Russian Journal of Economics and Law (Jun 2025)
Criminal anthropology of mariticide in Russia. Foreword to the article by P.N. Tarnovskaya “Female criminality in connection with early marriages”
Abstract
Objective: to provide a general overview of the content of P.N. Tarnovskaya’s article “Female criminality in connection with early marriages”, to determine its place in its author’s heritage and its scientific value for modern criminology.Methods: the general scientific method of dialectical cognition, comparison, as well as the formal logical method (deduction, induction, definition and division of concepts).Results: having analyzed the content of P.N. Tarnovskaya’s article, the author determined its significance as the initial stage of forming her anthropological concept in the study of female murderers. The author specified the sections of P.N. Tarnovskaya’s monograph “Women-murderers” (1902), which use the results of the research described in the article under study. The author refuted the opinion, previously prevailing in Russian criminology, that anthropological research by P.N. Tarnovskaya was supposed to use biological means to prevent crime. On the contrary, in this work Tarnovskaya recommended changing the social environment to curb female criminality (mariticide), namely, abandoning the widespread early marriages of adolescent women before the end of puberty.Scientific novelty: for the first time, the author gives a criminological assessment of P.N. Tarnovskaya’s article “Female criminality in connection with early marriages” and indicates its links with her subsequent works.Practical significance: the results obtained make it possible to change the perception of research by P.N. Tarnovskaya’s as one of the founders of world criminological science. In her concept of crime prevention, the impact on general social factors on female criminality was considered fundamental for the prevention of women’s deviant behavior.
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