Rising Female Criminality

What is rising female criminality?

• Whilst female crime has been relatively steady in recent years, it has risen significantly over the past 50 years

• Only 15% of arrests are of women (Ministry of Justice 2017)

• A higher percentage of those females arrested had mental health needs (69%)

• 26% of cases in court were female, 27% of convictions - although females have a lower custody rate of 2% of cases compared to 10% for males

What did Carlen say about class and gender deal?

• He argued that women turned to crime because they had rejected the class and gender deals offered to them

• Whilst this implies control over women, social changes demonstrate of rejecting gender and class deals

• Significantly more females had an alcohol problem when they arrived in prison (24%) than males (18%); similarly for a drug problem (39% compared to 28%)

What is Heidelsohn say about the control theory?

• His view is that women were controlled in different spheres - lower criminality

• Reduced control over women has led to increased criminal behaviour - however, women's crimes are still predominantly linked to household

• TV licence prosecutions, truancy and shoplifting are more likely to be female crimes- however most common female crime was offences against a person (over 50,000 cases)

What did Adler say about the liberation thesis?

• His research suggested that the rise of second-wave feminism coincided with increased female criminality

• As women became more liberated, their opportunities for committing offences increased

• Accounts for the rise in offences by women, yet female offences often differ to male ones

What is the sex role theory?

• Parson's sex role theory suggests that women are less likely to be criminal than males due to socialisation

• Changes to gender socialisation can be argued to have occurred with women socialised into being more assertive and demonstrating traditional masculine characteristics

What is net widening?

• A further explanation is the reversal of attitudes towards female criminality

• Pollock's Chivalry Thesis suggested a paternalistic attitude to women's criminality

• In recent years, and in response to moral panics over ‘ladettes’ and ‘girl gangs’ police have ‘widened the net’ to explore possibilities of females being offenders

What is the evluation?

• Despite rises in female criminality, in recent years this has stabilised and begun to decline

• Rise in some offences that would be seen as being part of the masculine domain increasing for females - e.g. drug dealing, and sexual offences - but are still largely dominated by males