The second offering in our short season of new crime films (the first provides an empirical example of Situational Crime Prevention in the form of Painter and Farrington’s Stoke-on-Trent street-lighting experiment) looks at the enduring relationship between gender and crime.
This relationship, as sociologists have long-observed, is one that, both historically and cross-culturally, is dominated by men – to the extent that statistical analysis consistently shows that in almost every country over 80% of crime is committed by men.
In recent years, however, the gender gap in countries like Britain and North America has been closing: the male crime rate has been steadily falling while the female rate, particularly but not exclusively for violent crime, has been increasing.
This short (8-minute) film provides a general introduction to the relationship between gender and crime through various sociological theories – from control, through strain to hegemonic masculinity – that seek to both explain gender differences in crime and why things may be (slowly) changing.