1. Gender and crime Questions we need to be able to answer
Why do women commit fewer crimes that men?
Why are women more likely to conform to social norms than men?
Is their anything different about women’s experience of crime as victims and perpetrators?
Are women treated differently from men in the CJS?
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gender and crime

2. Introduction
Official Crime Statistics (OCR) revealed how recorded crime appears to be a masculine activity (87% of all recorded crime)
Victorians explained women’s conformity with biological theory, sociologists favour socialisation, social control and postmodern concept of ‘transgression’.
Crime, delinquency and deviance viewed as a (working-class) “male thing”, that usually ends as they ‘settled down’.
However, the growth of laddette behaviour is challenging the implied links between deviance and masculinity.
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3. Female Crime Statistics
Whilst they commit less than men, women commit all types of offences.
Women’s property crime is motivated by economic factors (just like men).
Women fear and feel the impact of the stigma of the ‘criminal’ label.
Women offenders are seen as 'doubly deviant' - for breaking social rules, and being viewed as ‘unfeminine’.
Quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests:
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4. Will Women’s Crime Rise?
Freda Adler (1975) believes that women’s liberation will increase women’s participation in criminal activity.
Her evidence is partly based on a growth of juvenile crime by (liberated) girls.
Just as they are penetrating the labour market, so they are moving also into ‘criminal careers’.
However, Carol Smart (1979) criticises Adler on the grounds that she (wrongly) sees juvenile delinquency as reflective of future adult crime, so while she too argues that teenage female crime will rise with greater social freedom, we can’t assume a rise in female adult crime will follow
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5. Rise in Women’s Crime
Stephen Box feels that any increase in women’s property crime has more to do with poverty (especially as lone-parents) than their liberation.
He also found a relationship between the increasing employment of women police officers and the recording of violent crime by women.
He suggests the authorities have also been ‘sensitised’, resulting in female crimes of violence becoming more likely to be recorded.
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6. Frances Heidensohn
Frances Heidensohn (1985) notes how female crime was either invisible or sociologists assumed stereotypical ideas on females. She suggests 4 reasons:
Male dominance of offenders
Male domination of sociology
Sociological theorising
Vicarious identification (what interests male sociologists is exciting [male] rebellion)
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7. Gender and Crime
3 questions we need to address in order to ascertain if women are less criminal than men:
Are there
differences in the
amount of crime
committed by men
and women?
Are there
differences in the
kinds of crime
committed by men
and women?
Is there any
evidence that
women’s crime has
changed in either
amount or
kind ?
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8. Theories of Gender and Crime
Frances Heidensohn (1985) suggests that the question we should be asking is not why some women commit crime, but why women are so non-criminal?
She considers three explanations:
Biological
Theory
Sex-role
Theory
Transgression
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9. Biological Theory
The origins of this theory go back to Victorian ideas such as Cesare Lombroso (left).
It argues that 'normal' females have a disposition that repels them from deviant and criminal behaviour.
This theory has little support in sociology, although a link between female crime and hormonal and menstrual factors has been made.
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10. Sex-role Theory (Socialisation)
From infancy, children are socialised that the two sexes are different.
Female roles contain such elements as caring, passivity, and domesticity.
Male roles, on the other hand, stress elements of toughness, aggressiveness and sexual conquest.
It is argued that females generally lack the values that are typically associated with delinquency. However, laddette behaviour challenges this.
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11. Sex-role Theory (continued)
Even with shoplifting and prostitution it is argued these express socialised roles of family provider on the one hand and sexual provider on the other.
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12. Social Control
Frances Heidensohn (1985) says women commit so few crimes because of the ways in which they are ideologically controlled.
Firstly in the way in which societies are cemented together by a shared value system.
Secondly in the way bonding occurs within relationships of family, the peer group, and the school.
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13. Pat Carlen and Control Theory
Frances Heidensohn argues most women conform because failure to do results in labelling as unfeminine behaviour.
Pat Carlen (1985) has adopted control theory located in 'class deals' and 'gender deals'.
Females who are most likely to become criminal are those who have not had, or have rejected, the 'gender deal'.
Females who have been in care, thrown out of home, or have rejected 'normal' family life, are the most likely to be law-breakers.
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14. Lack of Opportunities
There was an assumption that because women were confined to the private world with limited access to the public world they lacked opportunity for crime.
However, this situation is changing, with women occupying roles in the workplace and public life.
Women still have less opportunity for crimes but Wilkinson found in California that where women were equal to men, they were engaged in similar levels of white-collar crime.
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15. Transgression
Adopting a Postmodernist approach Carol Smart (1990) introduced the concept of 'transgressive criminology‘.
In order to understand crime in a Postmodernist society, transgression takes us beyond the boundaries of conventional criminology.
It considers ideas as diverse as self-imposed curfews; treatment of women as victims; domestic violence, abuse and rape.
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16. ‘Chivalry’ Factor
Some argue women are more deviant than they appear and are protected by a ‘chivalry factor‘ by police, courts, etc.
Hilary Allen (1987) argues mental health explanation (including PMS) for female criminality results in lighter punishments by the courts.
However, Eileen Leonard (1982) challenges the 'chivalry factor‘ pointing out how ‘bad women’ are treated more harshly than some men.
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17. Women, crime and punishment- the big debate
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18. A02 Exam Evaluation Point
Factors that label a woman as ‘bad’ include anything that implies she is a ‘bad Mother’ (neglect, abuse, children in care, etc.) or promiscuous (prostitute, teenage mother, children from several fathers, etc.
Such women seem to be treated quite harshly by the agents of social control because they do not conform to expected norms of femininity.
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gender and crime