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The primary focus of this chapter is the relationship between group interests and the legislative policy process in Pennsylvania. In striking similarity to the situation in Congress, criminal justice agencies and a few prolific groups representing professional and single-issue citizen interests generally dominate. The citizen groups that appear are ones that specialize in the crime issue du jour—guns, sex offenses, crimes against children, or the death penalty. The share of hearings that includes citizen groups has increased, but a closer examination reveals that this is due to a dramatic increase in single-issue groups and a decline in groups with more diffuse interests. This picture of legislative crime hearings is confirmed by extensive interviews with state legislators, whose contact with citizen organizations is limited to a handful of high-profile, single-issue, and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and several statewide women's organizations. The ubiquity of prosecutors, law enforcement, and single-issue groups focused on women, children, and civil liberties leaves a glaring hole in policy debates about crime: the omission of the interests of the poor and urban minorities, many of whom face serious crime on a regular basis. This chapter also discusses the limitations of the American Civil Liberties Union as a group representing the broad interests of citizens at risk of crime and violence.

The gender ideology of separate spheres that emerged in nineteenth-century America prescribed public roles for men and private roles for women while, at the same time, asking clergy and women to serve together as moral guardians of the republic. The cultural no-man’s land they occupied proved to be dangerous territory. Four highly publicized trials reveal nineteenth-century Americans’ fascination and horror with clerical sexual misconduct and crimes against women: the 1832 murder trial of New England Methodist minister Ephraim Avery; the 1844 presentment for moral “impurities” of the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Onderdonk; the 1857 criminal adultery trial of Boston pastor Isaac Kalloch; and the 1875 church hearing and civil trial for adultery of the renowned preacher, Henry Ward Beecher. The verbal and graphic images generated in each of these trials tapped deep cultural anxieties, showing clergy and women regularly transgressing the too permeable boundaries of separate spheres and calling into question their roles as moral guardians and the utility of gender ideals in regulating social and sexual behavior.

This chapter talks about crime against women and juveniles, which have taken different forms with the changing socio-economic scenario in Delhi. The chapter lists the broad categories for classifying such types of crimes. Some of the categories are discussed in the following sections. The first is on dowry deaths, where newlywed girls are either murdered or subjected to situations that would ultimately push them to commit suicide. The second is on rape, where an analysis of case studies of rape cases that were registered in Delhi is provided. The third is on kidnapping/abduction of women and girls, for the main purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. The case study on this type of crime is based on interviews of the women and girls who were rescued from brothels. A quick rundown of the rescue operations for sex trafficking is presented. A discussion of juveniles is included.

This chapter examines the novelties in international humanitarian law of the 1990s regarding crimes against women in armed conflicts and argues that they can be explained by two key factors. The first factor is the judicial activism of the ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, rather uncommon for the criminal law area. The second factor is the very organized background work of the feminist ‘interpretative community’ against the gender bias in international law. The main conclusion is that although some challenges remain to be addressed, feminist legal discourse has finally started to win the semantic and conceptual ‘war’ against the most serious wording and ontological gaps in international humanitarian law that have existed since the aftermath of World War II, with the creation of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, and the subsequent Geneva Regime of 1949.