gender and crime

Question 1

sex role theory

Answer 1

• boys and girls are socialised differently, resulting in boys becoming more delinquent.
• girls are more supervised, taught to be more passive and domesticated and more strictly controlled.
• boys are more encouraged to take risks, be ambitious, extroverted, tough and aggressive.
• therefore, boys have more opportunities and inclinations to commit crime. if some women are deviant, it may be because they have been socialised in masculine ways.

Question 2

social control (smart)

Answer 2

• controls on how often and when girls are allowed out are fed by exaggarated fears about safety.
• strange sex attack are very rare, and boys are more likely to become victims of physical attacks, but parental fears lead to girls and women becoming prisoners in their own homes.

Question 3

social control (heidensohn)

Answer 3

• women experience four forms of control, which tend to lead to conformity rather than deviance:
• at home: through their role as a housewife and mother
• at work: through the dual burden of housewife role + wageworker
• in public: via notions of reputation
• social policy: welfare and benefits which tend to reinforce women’s position as primary carers

Question 3

biological explanation (lombroso)

Answer 3

• biological anomalies were a more significant indicator, seeing the habitual criminal as halfway between the “lunatic” and the “savage”.
• most women are genetically less inclined towards criminality, showing a natural passivity and not possessing enough intelligence or initiative to break the law.

Question 4

chivalry thesis

Answer 4

• the argument that the male-dominated criminal justice system has a paternalistic and indulgent attitude towards women, seeing them as vulnerable, child-like and not fully responsible for their actions.
• this may lead to police officers to let females off with warnings or cautions, or charge them with lesser offences, and may lead male judges and magistrates to sentence female offenders more leniently.

Question 5

rational choices (carlen)

Answer 5

• costs of criminal behaviour usually outweigh the benefits of women, since women conform to notions of respectable womanhood expected by society, making both a “class deal” and a “gender deal”.
• thus, the women most likely to become offenders are those who may have been brought up outside the familial ideology which reinforces the gender deal, and women who are marginalised in terms of education and employment, and cannot fulfil the class deal. they may feel they have little to lose.

Question 6

feminisation of poverty (chesney-lind)

Answer 6

• poor and marginalised women in the USA are more likely to be criminal than “liberated” middle class women.
• common female crimes (shoplifting, prostitution) not driven by liberation, but by poverty and oppression.
• some women branched into “male offences”, this was linked to economic and social issues.

Question 7

feminisation of poverty (james and thornton)

Answer 7

• women prisoners more likely to be from impoverished and uneducated backgrounds, and were mostly unaware of women’s liberation, which mainly benefits middle class women.

Question 8

liberation theory (alder)

Answer 8

• cites liberation as the main cause of the rise in “female crime”. as females achieve equality, this leads them into more “masculine” behaviour.
• as women leave the domestic sphere, they may have more opportunities to commit crimes such as fraud and embezzlement, in the workplace, traits encouraged in males which may lead to criminality, such as assertiveness, aggression and risk-taking, will apply to women too.

Question 9

liberation theory (jackson)

Answer 9

• there seems to be more prevalence and acceptance of “laddish” behaviour from girls.

Question 10

liberation theory (denscombe)

Answer 10

• teenage girls were adopting traditionally “male” values, such as being hard, controlling and risk-taking.

Question 11

masculinity (messerschmidt)

Answer 11

• hegemonic masculinity emphasises competitive individualism, aggression and violence in relation to authority and control.
• young males experience their world collectively, emphasising the importance of the school and peer group, youth crime is a way of “doing masculinity”.

Question 12

masculinity (masher)

Answer 12

• characterises hegemonic masculinity as “hypermasculinity”, referring to its dangerous and violence

Question 13

masculinity (winslow)

Answer 13

• mass unemployment in the 1980s left many young males in the northeast without a breadwinner status, and violence became more significant as a way of expressing masculinity.

Question 14

pleasure seeking (katz)

Answer 14

• crime provides an emotional thrill that we don’t understand until we do it as it is seductive.

Question 15

pleasure seeking (lyng)

Answer 15

• ‘edgework’ to explain risk-taking and deviant behaviour amongst young males.
• a thrill to be achieved from acting in ways that are on the edge between security and danger.

Question 16

socialisation and absent role models (murray)

Answer 16

• lone parent families are problematic due to lack of role models.
• keen advocate for marriage and the nuclear family, seeing this as the best form of socialisation for children.

Question 17

women in crime (pollack)

Answer 17

• the idea that men commit more crime than women is a myth, caused by differences in the types of crimes committed as well as the perception of male and female offenders.
• women are compelled by their physiology to commit certain crimes: their hormones and menstrual cycles cause emotional disturbance and low self-esteem.
• women are more biologically devious than men, given their need to conceal menstruation, fake orgasms and take on a passive role in society.
• women prefer professions like maids, nurses and teachers so that they can engage in non-detectable domestic crime.
• women also manipulate men to commit crime for them, they are often the beneficiary, but avoid arrest since the male partners take the blame.