Criminal Behavior

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Recommended: Biological and sociological explanations of crime

It has always been a traditional view that males commit more crimes than females as females are seen more as victims than perpetrators. According to most literature men are the predominant figures where crime is concerned and women are seen as law abiding citizens this essay will show that to an extent gender is a useful tool in explaining criminal behaviour in terms of whether a male or female may have committed a certain type of crime however because of the massive range of differences between different theorists and their explanations of female crime and the link to explaining behaviour there are lots of misconceptions regarding this. This essay will aim to analyse some of the key theorists ideas and use them for an overall explanation of the gender and the explanation of criminal behaviour link.

During the early twentieth century it was believed that men were the main perpetrators of criminal behaviour(Williams 2004), there was not a female crime category, crime was believed to be dominated by males so all crime fell into male categories.(Maguire, Reiner and Morgan 2002)

It is universally believed that males commit more crimes than females and according to the office for national statistics in 2002 males committed four times more crime than females. The figures of male offending rates has stayed fairly consistent in 1984, 84 percent of offenders were male and in 1999 the figure of male offenders was at 83 percent, in 2006 the figure was at 80 percent (Office for national statistics, 2002). In 2006 the statistics showed that in all major crime categories males outnumber females, between 82 and 94 percent of males were convicted of offences such as burglary, drug offences, criminal damage and violence against the person wit...

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Official statistics do show that there is a definite link between Gender and Criminal behaviour however statistics do not explain the actual causes of criminal behaviour, statistics only really show patterns of male and female offending rates. Unfortunately most of the theorists mentioned above have based their theories on assumptions with no real scientific proof however the social explanations regarding crime seem to offer a more acceptable explanation of gender crime and behaviour but seem to ignore important questions such as why do women commit crimes and to what extent is male crime regarded as normal behaviour. Furthermore there is still the controversy surrounding biological and physiological theories. Even though most of these theories get discredited, small parts of these theories get taken, inspiring more research into the area of gender and crime.

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