CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Bowman, Sarah Margaret |
|---|---|
| Title | Feminizing Terror: Gender Bias in U.S. Federal Sentencing for Terrorist Activity |
| Summary | There has been scarce research examining the extent to which extralegal factors influence sentencing outcomes in terrorism-related cases. This lack of inquiry is particularly concerning for a country like the U.S. which uses its criminal justice system as the cornerstone of its counter-terrorism policy, when considering research pointing to a trend of unexplained sentencing disparities between male and female defendants convicted of the same criminal offenses. As such, this study considers two questions: First, does the general U.S. pattern of preferential (i.e., more lenient) treatment of females exist in terrorism cases. This study, the first to examine the question, concludes that there is a gender-based disparity in terrorism cases. Second, the study uses U.S. sentencing data to examine possible reasons for the observed disparity. In particular, the study considers the applicability of two hypotheses: The liberation hypothesis which suggests sentencing disparities decrease between demographic groups in terrorism cases, and the paternalism hypothesis which posit gender will have a significant influence on sentencing outcomes in terrorism-related to cases. This thesis seeks to test these two theories by analyzing criminal sentencing data from terrorism-related cases in the United States from the period 1999-2017. |
| Supervisor | Sitter, Nick |
| Department | School of Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/bowman_sarah.pdf |
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