive sampling was used to select the study participants from one female prison while data were collected using semi-structured interviews. Each participant was interviewed, at least, three times. Semi-structured interviews were used to allow the researcher to gain deeper understanding of the phenomenon under study and to avoid objectifying the research participants. Data were analyzed using NVivo software. After transporting the documented notes to the software, open coding was done, and the software created nodes. Themes were finally generated from the specific categories in the transcribed data.From the perspective of women, the forms of victimization presented include; childhood (physical, sexual, psychological and witnessing violence), intimate partner violence victimization (IPV) (physical, sexual, psychological, economic violence and controlling behavior) and those experienced during police arrests and court hearings (physical and psychological). Findings from the in-depth phenomenological interviews show that twenty-four out of thirty women involved in this study experienced victimization. Of these, twelve reported childhood victimization, twenty-one reported IPV while seventeen reported victimization during arrests and in court sessions. The circumstances that shaped women’s victimization and the way they negotiated the experience were related to the socio-economic, cultural, and institutional factors in the social structure of Uganda. Women reported killing due to different reasons such as self-defense, marital abandonment, protecting marriages and children, and ending of abusive situations. At the time of killing, nineteen women reported having experienced a long-time span IPV experience ranging between 12 and 35 years. In many respects, the findings of this study are in line with the western feminist pathway perspective on the relationship between victimization and adult female offending. The findings also support the framework of sociological imagination in terms of showing wider social forces that shaped women’s victimization experience and constrained their ability to escape victimization. However, the findings contradict the feminist pathway perspective literature concerning the impact of childhood victimization on adult female offending through adolescent risky and deviant behaviors. This is because of the fact that all women in this study were adult-onset offenders, married at the time of killing, and with no criminal and imprisonment history much as twelve of them were victims of multiple forms of childhood victimization. However, there are cultural and context-specific forces such as forced marriage and bride price that shaped women’s victimization experience as well. These forces are not reported in the western literature that employs sociological imagination to understand female crime. The findings from this study, therefore, underscore the importance of conducting cultural and context-specific studies. The study makes theoretical contributions to feminist pathway perspective and sociological imagination. It also contributes knowledge to the general literature on female crime and is as such important for policy making and practice in Uganda.
| Date of Award | 26 Aug 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Wing Hong CHUI (Supervisor) |