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CHAPTER 13: GENDER AND CRIME SNIPES, BERNARD, & GEROULD (2019)
CHAPTER 13
Gender is the strongest and most consistent correlate of crime and delinquency.1 With few exceptions (such as prostitution), males are much more likely to offend than are females. Why this is so is not entirely clear, and this has become a more explicit focus within criminological theory and research.
This chapter opens with a discussion of feminist criminology, which has raised a variety of issues related to women’s offending, women’s victimization, and women’s experiences in the criminal justice system. The chapter then focuses narrowly on theories related to offending. Traditional criminology theories, as described in the earlier chapters of this book, largely ignore women’s offending. Feminist criminology therefore poses the question of the extent to which these theories can be generalized to explain women’s offending. But the larger question is the extent to which criminology theories can explain the gendered nature of crime—the tendency for crime to be largely a male phenomenon.2 The chapter therefore examines explanations of why women’s crime rates are so low and men’s crime rates are so high.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
Feminism is an extremely broad area of social theorizing that has applications to the field of criminology, although this certainly is not its major focus. Just as there are numerous branches of feminism, there are numerous branches of feminist criminology, with numerous disagreements and shadings of meanings within those branches. What follows here is only a brief overview that is intended to give a sense of the area and to identify its major themes.
The initial feminist writings in criminology were critiques of traditional criminology theories for ignoring or heavily distorting a number of topics related to women offenders.3 Traditional theories largely explained the criminal behavior of men,4 and the few theories that explained the criminal behavior of women were simplistic and relied on stereotypical images.5 In addition, most traditional criminology theories were gender neutral and therefore (in theory at least) applied equally to women and to men. They ignored the socially constructed relations between men and women that are associated with the concepts of masculinity and femininity.6 Consequently, these theories were largely unable to explain the gendered nature of crime (i.e., men commit the vast majority of crime). When the gendered nature of crime was addressed, the theories tended to focus on supposed characteristics that implied women’s inferiority and tended to reinforce women’s subordination to men in the larger society.7 Traditional criminology theories also failed to address the differences in the ways women, versus men, were treated by the criminal justice system.8 For example, women who were accused of sexual crimes were often treated more harshly than were men who were accused of similar crimes, but women who were accused of violent crimes were often treated more leniently. These differences in treatment led to differences in official crime rates (e.g., higher rates of sexual offenses but lower rates of violent offenses), which then affected the explanations of women’s criminality by criminology theories. Finally, none of the existing criminology theories discussed the new roles that women were taking on in the larger society as part of what in the 1970s was called women’s liberation and how these new roles might impact women’s participation in criminal activity.
The critiques that pointed to the many problems with traditional criminology theories were followed by two books on the subject of women and crime that appeared in 1975. In Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal,9 Freda Adler argued that women were becoming more aggressive and competitive as they moved out of traditional homebound social roles and into the previously largely male world of the competitive marketplace. Essentially, Adler believed that women were taking on what had been masculine qualities as they fought the battles that men had always fought. She argued that the same kind of transformation was occurring among criminals, where “a similar number of determined women are forcing their way into the world of major crimes.” Now, she contended, there were “increasing numbers of women who are using guns, knives, and wits to establish themselves as full human beings, as capable of violence and aggression as any man.”
In that same year, Rita James Simon published Women and Crime.10 Simon also described changes in the types and volume of crime committed by women but argued that it was not because women were taking on masculine characteristics. Rather, as women moved out of traditional homebound roles, they encountered a much wider variety of opportunities to commit crime, particularly economic and white-collar crimes, which required access to other people’s money in positions of trust.
Both Adler’s and Simon’s theories argued that liberation from traditional women’s roles would increase crimes committed by women. The major difference between the two had to do with the prediction about the type of crime these new female criminals would commit: Adler’s theory suggested that a larger portion of this crime would be violent, whereas Simon’s theory suggested that this crime would predominantly be property and white-collar crime. Later research indicated that Simon’s opportunity thesis had more validity, but on the whole there was little evidence that this “new female criminal” existed at all.11 In addition, Simon suggested that these theories generated enormous interest among nonfeminist criminologists and, in some ways, set back the cause of a feminist criminology because they “diverted attention from the material and structural forces that shape women’s lives and experiences.”12 Because of this, other feminist criminologists argue that neither theory should be described as feminist criminology.13
SCHOOLS OF FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
After Adler’s and Simon’s contributions, criminological writings that focused on explaining women’s participation in crime expanded dramatically. While there are many similarities and differences in these writings, certain categories have appeared in the literature as ways to group these writings to illustrate their range and variety. These are sometimes described as schools of feminist thought.14
Initially, many feminist writings in criminology could be described as a part of traditional criminology itself, filling in gaps and correcting the distortions of the past. As such, they were part of what came to be called liberal feminism.15 This branch of feminism basically operated within the framework of existing social structures to direct attention to women’s issues, promote women’s rights, increase women’s opportunities, and transform women’s roles in society.
Soon, however, several strands of critical feminism arose that directly challenged the social structures within which liberal feminism operated. These strands looked at the much more fundamental questions of how women had come to occupy subservient roles in society and how societies themselves might be transformed. The first such strand is known as radical feminism, and its central concept is that of “patriarchy,” originally a concept used by sociologists like Max Weber to describe social relations under feudalism. Kate Millett resurrected the term in 1970 to refer to a form of social organization in which men dominate women.16 Millett argued that patriarchy is the most fundamental form of domination in every society. Patriarchy is established and maintained through sex-role socialization and the creation of “core gender identities,” through which both men and women come to believe that men are superior in a variety of ways. On the basis of these gender identities, men tend to dominate women in personal interactions, such as within the family. From there, male domination is extended to all the institutions and organizations of the larger society. Because male power is based on personal relationships, Millet and her fellow feminists concluded that “the personal is political.”
Whereas Millett had placed the root of the problem in socialization into gendered sex roles, Marxist feminists combined radical feminism with traditional Marxism to argue that the root of male dominance lies in men’s ownership and control of the means of economic production.17 For Marxist feminists, patriarchy is tied to the economic structure of capitalism and results in a “sexual division of labor” in which men control the economy and women serve them and their sexual needs.18 Much like Marxist criminologists in general, Marxist feminist criminologists argue that actions that threaten this capitalist–patriarchal system are defined as crimes by the criminal law and the criminal justice system. Thus, women’s actions that threaten male economic dominance are defined as property crimes, and women’s actions that threaten male control of women’s bodies and sexuality are defined as sexual offenses. Like other Marxists, some Marxist feminist criminologists take an instrumental view of the criminal law—law is a direct instrument of men’s oppression—while others take a more complex structural view that looks to overall patterns through which law maintains the system of patriarchy.19 Thus, another source of women’s criminality in this perspective is the frustration and anger that women feel by being trapped in these limiting social roles.20
Finally, socialist feminists retained both the focus on social roles and economic production, but they moved away from a rigid Marxist framework. In particular, they argued that natural reproductive differences between the sexes underlie male–female relationships. Before birth control, women were much more at the mercy of their biology than were men—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, menopause—all of which made them more dependent on men for physical survival. The biological role of women in pregnancy, birth, and nursing led to women taking major responsibility for raising children, who require extensive care for long periods. Ultimately, this care led to a sexual division of labor in which men worked outside the home and women worked inside it, thereby forming the basis for male domination and control over women.21 According to socialist feminists, the key to an egalitarian society lies not so much in women taking ownership of the means of economic production, but in women taking control of their own bodies and their own reproductive functions. Once women have done so, they can move on to taking their rightful place in the larger society.
Liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist feminisms are all widely recognized as separate strands of feminism, but several other strands are also sometimes mentioned.22 One of these strands is postmodern feminism.23 Smart, for example, discussed how discourse is used to set certain women apart as “criminal women.”24 Wonders argued that both postmodernism and feminism question the nature of justice in the context of storytelling and narrative and that both tend to see “truth” as an opinion that benefits some at the expense of others.25 Other feminists have criticized postmodernism. Chesney-Lind and Faith questioned whether it is useful for women to dispute the notion of truth just at the point when women are gaining a voice in the knowledge production process.26 Still others appear to reject postmodernism because they advocate feminist theory and research that adheres to standards of scientific objectivity.27
Whether or not they adhere to postmodernism as a whole, many feminists now take an “appreciative relativism” stance within feminism that is similar to postmodernism. That is, they recognize and appreciate many different feminist voices as legitimate and refrain from analyzing, classifying, and ultimately picking apart those different voices.28 In particular, feminist criminologists value multiracial and multicultural voices that speak about women’s experiences related to crime, victimization, and criminal justice.29 This multicultural feminism focuses on the interlocking structures of domination: race, class, and gender.30 Earlier feminism, dominated by middle-class European American women, tended to ignore the very different experiences of, for instance, poor African American women.31
The problem of gender in criminology has usually been addressed in one of two forms. First, the generalizability problem focuses on whether traditional criminology theories, which were formulated to explain male criminal behavior, can be generalized to explain female criminal behavior. Second, the gender ratio problem focuses on explaining why women are less likely than men to engage in criminal behavior.32
Daly and Chesney-Lind suggested that the generalizability problem is the safe course of action for female criminologists who are just entering the field: “Focus on the generalizibility problem and … use a domesticated feminism to modify previous theory.”33 While generalizability is “safer,” the problem is that the traditional male-oriented criminology theories have limited value for explaining female criminality.34 Daly and Chesney-Lind maintained that the theoretical concepts on which these theories are based “are inscribed so deeply by masculinist experience that this approach will prove too restrictive, or at least misleading” when applied to female crime.35 On the other hand, after reviewing the literature, Smith and Paternoster concluded that it is premature to abandon these male-based theories entirely in the attempt to explain female offending.36 Similarly, Kruttschnitt concluded that “the factors that influence delinquent development differ for males and females in some contexts but not others.”37
Women criminologists who focus on the gender ratio problem, as opposed to the generalizability problem, have been more likely to utilize observations and interviews and “have displayed more tentativeness and a discomfort with making global claims” at the theoretical level. In contrast, men criminologists who address the gender ratio problem have been bolder in making grand theoretical claims and have tended to do empirical research that involved statistical analysis of quantitative data. Daly and Chesney-Lind stated that women criminologists
are more interested in providing texture, social context, and case histories: in short, in presenting accurate portraits of how adolescent and adult women become involved in crime. This gender difference … [is related] to a felt need to comprehend women’s crime on its own terms, just as criminologists of the past did for men’s crime.38
The problem for these women criminologists is that “global or grand theoretical arguments and high-tech statistical analyses are valued more highly by the profession.” The women criminologists therefore run the risk that their approaches “will be trivialized merely as case studies or will be written off as not theoretical enough.”39
Chesney-Lind and Faith argued that gender must become a central concept in criminology theories.40 Social class has been the central concept in many criminology theories in the past, yet many criminologists argue there is no direct relationship between class and crime.41 In contrast, the relationship between gender and crime is strong and undeniable. Beyond that, Chesney-Lind and Faith contended that the gender ratio problem (why women are less likely, and men are more likely, to engage in criminal behavior) can be fully explained only in the context of the sex–gender system (or patriarchy). While it varies from culture to culture, this system constructs gender categories out of biological sex, associates these gender categories with different roles or tasks in a division of labor, and then values men and their tasks over women and their tasks.42 Ultimately, to explain the gender ratio problem, Chesney-Lind and Faith argued that criminologists will have to “theorize gender” in their theories of crime. That is, both women’s and men’s experiences as offenders and victims, as well as their divergent treatment in criminal justice systems, can be fully understood only in the context of the sex–gender system of patriarchy.43 Feminist criminology has raised a wide variety of issues that are related to women as offenders, women as victims,44 and women’s experiences with the criminal justice system, and all these issues have implications for much existing criminological knowledge about men. The following sections, however, consider only the gender ratio problem. For most of the twentieth century explanations of the gender ratio have focused on why women’s crime rates have been so low, and these explanations are the subject of the next section. In effect, this approach assumes that male crime rates are the norm, and it attempts to explain why women’s crime rates are different from that norm.45 The opposite question—Why are men’s crime rates so high?—is addressed later in this chapter. Following this is a discussion of a debate on whether the gender ratio of violence has been decreasing over the past few decades.
WHY ARE WOMEN’S CRIME RATES SO LOW?
In the first half of the twentieth century, criminology theories generally explained all crime in terms of biological and psychological disorders. Such theories tended to assume that because women commit less frequent, less serious crime than men, women offenders must therefore have even more serious biological and psychological disorders than men offenders.46 By the middle of the twentieth century theories of men’s criminality had turned to social explanations, such as the ecology, strain, differential association, control, and labeling theories discussed in earlier chapters. These theories, as originally proposed, had little or nothing to say about female offending.47 Theories of women’s criminality during these years remained almost entirely focused on individual pathology and tended to view women’s offending as minor offending predominantly related to sexual activity. When women engaged in more serious offenses, it was often viewed as being the result of the influence of their male romantic partners.48 Only with the rise of feminism was women’s criminality viewed as an entity in itself and in the context of women’s social situation.
Many of the theories look at variations in socialization, particularly as related to gender roles, arguing that females are socialized toward greater conformity and less risk taking than males.49 An alternate but related perspective is that females are more controlled than males, particularly in terms of direct controls, such as surveillance and supervision.50 Hagan and his colleagues combined both of these perspectives in power-control theory, which argues that parents control daughters more than sons and that boys are therefore more likely to engage in risky behavior than are girls.51 This disproportional controlling behavior will be greatest in a patriarchal family, in which the father has more power than the mother because of his employment in the workforce. This behavior will be the least in nonpatriarchal families in which both parents have equal power because of their equal status in the workplace. Individual delinquency rates are thus viewed as the product of two levels of distribution of power—power relations in society (the workplace) and power relations in the family. Tests of power-control theory have found mixed support for a variety of its arguments.52
Whereas power-control theory focuses on the greater controls of girls, other explanations consider female offending in the context of strain-type theories. Many theories have discussed the particular victimizations that women experience and have sought to link them to the particular types of offenses that women commit. Chesney-Lind and Faith stated that “research consistently documents that victimization is at the heart of much of girls’ and women’s lawbreaking, and that this pattern of gender entrapment, rather than gender liberation, best explains women’s involvement in crime.”53 Agnew’s general strain theory has also been applied to gender differences, in an extension of the theory proposed by Broidy and Agnew. They argued that that males and females face different types of strain (e.g., financial and interpersonal conflict for males versus family and friend problems and gender discrimination for females), and that typical male strains were tied greater to crime and delinquency than female strain types.54 Tests of the application of GST to gender differences have produced mixed results.55
Still other theories have approached women’s offending in the context of differential association theory. In 1982 Giordano and Rockwell, for example, interviewed 127 girls, the total population in Ohio’s only institution for female delinquents, and reinterviewed most of them again in 1995.56 They found that “these women appear to have been literally ‘immersed’ in deviant lifestyles—where aunts, cousins, siblings, fathers, and mothers routinely engaged in violence and criminal behavior.”57 The authors presented anecdotal accounts to illustrate the family’s influence on criminal definitions, as well as the direct and indirect learning of the behavior itself from family and extra-family influences. Also in the differential association tradition, Heimer and De Coster found that “boys are more violent than girls largely because they are taught more definitions favoring such behavior; girls are less violent than boys because they are controlled through subtle mechanisms, which include learning that violence is incompatible with the meaning of gender for them and being restrained by emotional bonds to family.”58 These authors concluded that “consistent with feminist arguments, gender differences in violence ultimately are rooted in power differences.”59
Some feminists have looked at female criminality in the context of “doing gender,” an approach to gender that assumes that the feminine gender role is something that must be accomplished in the context of specific situations.60 The feminine gender role itself may be dysfunctional in various ways, but the greater problem lies in overconformity to the role generated by the need to prove something, to demonstrate femininity in specific contexts. This approach is associated with the multicultural feminism described earlier, since different racial and ethnic groups may have different norms for femininity. What are called “hegemonic” gender roles (breadwinner for males, housewife for females) are the masculinity and femininity defined by the dominant culture. Quoting Spender,61 Simpson and Ellis described this femininity as girls learn it in schools:
Simultaneously expected to behave and conform but not perform (at least not in subjects that “really” matter, like physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and so forth), “women learn that they are not as worthy, that they do not count as much, and that what competence they may have is usually restricted to a specialized sphere which does not rank high in the male scheme of values.” The above view captures, for the most part, a hegemonic femininity.62
Simpson and Ellis then argued that this hegemonic femininity is more relevant to European American females, but less relevant to females who are expected to work, including African American females.
Other researchers have also taken the doing gender approach, but they have examined the very different femininities of females who are involved in serious crimes. For example, Maher63 described the gendered division of labor in serious drug markets in Brooklyn, New York. Miller64 interviewed women who were involved in armed robberies in St. Louis, while Laidler and Hunt65 interviewed girls in delinquent gangs. These women operate in rigidly stratified gender hierarchies where women’s roles are severely limited, and while their motives are similar to those of male offenders, their specific actions can be understood only in the context of that gendered environment.
WHY ARE MEN’S CRIME RATES SO HIGH?
Heidensohn remarked that one of the lessons that should be learned from all the theory and research on women’s offending is that “we have to ask a different question—not what makes women’s crime rates so low, but why are men’s so high?”66 Chesney-Lind and Faith suggested that asking the question this way means that “suddenly men have a gender, not just women; and male behavior is no longer normalized.”67 Heidensohn described this question as “stunning in its implications.”
Before they were questioned by feminist criminologists, traditional criminology theories largely dealt with male offending and were largely tested with male populations. Nevertheless, most of these theories were gender neutral in their arguments and could not explain the differences between male and female offending (the gender ratio problem). The problem was that the causal factors proposed by these theories, such as economic inequality or social structural strain, did not appear to affect men and women differently. Thus, the theories themselves implied that men’s and women’s crime rates should be equal.68
A few of these traditional criminology theories proposed causal factors that are unequally distributed by gender. For example, testosterone levels, one biological factor that is associated with crime, are more concentrated in men than in women.69 One recent study has also shown that a low resting heart rate partially mediates the relationship between gender and crime. (Males on average have a lower heart rate than females.) Based on a sample of 894 individuals, the researchers analyzed measurements of heart rate at eleven years of age and twenty-three years, and found that resting heart rate could explain between 5.4 and 17.1 percent of the gender difference in various measures of crime, controlling for body mass index, race, social adversity, and activity level.70 Few criminologists deny that such biological factors have some effect on gender differences in crime, but as discussed in Chapter 4, these effects are generally not direct or isolated from environmental causes. In addition, the very large within-gender differences in crime (i.e., some men commit a lot of crime, and some men commit none) indicate that strictly biological factors can play only a limited role in criminology theories.71
Boyd, however, called for a greater emphasis on biological factors in explaining the tenfold difference between men and women in the commission of violent crime. In The Beast Within: Why Men Are Violent,72 he argued that criminology currently suffers from “an unwillingness to accept that male violence flows from an amalgam of genes and environment.” Boyd stated that testosterone, as well as “biological differences in speed, size, strength, sexuality, spatial skills, verbal skills, and empathy,” makes men a greater risk than women for becoming violent. While acknowledging that a direct connection between testosterone and aggression is weak, Boyd contended that the “connection between testosterone and sexuality is overwhelming” and represents the key to understanding the connection between testosterone and violence. Linking biological factors with social change, Boyd tied the increase in violent crime in Western cultures beginning in the late 1960s to sexuality, specifically to the sexual revolution with its “changing conceptions of monogamy and commitment.” He concluded that such change produced an unprecedented disruption of sexual relationships, causing frustration and confusion in sexually immature young men.
Cote, relying upon longitudinal studies, applied a developmental perspective to the differential uses of aggression in boys and girls.73 She found that while boys and girls differ little in their use of physical aggression in infancy, a gap widens over the life course, peaking between ages eighteen and thirty. Cote attributed the increasing gap to the greater ability of adult females to regulate and inhibit physically aggressive behavior.74 When it came to using indirect aggression, defined as socially manipulative and circuitous forms of aggression, such as malicious gossip or practicing social ostracism, females are already more indirectly aggressive than are males during their preschool years, and this gap gradually widens over the course of childhood and adolescence and then narrows in adulthood, to the point where males and females do not significantly differ in their use of indirect aggression by age twenty-two. Whereas the use of physical aggression by girls gradually declines over the course of childhood, the use of indirect aggression appears to increase in frequency with age, with frequency of physical aggression peaking in toddlerhood and indirect aggression peaking in adolescence.75 Cote concluded that the difference in aggression is attributable to different social relations among girls and boys and to different selection pressures that are brought to bear on males and females in sexual selection.76
Other traditional theories proposed causal factors that might be unequally distributed by gender, although this was not argued in the theory itself. For example, Hirschi’s social control theory could explain the gender ratio problem if boys experience fewer social controls than girls. However, this argument is not actually part of the theory, and Hirschi himself discarded all data on females before testing his theory.77 As we discussed in the section on women’s crime rates, testing of this assertion has produced mixed results.
Similarly, Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory of low self-control may explain the gender ratio problem if the standard child-rearing practices for boys, compared to girls, are more likely to result in low self-control as a stable personality construct in adolescence and adulthood. Gottfredson and Hirschi agreed that gender is a “major, persistent correlate” to crime.78 After reviewing the research, they concluded that some gender differences in offending reflect “differences in opportunity variables or supervision,” in that parents “seek to minimize opportunities for crime, especially for daughters.” But they concluded that “there are substantial self-control differences between the sexes” and that explanations of gender differences in crime must include “differences in self-control that are not produced by direct external control.” They speculated that gendered differences in self-control may originate in gendered differences in parental monitoring and punishment of the deviant behavior of very young children, but then stated that “it is beyond the scope of this work to attempt to identify all of the elements responsible for gender differences in crime.”79
Finally, few traditional criminology theories explicitly dealt with masculinity or the sex–gender system (patriarchy) as a causal factor in crime. Some theories of gang behavior, however, were an exception.80 In his theory of lower-class culture, Miller described a tenuous masculinity at the heart of gang behavior, which is a “one-sex peer group” of adolescent boys who mostly live in female-headed households.81 Similarly, in his strain theory, Cohen argued that a boy’s gang behavior “has at least one virtue: it incontestably confirms, in the eyes of all concerned, his essential masculinity. The delinquent is the rogue male.”82 Relying on Miller and Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin83 stated in their strain theory that gang boys
have trouble forming a clear masculine self-image.… Engulfed by a feminine world and uncertain of their own identification, they tend to “protest” against femininity. This protest may take the form of robust and aggressive behavior, and even of malicious, irresponsible, and destructive acts. Such acts evoke maternal disapproval and thus come to stand for independence and masculinity to rebellious adolescents.
These theories suggest that gang delinquency involves the process of doing gender as described in the feminist theories of female crime and delinquency. That is, the gang behavior itself is a means of demonstrating masculinity in the context of particular situations and particular cultural contexts. Messerschmidt developed this view at considerable length, examining how the criminal behavior of men in different cultural contexts reveals an attempt to demonstrate the different masculinities associated with those contexts.84
In this approach, the masculine gender role is said to be the source of a variety of men’s problems, including increased suicide, crime, health problems, and relationship problems. All these problems, particularly relationships with women, are driving changes in the masculine gender role today. However, the greater problem is that most men experience themselves as not living up to gender-role expectations and therefore as needing to prove their masculinity. Thus, men focus less on the gender role itself than on the process by which they attempt to live up to its demands. The exact behaviors by which men demonstrate masculinity then depend very much on the particular cultural and situational contexts in which they find themselves.
Studies of street violence and gang delinquency have sought to understand offender motivations and to gain insight into the gendered nature of such activities. On the basis of an analysis of interviews with forty men and twelve women on the streets of St. Louis, Mullins, Wright, and Jacobs found that retaliatory violence is of a “strongly gendered nature,” with males viewing violent retaliation as “a key street survival tactic,” deeply rooted in their identities as men. While the motivations for intragender retaliation seem similar for men and women—the building and maintaining of street reputations—the criteria differed, as female disputes centered more on domestic matters and involved less violence. Far more frequently, men’s violence involved guns, with males getting locked into retaliatory cycles “due to the demands of actualizing a street masculinity identity.”85 Also addressing gangs and delinquency, Peterson, Miller, and Esbensen found that males in all-male gangs were less delinquent than were males in other gang types (sex-balanced gangs or majority male gangs). The authors concluded that they were “witnessing a phenomenon associated with the gendered organization of groups,” not simply differences between males and females. From this, the authors posited that masculinity and femininity are fluid concepts, “situationally defined and enacted, rather than resulting from deeply entrenched gender differences.”86
THE NARROWING OF THE GENDER GAP IN VIOLENCE
Currently, the subject of whether the gender gap in violent offending has been diminishing, as predicted in the 1970s by Adler, is one of some debate. In the United States, Lauritsen et al.87 and Schwartz et al.88 reached different conclusions. The former study, analyzing the gender gap in criminal offending between 1973 and 2005, using data from the National Crime Survey and the National Crime Victimization Survey, found enough evidence of a narrowing in the gender gap of violent crime to conclude: “It seems that the time has come to move beyond the debate over whether these changes in offending by gender have occurred and focus research efforts on explaining the reasons for differential changes in female and male rates of violent offending.”89
Schwartz et al., however, also analyzing these datasets, concluded that for the most part the gender gap in violence remained about the same over those three decades. Much of their empirical argument was based upon a different approach to statistical methods, in which they employed measures of violence using offender counts rather than the incident counts used by Lauritsen et al.90 Additionally, the two studies dealt differently with how they addressed the 1992 redesign in the National Crime Survey, which could have affected the estimates of this gap, as well as how to deal with sex-specific adjustments in their analyses.91 Schwartz et al. found that females comprised about 12 to 14 percent of all homicides over these decades, 2 to 3 percent of rapes, and 5 to 6 percent of newly admitted prisoners for homicide, rape, robbery, and assault. They reported that the only evidence of an increase in the gender gap in violence was in the assault category (and to some extent robbery, depending on the data set). Both studies, however, agreed that to the extent this gap was narrowing, it was primarily a result of decreasing male violence, rather than increasing female violence. Some research on the gender gap in other countries has also found that the bulk of any reduction in the gender gap in violent behavior is mostly attributed to less male violence.92
As there is disagreement by some researchers over whether this gender gap exists in violent crime, there are also different explanations for why this gap may be narrowing. It may be due in part to changes in women’s behavior, as posited by Adler’s “emancipation” effect. Some scholars assume there has been a global increase in female violence. Carrington, in making this assumption based on somewhat selectively chosen research, argues that feminists must own “real” female violence and put forth feminist theories that explain its uptake.93 Another explanation is based on reductions in male violence, which could come about in a number of ways. For example, some have attributed the decline in male violence to focused deterrence and prevention programs targeting mostly male violent offending (as discussed in Chapter 3 of this volume).94 Another example is the perspective of institutional anomie theorists, who view the male decline as occurring through a lessened male propensity for violence as increased gender equality expands male responsibilities at home.95 Finally, one of the most common explanations for the gender gap in violence is that it is borne out only through official data, such as arrests from the Uniform Crime Report, and this reflects not an actual change in violence across genders, but changes in social control and police practices that have a “net-widening” effect on the definitions of offenses as violent.96 Definitions of girls’ violence may be culturally constructed, and to at least some extent, accounted for by the increased visibility of girls in public spaces—their behavior in these spaces may be relatively minor but viewed more seriously, given its construction as rebellion.97
With regard to the explanation of female criminality, Miller concluded that “it is important to strike a balance between recognizing the significance of gender and gender inequality but not to reduce everything to gender.”98 Similarly, Giordano and Rockwell concluded that “a truly comprehensive approach … inevitably would include attention to causal processes that appear gender specific (e.g., backgrounds of sexual abuse) and to those that appear to have applicability to both males and females (e.g., family histories that include exposure to criminal definitions and opportunities).”99 These conclusions about the role of gender in criminology theories appear to be reasonable generally.
Crime is overwhelmingly a gendered activity, and the gender ratio may be considered the single most important fact that criminology theories must be able to explain. Although criminologists are gradually beginning to take the task of explaining the gender gap more seriously, the hard truth is that traditional theories have largely failed even to consider this problem, much less explain it. It seems likely that the full explanation of the gender ratio will have to include some theories that are common to both genders and some that are specific to each gender. Beyond that, the full explanation of the gender ratio will have to include what feminists describe as the sex–gender system of patriarchy—the stratified system of gender roles and expectations by which women and men enact femininity and masculinity. Whether the gender gap is narrowing, and if so, how to explain the change, are questions that are in considerable ongoing debate.
Feminist theories of crime (and feminist scholars themselves) continue to be criticized by many, in what can be considered as a backlash to the feminist movement, and feminists have had to defend themselves. As one example, DeKesered and Dragiewicz take on Donald Dutto’s100 work on woman abuse. They state that Dutto claims (1) women are as violent as men; (2) feminism is a political agenda; (3) feminists rely on a single-factor explanation of woman abuse (patriarchy); (4) feminists ignore women’s use of violence; and (5) feminists are proponents of ineffective mandatory arrest and prosecution policies in instances of intimate partner violence.101
According to DeKesered and Dragiewicz, all these claims are problematic. The assortment that women are as violent as men in woman abuse cases conflates offensive and defensive violence. The notion of feminists as all political by nature ignores “scores of feminist studies”102 uncited by Dutton, based on rigorous objective scientific standards and published in top journals. Similarly, Dutton in his claim on the single-factor approach, ignores a “large feminist literature combining both macro-level factors, such as unemployment, globalization, deindustrialization, life events, stress, intimate relationship status, familial and societal patriarchy, substance use, male peer support, and other factors.”103 With regard to women’s use of violence, they point to a number of theoretical and empirical works by feminist scholars that discuss female offensive violence against men. And finally, feminists have supported holistic nonenforcement responses to violence against women.
Reference
Snipes, J., Bernard, T., & Gerould, A. (2019). Vold’s theoretical criminology (8th Edition). Oxford University Press.
