4.3.1 - Feminist Theories of Crime

The gender gap and malestream criminology

One starting point for feminist theories of crime is the gender gap. Official statistics consistently show that men commit far more recorded crime than women, especially violent crime and sexual offences. Women are a much smaller proportion of the prison population and are more often associated with minor property offences such as shoplifting or fraud. Feminists agree that this pattern is real, but they also argue that older criminology often asked the wrong questions about it.

Frances Heidensohn argued that much criminology was "malestream": it focused on men, took male offending as standard, and paid too little attention to women's offending and victimisation. Carol Smart pushed the critique further. She argued that criminology was not just incomplete; it was shaped by male assumptions about what counts as crime, whose experiences matter, and how female behaviour is judged. That is why feminist criminology studies women as offenders, but also as victims, and asks how power shapes both.

This matters for method as well as theory. Official statistics tell us what is recorded by the criminal justice system, not the total amount of offending. Self-report studies sometimes show a narrower gender gap than official figures suggest, which means detection, reporting and prosecution may also be gendered processes. Feminists therefore treat crime data carefully rather than assuming the official picture is neutral.

Patriarchal control and broken deals

Feminist explanations do not usually say women are naturally less criminal. They argue that women are more tightly controlled in a patriarchal society and therefore have fewer opportunities, and often stronger pressures, to conform.

Heidensohn used control theory to explain why women offend less. At home, domestic labour, childcare and expectations of being a "good" wife or mother reduce time, freedom and legitimacy for risky behaviour. In public, fear of male violence and concern for respectability restrict where women go and how they act. At work, male authority, surveillance and harassment can limit both women's autonomy and their access to criminal opportunities. Her argument is not that women are passive, but that patriarchy narrows their choices more than it does for men.

This approach also connects crime to identity and socialisation. Girls are often taught caution, care and self-restraint more strongly than boys, while femininity is linked to respectability. Feminists see this not as a neutral cultural difference but as part of a wider structure of social control. Sunita Toor's work on British Asian young women supports this line of argument by showing how honour and shame can intensify control over girls' behaviour, though this is a specific context and not a universal account of all women.

Pat Carlen developed a related but more class-sensitive explanation from her study of 39 convicted women, using in-depth unstructured interviews. She argued that many working-class women are offered two incentives to conform. The first is the class deal: legitimate work is supposed to bring material rewards and consumer security. The second is the gender deal: femininity, family life and relationships with men are supposed to bring emotional and material support. When both deals fail, crime can become a more imaginable option.

Carlen's method gave rich insight into women's own meanings and biographies, which is a strength because it avoids treating female offenders as statistics only. However, it was a small sample focused mainly on working-class women already in trouble with the law, so it cannot simply be generalised to all women. Even so, it is powerful because it links female offending to poverty, care experience, abuse and blocked opportunities rather than to a simple idea of moral weakness.

Liberation, chivalry and double deviance

Not all feminist arguments explain low female offending in the same way. Some focus on control and inequality, while others ask whether changes in gender relations alter women's offending or the way the criminal justice system responds to it.