Cinematic Forced Atonement, 1960-2000: The Masculine Gaze and Violence Against Female Prostitutes

Content analysis is used to examine the representation of prostitutes in film between 1960 and 2000 in order to describe the forced atonement of deviant characters. Consistently across all four decades, the film prostitute is subject to a forced atonement, victimized by one or more abusive situations as a prerequisite to her transformation from criminal (prostitute) to non-criminal (occurring in thirty-three out of thirty-eight movies). This finding is significant because (1) cinematic depictions of predominately female deviance consistently use forced atonement to resolve female deviance and (2) when male characters use violence to punish women for having sex outside of marriage, the message is sent that female sexuality may be controlled with violence