A Comparison of Women’s Motivations to Enter the Police Profession in the Caribbean

• Author: Wendell C. Wallace,Malisa Neptune-Figaro
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15570851211058789
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Feminist Criminology

2022, Vol. 17(5) 567–586

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851211058789

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A Comparison of Women’s

Motivations to Enter the

Police Profession in the

Caribbean

Wendell C. Wallace

1

, and Malisa Neptune-Figaro

1

Abstract

Absent from the criminological literature on policing in the Caribbean are studies on

female’s motivations to become police off‌icers, studies using female police recruits and

studies using a comparative approach. As a result of this gap, data were gathered from

female police recruits in Jamaica (N= 37) and Trinidad and Tobago (N= 60) in July 2017

via a standardised, self-administered questionnaire in order to determine their mo-

tivations for entry into policing. The main motivation for female’s entry into policing in

both jurisdictions was job security. Revenge and the desire for power and authority

were the least cited motivations for entry into the police profession in both juris-

dictions. The importance of females as police off‌icers, study limitations and directions

for future research are also discussed.

Keywords

females, police recruits, motivations, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago

Introduction

Policing emergedin the 19th century as a male only occupation(Carrington et al., 2019).

Therefore, policing is often held out as a male-dominated f‌ield, one of the most

1

The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

Corresponding Author:

Wendell C. Wallace, Department of BehaviouralSciences, The University of the West Indies at St Augustine,

Room 7, Carmody Road, Behavioural Sciences Building, St Augustine 868, Trinidad and Tobago.

Email: Wendell.Wallace@sta.uwi.edu

masculinised occupations of the world (Chan & Ho, 2013;Chen, 2015;Diaz & Nuño,

2021;Mukherjee, 2018;Randhawa & Narang, 2013;Veldman et al., 2017)aswellasa

male preserve (Archbold& Schulz, 2012;Punnoose, 2013). The maleness of policing is

highlighted in research f‌indings by Kringen (2014) and Status of Women (2014) which

identif‌ied thatglobally, women represent about 13% of all individuals in policing and by

Brown et al. (2020) and Diaz and Nuño (2021) who cogitate that females continue to be

underrepresented in policing. The result of this ‘hegemonic masculinity’in policing

(Deans, 2015;Shelley et al., 2011) is that there is a preponderance of malesover females

in police services globally (Aquino, 2014).

Despite its inherent maleness, policing as a profession has changed over time and

increasingly females are joining police departments in many jurisdictionsas police work

is now viewed as a desirable career for them (Horne, 2006). As more and more females

are entering the police profession (Christie, 1996;Coleman et al., 2018), the previously

entrenched ‘hegemonic masculinity’(a societal pattern in which stereotypically male

traits are idealized and where men maintaindominant social roles over women–Conn ell

& Messerschmidt , 2005) is gradually being whittled away and ‘slowly becoming a

symbol of the past’(Deans,2015, p. 45). Instructively, hegemonic masculinity is bad for

policing due to gender inequality (Jewkes et al., 2015) and the fear ass ociated with

reporting victimization by femalevictims (Tuomey & Jolly, 2009). With the pro positions

of Deans (2015) and Horne (2006) in mind, it is important to bothgarner and illuminate

the experiences of females as police off‌icers as all too often their voices are lost in

narratives about policing. In addition, given the increase in the number of females being

employed in the policeprofession (Christie, 1996), it is appropriate to enquire about their

rationales for becoming police off‌icers.

Globally, there is an abundance of research on females in policing (see Chen, 2015;

Chu, 2018;Chu & Abdulla, 2014;Guajardo, 2016;Khanikar, 2016;Lancaster-Ellis,

2013;National Institute of Justice, 2019;Prenzler & Sinclair, 2013;Shelley et al.,

2011). However, a great majority of the existing research on females in police de-

partments focuses on female police off‌icers as tokens in policing, marginalization by

male peers and sexual harassment of policewomen. Concomitantly, there is a paucity of

research on factors leading to female’s interest in the police profession (Vermeer et al.,

2020;White et al., 2010). Even rarer are (1) cross-national, (2) cross-cultural com-

parative studies on women in policing (Millie & Hirschler, 2018), (3) comparative

research on female’s motivations to enter policing and (4) limited studies focussing on

police recruits (see Chan, 2001;Charman, 2017 as exceptions).

The authors of this article argue that there is a visible absence of data on female

motivations for pursuing careers as police off‌icers in the Caribbean (see Flavin &

Bennett, 2001;Lancaster-Ellis, 2013 for support) and submit that this absence is an

egregious omission as well as an existing lacuna in the literature on policing in the

Caribbean. As a result of this lacuna, the authors sought to counterbalance the mono-

sexual tradition of academic thought by introducing information on policewomen and

their motivations to enter the police profession in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

This was achieved through investigating and comparing the motivations of female

568 Feminist Criminology 17(5)