Female offenders

This paper specifies the scale and nature of the challenge for women's forensic services. It reviews recent information on patterns of female offending and mental ill health in relevant populations. It discusses both the origins of current secure services for women and the recent proposals of alterations to them. This is in light both of a better clinical understanding of mentally disordered female offenders and changing perceptions of their security needs. Mentally disordered female offenders are now more widely recognised to have been vulnerable to abuse in childhood. Within the last twenty years, there has been a developing view that women are rarely in need of high secure hospital services, but there continues to be a lack of consensus about how and where their needs would best be met.