What Is Feminist Criminology

For years the equality of women and men have been the central focus of discussion. Criminology has solely aimed their studies on men who commit crimes rather than women. The reason being is that more males commit crimes than females. Studies also show that men also commit more serious offenses than females as to why females get overlooked. Women as criminals even today do not get as much notoriety unless it’s a major crime being committed. Researchers considered female criminals as unnatural female behavior and that females are more nurturing, docile, and caring. The Women’s Movement was a fight for equal opportunity for men and women. The start of educational and occupational opportunities became a staple of women in the field of criminology.

Feminist criminology looks to address this restriction by improving our understanding of both male and female offending as well as criminal justice system responses to their crimes. They also try to find ways to place gender at the center of the discussion, bringing women’s ways of understanding the world into the knowledge on crime, criminality, and responses to crime. It is obvious that men commit more crimes than women. Criminology was developed to help understand why people commit crimes so that laws could be passed to reduce crimes. Women not only commit less crimes they commit crimes that are really unimportant as to why they have been ignored since the 1970’s. Today, women are still committing less crimes but the types of crimes are those similar to men. Feminist criminology includes a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies that discusses how gender forms knowledge at the center of intellectual analysis. It emphases on an extensive variety of issues related to women and crime, including hypothetical explanations of crime, responses to female offending, programming in women’s prisons, women as workers in the field of corrections, and the different needs of women prisoners. Feminist believed it is not a standardized method; it integrates the liberal feminist focus on equal

Socialist feminists’ combine male domination with political and economic structures in society as the foundation of inequality, and the radical feminist concentrate on patriarchal domination of women. However, these feminist methods have in common their attention on the ways in which the gendered structure of society is related to crime. Most of todays, criminological work concentrated on male offenders and criminal justice system responses to male crime. However, female incarceration rates were steadily increasing, as a result the study of women, crime, and the criminal justice system took place. The reason females commit less crimes are because they have more self-control than men. Women are more involved in childcare and more closely tied to the household (Cullen, Agnew, & Wilcox, pg.