Rising Female Criminality

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

Carlen- Class and Gender Deal:

  • Carlen 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%)

Heidelsohn- Control Theory:

  • Heidensohn's view 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)

Adler- Liberation Thesis:

  • Adler's 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

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

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

Evaluations:

  • 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