Gender

• Patterns - chivalry thesis (Pollack)


  • Most criminal justice agents are men, who are socialised to act in a gentlemanly way towards women
  • Means female crime goes unreported and makes official statistics unreliable
  • Hood - study of over 3000 defendants and found that women were 1/3 less likely to be jailed for similar cases for men
• Patterns - criticisms for chivalry thesis

  • Box - studied self-report studies and found that women are not treated more favourably than men for serious offences
  • Yearnshire - Ignores unreported male crimes, women typically suffer 35 assaults reporting domestic violence
  • Ignores the fact that women commit more corporate crime, as men don't feel they need to due to their privileged position in the job market
• Patterns - gender norms (Heidensohn)


  • Court treats women more harshly than men when they deviate from gender norms
  • Sharpe - out of 55 juvenile sexual promiscuity cases, 7/11 girls were referred for support but none of the 44 boys were
  • Stewart - women who don't conform to heterosexual motherly role are seen as more deviant and get punished harsher
• Female crime explanations - functionalist sex role theory (Parsons)


  • Boys socialised to be rough, aggressive risk takers
  • Girls socialised to be passive, caring and calm
  • Explains why more men commit than women
  • Counter - Walklate says its based on untested biological assumptions
• Female crime explanations - patriarchal control (Heidensohn)


  • Control at home - domestic roles impose restrictions on time and movement and confines women to the home, reducing their opportunities to offend
  • Control in public - societal pressure controls behaviour that's not respectable, and the media's mass reporting of crimes against women keeps them inside
  • Control at work - having to work harder to climb the job ladder reduces offending as they cannot afford to ruin their career, men's sexual harassment keeps women 'in their place'
  • Counter - ignores free will
• Female crime explanations - class and gender deals (Carlen)


  • Class deal - women who work will be offered material rewards, with a decent standard of living and leisure opportunities
  • Gender deal - patriarchal ideology promises women material and emotional rewards from family life by conforming to the norms of a conventual domestic gender role
  • Counter - sample is small and may be unrepresentative, consisting of largely WC offenders
• Female crime explanations - liberation thesis (Adler)


  • As women become liberated from patriarchy, their crimes will become more as frequent as men's
  • Women beginning to work in traditionally male workspaces, they have started committing more male crimes, like violence
  • Counter - Chesney-Lind found that women committing 'male' crimes were largely prostitutes, a very unliberated female offence
• Female crime explanations - criminalisation of females

  • Steffensmeier and Schwartz - women aren't committing more crime, the justice system has just widen the net for offending to include smaller instances of violence
  • Chesney-Lind - when a couple fight, both are arrested, even though it is likely the women is a victim
• Female crime explanations - moral panic

  • Burman and Batchelor - media depicts young women as drunk, disorderly, out of control and ready to fight
  • Sharpe - Judges influences by media stereotypes of 'ladettes' and that girls behaviour was worsening
  • Steffensmeier - media-driven panic about girls were affecting sentencing decisions
• Men committing - masculinity (Messerschmidt) 


  • Masculinity is a social construct and some men have more resources to construct this identity than others
  • Hegemonic masculinity - dominant form that most aim to accomplish, gain status from other men through violence and sexual harassment
  • Subordinated masculinity - gay men who have no desire to appear traditionally masculine or lower-class men who cannot afford hegemonic identity
  • Counter - not all men use masculinity to accomplish crime and uses his theory to place a blanket over all male crime
• Female crime explanations - postmodernity (Winlow)


  • Globalisation and tech development has led to a reduction in traditional labour jobs that men used to express their masculinity through, has led to them resorting to crime
  • Found that bouncers in Sunderland used their job to gain access to illegal opportunities like drugs
  • Bodily capital - some men have to resort to bodybuilding and their masculinity to stay employed, like body builders. They also do this to accomplish violence