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The relationship between gender and crime
The relationship between gender and crime
The role of women in crime and punishment
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Female Serial Killers
While most of the violent crimes that happens most are them are belongs to men, women have not been the wilting flowers promoted so heartily by Victorian adorers and (right or wrong) often evident in today's society. Before we get into detail about the fascinating phenomenon of the Black Widow, it is worth a brief overview of women's escalating role in the world of violent crime, particularly in the United States.
Since 1970, there has been an increasing and alarming rise 138 percent of violent crimes committed by women. Still, while the equivalent percentage compared to male violence is small 15 percent to 85 percent the fact that the numbers have elevated so drastically points to something changing in society.
Sociologists try to explain it, so do criminologists, theologizes, politicians and world historians, but the resulting message is clear, and that message is that females are not alien to committing violent acts. In recent years, women have committed some of the most heinous crimes. Darlie Routier killed her two sons for reasons blamed on personal economics. Diane Downs killed one of her three children (she tried to kill all of them) in order to win back a lover who didn't want kids. Susan Smith drowned her boys in a neighborhood lake because her boyfriend did not want the responsibility of raising some other man's children. Karla Homolka and husband Paul Bernardo sexually assaulted, tortured and killed several young women for thrills.
There a...
National data gives us an indication of the severity of this issue. When 1 in 5-woman report being victims of severe physical violence (NISVS, 2010), we must ask ourselves if enough is being done to prevent this from occurring. From a historical point, there has always almost been a distinction from men on woman violence. Based on the disparity of cases reported, male inflicted violence on females is much higher and prevalent. When the perpetrators of DV, and IPV are predominately males, we can no longer dismissed this issue as a cultural, or
"Violence against women-it's a men's issue." Jackson Katz:. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014. .
Walklate, S. (2001) Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice. 1st ed. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Press. 26
In the study involving 2,143 married couples living together completed in 1975 and the study involving 6,002 couples completed in 1985 these studies showed that females had a slightly higher rate of assaulting their spouse than men did (Straus & Gelles, 1986, 1990). The overall rates in the 1985 National Family Violence Survey was 124 per 1,000 women assaulted their male partners compared to 122 per 1000 men who assaulted their female partners (Dutton, 1988; Stets & Straus, 1990). These studies show that women have the same if not hig...
The most notable discovery or key concept behind intimate partner violence with women as victims, would be that the overall rates have seen a general decrease. As found in the National Trends in Intimate Partner Homicide report, "Spousal homicide rates for both women and men have declined between 1974 and 2000" (Bunge, 2002). Many of the authors discussed present different perspecti...
The criminal justice system main focus has always been shifted towards male offenders and their responses to male crimes. Women and girls offending lacked attention simply because most crimes were known to be committed by males and not females. Nevertheless, towards the end of the 20th century, female incarceration tremendously took a turn for the worst, leading to more study on women/girls, women and crime offending, crimes, and the criminal justice system in regard to feminist. This increase rate of women incarceration was led in regard to “war on drugs”. It was explained that women’s and girl’s crime and deviance is trigger often by biological factors than by social or economic forces (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988). In the late 1960s, Bertrand
Moreover, females acting alone manage an estimated eight year killing time, double that of their male counterpart (as cited in Farrell et al, 2011, p. 232). For children, people are often hesitant to blame women for their deaths. Nobody wants to accept that a mother could kill their own child, or anyone else’s child. Even if they aren’t a mother, women are seen as compassionate and caring, the nurturing gender, so they are less likely to be the center of investigation in a child’s death.
Are violent crimes towards women becoming a social norm for America? The answer is yes, violent crimes such as rape and murder are all becoming “just another story” for many Americans. From Isobel Parker, a twenty-three year old woman who was murdered by her boyfriend in Tennessee, to Dru Sjodin, a twenty-two year old college student, who was murdered by a man in North Dakota, all the way to these stories are no longer shocking to many Americans simply because they hear about stories similar to this on a daily basis.
Why do females commit crimes? Female’s percentages in jails and prisons have increase in the recent years. This has led to our society being concern of female crimes and how they affect us. This paper will discuss female inmates and some of the legal and social problems they face in the criminal justice system.
While all feminist theorists share a common focus on gender inequality, there are differing views on the source of the problem and the ultimate solution. Liberal Feminists Freda Adler and Rita argued that sociological factors, not physiology, best explain women’s criminality. There is a strong relationship between women’s emancipation and the increase in female crime rates. As women become more liberated and become more involved in full time jobs, they are more likely to engage in the types of crime that men commit. Thrasher, a leading exponent of the social disorganization perspective, felt that girls and women committed less crime because they were more closely supervised by boys and men. These arguments lacked any factual support.
Due to a strong cultural bias, society often disinvolves or denies the very existence of a female serial killer. Whereas the male serial killer has been regularly lionized by his outrageous exploits, the female serial killer is typically ignored, viewed as an anomaly (Kelleher p.xi)
A serial killer is a person whom everybody knows as a friend, a lover or even a father but no one knows about his killer instinct until it's to late. Serial killers have plagued this country and others for many years. They are hard to find and virtually undetectable until they start murdering the innocent.
Although feminist theory and intersectionality in particular have played a large role in the subfield of sociology of gender, their integration into the subfield of criminology has been less pronounced. Because the most consistent finding in criminological research is that men commit most crime, many areas of criminology continue to focus on men, overlooking women and girls, without ever acknowledging the role of gender (Belknap 2001; Britton 2004; Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988; Morash 2006). Nonetheless, a growing number of feminist criminologists have been at the forefront in advocating for the integration of women and other marginalized groups into criminological research (Flavin 2004; Simpson 1989) and have also been strong supporters for the adoption of intersectionality in criminology (Belknap 2001; Burgess-Proctor 2006; Chesney-Lind 2006; Daly 1997; Morash 2006; Potter 2006). In this way, feminist criminologists have emphasized that
From the start women who commit violent crimes are all ready in the spot-light. Society has grown quite accustomed to viewing the womens role in violent crimes as that of the victim. When the women is a violator it incites a gross media fascination as a novelty. Convicted women gain more notoriety then men who are found guilty of committing the same crime. In certain cases like Amy Fisher, Loren Bobbit and most recently Louise Woodward the media celebrate the violence of women. If it had been a man who shot his lovers mate in the head or slashed and dismembered their spouse or shook a baby to death things would be different. The media would not give as in depth of coverage to the trial and sentencing would be of a longer time. The media escalates these women to such extremes due to the fact that there are so few women who are tried for criminally violent acts. Society tends to be more sympathetic to women who commit violent crimes than men. To this day Americans are still reluctant to put women to death. The recent execution of Karla Faye Tucker had the country in an uproar. This is because women are seen as less scary and less dangerous then men.
It seems that hegemonic masculinity does a great deal in explaining male-perpetrated familicide, but it fails to explain female perpetrators. There is a great lack of gender symmetrical explanations of interpersonal violence. However, as the 21st century continues, and there is a continued strive for gender equality, there is good chance that there will be an increasing amount of gender based research on violence.