Episode 24: July 7, 2026 | Cornered: Deborah Anthony on Gender and the Legal System

Transcript

00:00:01 Oh, you're an attorney?

00:00:02 I have a friend who...

00:00:03 I've been meaning to update my will, but I just bought a new house…

00:00:06 I want to start a business…

00:00:08 My brother was fired…

00:00:09 Hey, my friend got divorced a while back.

00:00:12 I just don't understand how her ex-...

00:00:14 You've been there.

00:00:15 At a social function, meeting friends of friends.

00:00:18 Word gets out that you're an attorney and suddenly your night is filled with partygoers asking you quote-unquote simple legal questions.

00:00:25 The questions are seldom in your area.

00:00:27 Some of the stuff you haven't thought about since law school.

00:00:30 You're being cornered out of court.

00:00:33 In the Cornered Out of Court podcast from IICLE, you'll hear from fellow attorneys about the questions they get and the responses they give to escape being cornered.

00:00:46 A content warning for listeners.

00:00:48 This episode discusses domestic violence involving children.

00:00:51 Please be advised.

00:00:53 In People v.

00:00:53 Collins, the Supreme Court of California overturned a second-degree murder conviction based on a failure to protect theory.

00:01:00 Dr.

00:01:01 Deborah Anthony, professor of legal studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, wrote the 2022 article the court cited in its opinion.

00:01:09 That article, titled “The Law of Motherhood in the Gender-Dependent Application of Criminal Responsibility for Failing to Protect Children,” is part of Dr.

00:01:19 Anthony's ongoing research into gender and the legal system.

00:01:23 Hello, my name is Deborah Anthony.

00:01:25 I am a professor of legal studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield.

00:01:30 I'm also a licensed attorney.

00:01:33 I practiced for a few years in Minnesota before jumping into my teaching career, and I still do some pro bono work as well.

00:01:42 What prompted you to begin researching the charge of criminal failure to protect children?

00:01:48 The background of this research is

00:01:52 Very interesting, in my opinion.

00:01:54 It was prompted by some increasing awareness on my part of criminal prosecutions of mothers for abuse that was perpetrated against their children by their male partner.

00:02:07 This was percolating in the back of my mind when I had a student in one of my classes who, in introducing herself, went into quite a bit of detail about her own personal experience with this.

00:02:22 where she had been working temporarily out of state.

00:02:27 And while she was gone, her partner murdered her eight-year-old son.

00:02:32 And when she returned to Illinois, which of course she did immediately upon hearing what had happened, she was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in her son's death.

00:02:42 And she was convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison for the murder of her son.

00:02:48 So she was not charged with neglect,

00:02:51 or with accessory.

00:02:53 She was charged as the principal actor, just as her partner was.

00:02:57 He also was convicted.

00:02:59 But it was really remarkable to me that there was no contention that she actually had perpetrated the abuse or had been responsible for the murder directly, but that somehow she was criminally responsible for leaving her son

00:03:16 with her partner.

00:03:17 So this was really the catalyst for me getting into this research more broadly, and I was curious if this is happening in Illinois, these were not the famous news cases that I had been reading about, then is it happening all over the place?

00:03:35 And to what extent is this phenomenon a thing in the criminal system?

00:03:41 Are people aware of it?

00:03:42 And if it's happening with mothers, is it also happening with fathers?

00:03:47 And so that's when I started diving into this idea of criminal failure to protect your children.

00:03:55 which in one way or another is a criminal offense in every state.

00:03:59 In Illinois, we do have a crime of child abuse and neglect, but oftentimes in this state, people are prosecuted under accountability theory, which is not specific to children, right?

00:04:15 It's more of accessory to any type of crime, and that was in fact my students'

00:04:20 charge as well under accountability theory.

00:04:23 And so that's often the case in various states.

00:04:26 So sometimes it's failure to protect and sometimes it's accountability theory or the analogous provision in the state's law.

00:04:33 And what I found was really striking that over 95% of the time it is mothers who are prosecuted for this crime.

00:04:44 I couldn't find more than, I think, two cases.

00:04:50 out of hundreds of cases where the father was prosecuted, even under really egregious facts, right?

00:05:00 So we find women prosecuted when they're out of state or when they're away at work.

00:05:06 But in cases where men are in the home, for example, and witnessing the abuse, often still are not prosecuted, or when they are, it's for a lesser offense, right?

00:05:15 Then we see the prosecution for neglect.

00:05:20 or failure to seek medical attention, things like that, versus being prosecuted as the principal actor, which is almost exclusively something that is leveled against mothers.

00:05:31 How does your research about gender in the law provide a way to view other legal injustice issues?

00:05:38 I think we know that historically gender was overtly relevant in the law in general and in family law in particular.

00:05:46 So this was a critical component in how various legal issues and family issues were resolved until that became clearly unconstitutional, right?

00:05:59 So now the statutes and the application of those statutes must be gender neutral.

00:06:07 And so we ostensibly don't bring gender into those decisions.

00:06:13 But what I found in this empirical research, but also in looking more deeply into a lot of kind of broader issues with gender in the legal system, is that a lot of social expectations of women and mothers, especially, is imputed into the way the system operates.

00:06:36 For example, according to the data that we have, mothers are more likely to actually be the perpetrators of child abuse.

00:06:44 There are some scholars that call that into question a little bit...

00:06:55 So whatever disparities and biases might exist may also come into play in that.

00:07:01 But assuming that's true,

00:07:03 then it would suggest that the men in those children's lives would be more likely to be prosecuted for failure to protect their children, right?

00:17:03 Thank you, Dr.

00:17:04 Anthony.

00:17:05 Dr.

00:17:05 Deborah Anthony is Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield.

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00:17:51 Thank you for joining us for another edition of Cornered Out of Court, brought to you by the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education.