FEMALE DELINQUENCY

Delinquency came to be seen as a male phenomenon. Indeed, Lombroso

explained female criminality as occurring among women who possessed masculine characteristics in
appearance and personality. 25

With more women having jobs, schools and other social institutions have assumed additional
responsibility for socialization of the young. The female sex role has expanded to include behaviours
that were once considered ''masculine,'' such as aggressiveness and achievement orientation. As a
result, the female juvenile has more freedom and more opportunities for involvement in delinquency.

The types of offenses that females commit, according to police and juvenile court records, are very
different from those committed by males. Official female delinquency most often consists of sexual
offenses, running away from home, incorrigibility, and truancy whereas males are more likely to commit
property offenses. 28 These differences are not surprising since they coincide with sex-role expectations
for females and males. Women are encouraged to be expressive and to establish status in terms of
sexual attractiveness.

29 Men are encouraged to be success oriented and to engage in instrumental behaviours. Thus the
female who experiments with sex is seen as expressing rebellion or a desire for status whereas sexual
activity among males is considered acceptable. A male is more likely to be arrested for property offenses
or violence.

Maleness

Messerschmidt (1993) contends that men are constantly placed in situations in which they must
establish their maleness. In order to establish their maleness, men engage in behaviour that has been
sanctioned by society as demonstrating masculinity, including seeking independence, pursuing sexual
gratification, dominating women and so on.

For minority lower class boys, on the other hand, demonstrating maleness cannot be done in the
context of school or a job. Rather, they do gender through repeated commission of violent crimes. With
his ideas on masculinity and crime, Messerschmidt (1993) provides an explanation for why men engage
in so much more crime than women and why minority members of the lower class engage in relatively
more crime than other groups.

patriarchy
Chesney-Lind (1989) delineated the ways in which patriarchy may contribute to female delinquency. She
starts by pointing out the fact that girls are frequent targets of violence and sexual abuse in the home;
patriarchy facilitates sexual abuse of girls because it facilitates the view of girls as objects whose
sexuality is for the taking by any interested man. Running away from home does not solve the problem
of abuse. Rather, runaways are returned to their homes by the police, which does nothing to stop the
abuse, or they must live on the streets. Once on the streets, they have to resort to crime, including
prostitution, in order to survive.

With this seminal work, Chesney-Lind (1989) highlights a prominent theme in this feminist criminological
perspective, namely that the criminal victimization of women is a key factor in their offending.

Research on Feminist Criminology

There is little evidence that females were experiencing more equality at the time when female crime
rates started to increase. Moreover, Steffensmeier (1980) contends that the increase in female crime
started to occur before the Women's Movement. The gender gap has remained fairly consistent over
time, with men committing much more crime than women and there appears to be no relationship
between feminist attitudes and female crime (Chesney-Lind and Shelden, 2004). What increases in
female crime there have been are not confined to occupational crime, but extend to other offenses such
as shoplifting. Research on victimization and its association with crime as discussed by Chesney-Lind
(1989) reveals that people who have been subjected to victimization are more likely to become criminal
offenders than those who have not been victimized (Brezina, 1998; Widom and Maxfield, 2001).
However, Widom's (1989) robust study found that both male and female victims of abuse went on to
have equal likelihoods of offending, undermining the notion of a special pathway to offending for
women that is predicated on victimization.

IMPLICATIONS

The greatest strength of feminist criminology is that it turned collective attention toward how social
changes have the potential to influence women's involvement in crime and, more recently, how
women's subjugation under patriarchy may lead to their victimization and their eventual criminality. In
short, feminist criminology convincingly emphasized the need to examine gender as not just a
demographic variable but as a way to understand human experiences and behaviour. Consideration and
appreciation of the importance of gender-based experiences may lead to better assessments of needs
and predictions about future behaviour.

As yet, there is no gender-specific theory of crime. The different perspectives discussed above have not
received a great deal of empirical support. As mentioned, predictions from both the liberation and
patriarchy perspectives are not well supported by data. In addition to the studies noted above that
challenge the various perspectives, Campbell's (1999) staying alive hypothesis does little to explain why
women are involved in crime, instead focusing on why they are not.

Messerschmidt's (1993) work cannot explain why if men, especially low class minority males, are always
doing gender, they do not always engage in crime.