Definition
Double deviance is the feminist-criminological observation that women who break the criminal law are punished twice: once for the offence itself, and again for violating the gendered expectations of femininity, motherhood, or sexual propriety that the wider culture attaches to them. The second punishment may be informal — stigma, family rejection, loss of custody — or institutional, in the form of heavier sentences for women who do not conform to the role of a contrite, domestic, dependent offender.
The idea developed across Frances Heidensohn's Women and Crime (1985), Pat Carlen's work on women's imprisonment, and Carol Smart's Women, Crime and Criminology (1976). It complements the older chivalry hypothesis (that courts treat women leniently) by showing that leniency, when it appears, is conditional on performing femininity correctly, and is withdrawn from women whose offending or biography breaches that script.
Why it matters
How it works
Analysts use the concept to read court transcripts, sentencing remarks, and prison regimes for the two layers of judgement. The offence is processed by the formal law; the femininity is processed by judges, probation officers, the press, and the woman's own community. A first-time shoplifter who is a married mother in stable housing may receive a caution; a homeless drug-user with children removed from her care may not, even on identical charges.
The same logic extends to victims: women who report sexual violence are scrutinised for whether they behaved respectably, which depresses reporting and conviction rates. The limit of the concept is that it can homogenise "women" and overlook how race, class, and sexuality compound the second judgement — intersectional work from the 1990s onward has refined the model to address that gap.