Gender and Crime Flashcards
Do women commit more crime?
Typically female crimes such as shoplifting are less likely to be reported. For example, property crime is less like to be noticed or reporter than the violent or sexual crimes more often committed by men. Similarly, prostitution, which females are more likely to engage in than men, is less likely to be reported by either party.
Even when women’s crimes are detected or reported, they are less likely to be prosecuted, or if prosecuted more likely to be let off relatively lightly.
What are some gender patterns in crime?
Most crime appears to be committed by males. Heidinsohn observes gender different are perhaps the most significant feature of recorded crime.
4/5 convicted offenders in England and Wales are male.
What is the chivalry thesis?
Pollak- argues that men have a protective attire towards men and that men hate to accuse women and this send them to their punishment, police officers less likely to prosecute them etc.
The CJ system is this more lenient with women and so their crimes are less likely to end up in the official statistics. This im then gives an invalid picture that exaggerates the extent of gender differences in rates of offending.
Who supports the chivalry thesis?
Flood-Page- found that, while only 1 in 11 female self-reported offenders had been cautioned or prosecuted, the figure was over 1 in 7 for males.
Ministry of Justice- women are more likely than men to be cations rather than prosecuted. 49% of females recorded as offending received a caution compared to 30% of makes.
Hood- in over 3,000 cases of defendants, found that women were 1/3 less likely to be jailed in similar cases.
What is evidence against the chivalry thesis?
Farrington and Morris’- study of 408 offences of theft in court found that women were not set need more leniently for comparable offences.
Buckle and Farrington- women shoplifters may be more likely to be prosecuted than their male counterparts.
What is bias against women?
Heidensohn argues that the courts treat females more harshly than males when they deviate from gender norms:
Double standards: courts punish girls but not boys for promiscuous sexual activity.
Women who do not conform to accept standard of monogamous heterosexuality and motherhood are punished more harshly. Stewart found that the magistrates perceptions of female defendants characters were based on stereotypical gender roles.
What does the functionalist sex role theory say?
Parsons- traces differences in crime and deviance to the gender roles in the conventional nuclear family. While men take the instrumental, breadwinner role, performed largely outside the home, where they take the main responsibility for socialising the children.
Boys seek to distance themselves from such models by engaging in ‘compensatory compulsory masculinity’ through aggression and anti-social behaviour, which can slip over into acts of delinquency.
What is patriarchal control? (control at home.)
Control at home- with women’s domestic role, with its constant round of housework and childcare, imposes serve restrictions on their time and movement and confines them to the house for long periods, reducing opportunities to offended. Women who try to reject their domestic role find that their partners seek to impose it by force, through domestic violence.
As Dobash and Dobash show, many violent attacks result from mens disassociation with their wives performance of domestic duties.
Daughters are too subject to patriarchal control. Girls are less likely to be allowed to come and go as they please. As a result, they develop a ‘bedroom culture’ staying in and socialising with their friends rather than in public spaces. They are also required to do more housework.
What is control in public?
Women are controlled in public places by the threat or fear of male violence against them, especially sexual violence. 54% of women avoided going out after dark for fear of being victims of crime, compared to only 14% of men.
What is control at work?
Women’s behaviour at work is controlled by male supervisors and managers. Sexual harassment is wide pared to keep women ‘in their place’.
Furthermore, women’s subordination position recused their opportunities to engage in major criminal activity at work; less opportunity to rise to senior positions where they can commit fraud.
What is some evaluation for the control theory?
The control theory can be accused of seeing women’s behaviour as determined by external forces such as patriarchal controls which takes away the importance of free will and choice in offending.
Why does Messerschmidt say men commit crime?
Messerschmidt- argues that masculinity is a social construct or ‘accomplishment’ and men have to constantly work at constructing and presenting it to others. In doing so, some men have more resources than others to draw upon.
What is hegemonic masculinity?
This is the dominant form of masculinity that men wish to accomplish and can be done through work in the paid labour-market, the subordination of women, heterosexism.
What is subordinate masculinity?
People who have this type of masculinity include gay men, who have no desire to accomplish hegemonic masculinity, as well as lower-ass and some ethnic minority men, who lack the resources to do so.
White working-class youths- have less chance of educational success, so their masculinity is oppositional both in and out of school. Therefore, their masculinity is constructed around sexist attitudes and being tough and opposing teachers’ authority. As seen in Willis’ lad study.
Black lower working-class youths- may have few expectations of a reasonable job and may use gang membership and violence to express their masculinity, or turn to serious property crime to achieve material success.
What is the evaluation of Messerschmidt?
Is masculinity an explanation of male crime, or just a description of make offenders? This makes his argument very circular.
Messerschmidt doesn’t explain why not all men use crime to accomplish masculinity.
If masculinity is a social construct, then isn’t Messerscmhidts definitions purely a social construct as well?
