Explaining Female Crime

The CJS is more lenient with women. 

Majority of CJS agents are male (Police/Judges) and are socalised to act in a chivalrous way towards women. 

Leniency - women's crimes are less likely to end up on official statistics - gender differences in rates of offending are over-exaggerated. 

Argues that men and women commit similar amounts of crime. However, the types of crimes that wome commit, like shoplifting are underpresented in crime statistics - easily concealed, underreported crimes. 

Ev/ An - Womens and girls crime rates in Englands and Wales doubled for violence since 2000 = women are becoming more violent. 

However, Farrington & Morris found that women were not sentenced more leniently for comparable offences 

Heidensohn - women have fewer oppurtunities to commit crime due to gendered patterns of social control, which reinforces the control that men have over women - expected not to go out alone or at night. 

Carlen - Womens crime rates reflects their powerlessness; lack oppurtunity to change their repressed positions. More likely to experience abuse at the hands of men who use violence to assert their control over them. No legitimate oppurtunities to improve their situations. 

Walkate - Due to a patriarchal society it assumes that because women are biologically suited to bear children, they are best suited for the expressive role. 

Adler - Women have begun to adopt traditionally male roles in both legitimate and illegitimate activities. 

Functionalist Sex Role Theory - Parsons:  Boys tend to be socialised to be physical, competitive, agressive and macho. While girls tend to be socialised to be compliant, reserved and conforming. Cohen: Boys reject feminine models of behaviour that express tenderness and emotion, seeking to distance themselves from these role models, they engage in masculinity through agression. 

Patriarchal Control - Heidensohn: Womens behaviour is subject to conformity. They commit fewer crimes than men because patriarchal society imposes greater control over them, reducing their oppurtunities to offend. 

Class and Gender deals - Carlen: Argues most convicted serious female criminals are w/c. Alike Hirschi, humans act rationally and are controlled by by being offered a 'deal' of rewards, in return for conforming to social norms. They turn to crime if the reward is percieved as greater than the risk and the reward for conforming. W/c women conform through the promise of 2 types of rewards. 

The class deal - women who work = maternal rewards, decent standard of living, leisure oppurtunities. 

The gender deal - Patriarchal ideology promises women material and emotional rewards from family life.

If patriarchal society exercises control over women to prevent them from deviating. = logical to believe that if society was less patriarchal and more gender equal, women's crime rates should increase and be similar to mens. 

Adler argues that due to the liberation thesis that the crime statistics for men should mirror that of women. 

Women have more oppurtunities, such as work and education that they didn't before. They have adopted more male roles