Gender and crime

Gender and crime

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Gender and crime

The term woman can be confusing a little as it is a sex and gender’s category. The two words can be explained and sex is basically the biological characteristics that make someone either a male or a female whereas gender is the feminine or masculine traits existing in someone. Back to the old theories of criminology, female offenders were categorized as male as they were viewed to commit male crimes or it was believed most crimes were committed by males (Fahmy & Young, 2017). This document focuses on women treatment in criminal justice as well as the solution for the same treatments.

Women and crime studies have shown that throughout the 20th and 21st century, changes have incredibly advanced and many of the changes were brought by feminism’s social and political efforts. Discrimination of women in criminology activities were there until 1970s when some of them were given attention. According to Boesten & Wilding (2015), majority of this female criminologist were focusing on equality issues regarding to men and women in terms of criminal justice responses and offending acts. This was the first wave feminism and both the second and third wave had different ideas to address. The second focused on white liberal feminist’s works while the third addressed different women’s perspectives such as sexuality, race and nationality.

Feminist criminologist encouraged systems of criminal justice to have a different view of female offenders and female victimization conversations were encouraged by feminism. The second and third wave’s efforts brought more attention to female offenders’ victimization. A greater participation in the workforce was brought by feminism and criminal justice field was not exceptional (Fahmy & Young, 2017). Suggestions from scholars are failure to rise of feminism, concerns of scholarly including sex work, rape and domestic assault would possibly not have happened.

Many women are familiar with victimization and expectations of males to be victims of crimes; women have certain forms of violent crimes which they compose majority into. Most of the female victims are victimized by someone they are familiar to and in many cases, they don’t seek help from systems of criminal justice due to conviction factors. Female criminologists have a little mercy and due to the familiarization strategy, most of them receive better treatments unlike males.

Female are compared to male offenders by using the similarities and differences between both patterns and this can be referred to gender gap. This gap clearly shows the differences of both the female and male offending in serious violent crimes. Female crimes such as prostitution cannot be categorized with male crimes such as robbery as the latter seems more serious. Women are not treated the same as men during criminal justice proceedings as most of their crimes are not that serious (Boesten & Wilding, 2015). The masculine characteristic in males tend to make them commit serious crimes like murder but the feminine characteristic in women rarely make them commit serious crimes.

Conclusion

It is crystal clear that most males commit crime than females in every region and a biological factor such as testosterone can also add up to the observation differences. Nowadays the existence of female criminologists has impacted change in these organizations and most of them are now dealing with crimes committed by females such as: prostitutions and status offences. Gender gap has help to differentiate male and women crime patterns considering most male crimes are a bit serious than females’. The best solution to solve such an issue is by involving the criminal justice system of both genders when ruling such cases.

References

Boesten, J., & Wilding, P. (2015). Transformative gender justice: Setting an agenda. In Women’s Studies International Forum (Vol. 51, pp. 75-80). Elsevier.

Fahmy, C., & Young, J. T. (2017). Gender inequality and knowledge production in criminology and criminal justice. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 28(2), 285-305.