Gender and Crime

1
Gender and Crime

• Feminist Criminology

2
Early Views on Women Crime

• Lombroso The Female Offender (1895)
• Biologically Male-like
• Psychological Passivity
• Cold Calculating Predisposition
• Otto Pollak The Criminality of Women (1950, 1961)
• Women were inherently deceitful
• Women were vengeful
• Women were treated different by the law
• Female Crime was hidden

3
Freda AdlerSisters in Crime (1975)

• Women were becoming more aggressive and
  competitive
• Taking on more masculine qualities
• Violent crime

4
Rita James SimonWomen and Crime (1975)

• Women were not taking on masculine
  characteristics
• Wider variety of opportunities
• Property and white-collar crime

5
Schools of Feminist Criminology

• Liberal Feminism
• Radical Feminism
• Patriarchy
• Marxist Feminism
• Socialist Feminism

6
Kathleen DalyMeda Chesney-Lind

• Generalizability Problem
• Gender Ratio Problem
• Gendered Crime Pathways

7
James Messerschmidt (1986)Doing Gender

• Intersection of gender and class.
• Gendered and class-based division of labor
  coupled with gender and workplace socialization
  experiences account for differences.
• Women subject to greater control
• and closely supervised.

8
Patterns and Trends

• Self-report studies of lawbreaking show higher
  rates of prevalence and incidence for boys.
• Arrest data show larger gender ratios of
  lawbreaking than self-report studies.
• Trend data for arrests from 1960 to 1990 show
  female share of arrests rose from 10 to 20
  percent.

9
Women in the Criminal Justice Process

• Legal Model
• Chivalry
• Paternalism
• Evil Women
• Informal Social Control
• Deviant Typescripts

10
Critiques of Traditional Theories

• Ignored or distorted topics related to women.
• Explained only the behavior of men.
• Ignored the socially constructed relationships
  between men and women.
• Failed to address the differences in the ways
  women were treated by the criminal justice system.