Gender and Crime Revision

Just a brief revision note this time from me on gender and crime.

First things first, the stats. Men accounted for around 80 per cent of all offenders convicted or cautioned for indictable offences in 2000and 94 per cent of the prison population in the UK in 2002.

Sure, those aren’t the very latest figures, but that is a trend which has held for as long as I’ve been studying sociology, so the trend seems pretty clear: most crime is a male affair.

For a long time in sociology, the key question was – why are so few women involved in crime – but maybe we should be asking another question – why are so many men involved in crime? What is it about masculinity that makes crime figure so prominently in the lives of many young men? Of course, there is a story about social class here as well.

Back to women though; sociologist Frances Heidensohn, argues that a lot of the reason why women are less involved in crime is to do with the way crime is gendered as a male activity. The dominant feminine roles in our society are ones where women are required to exhibit ‘soft’ characteristics; their role is to look beautiful and is highly sexualised in some social groups. Women who are violent and aggressive – characteristics required for some types of crime, are liable to be negatively labelled. Heidensohn suggests that control theory can be applied to gender and crime and can explain why so few women get involved in crime.

One interesting study which gives some support for these sort of approach comes from research conducted by Gelsthorpe and Louck (1997). They conducted 197 interviews with part time magistrates from five courts in England and Wales. They found that magistrates were more inclined to take account of family circumstances in cases involving women and women were more likely than men to be treated with leniency when they had dependents. Magistrates tended to distinguish between ‘troubled’ and ‘troublesome’ women, a distinction which wasn’t made with male offenders. You could argue that sounds like a labelling process is going on.

So you need to look at the issue of gender and crime from a variety of angles – not just in terms of what may prevent women from becoming criminal in the first place, but also, how they are seen and treated by the police and the criminal justice system. Remember also to bring in methodological and theoretical points, and you have the basis of an answer for questions on gender and crime.