The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
(the gender gap is closing) is the most frequently occurring gender–crime pattern. Analyses conducted to compare the gender changes over 10 years used a definition of “less than 5.0%” gender difference in the 10-year change to designate gender stability, whereas gender differences over 5.0% were identified as gender convergence or gender divergence.3 Rape arrest changes were not included in the 10-year change due to a legally changing definition, but the calculations were done for total arrests, violent index crimes, violent property crimes, individual index crimes, and all other offenses. Findings are as follows:
3 The author conducted the gender comparison of changes over 10 years to determine stability, convergence, or divergence. They are not shown here. Also, remember that rape definitions changed between 2009 and 2018 so could not be used for the 10-year change rate (see Table 4.1 footnotes).
Consistently gender convergent (regardless of age group) (n = 14 offenses combined ages and 14 among youth): composite violent index crimes, murder/manslaughter, robbery, aggravated assault, other assaults, arson, vandalism, weapons carrying/possession, drug abuse violations, gambling, offenses against the family and children, drunkenness, non-traffic driving offenses, and suspicion
Gender stable for combined ages (n = 10): total arrests, burglary, motor vehicle theft, stolen property, sex offenses (not rape or prostitution), DUI, liquor law violations, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and curfew/loitering
Gender stable among youth (n = 5): index property offenses, larceny-theft, embezzlement, liquor law violations, and curfew/loitering
Gender divergent for combined ages (n = 5): index property offenses, larceny-theft, forgery/counterfeiting, fraud, and embezzlement
Gender divergent among youth (n = 3): fraud and prostitution/commercialized vice
The Roles of Gender Regarding Co-Offenders, Age, Race, Class, Sexuality, and Mental Illness
Chapters 2 and 3 pointed out how many criminological theories have tended to ignore women and girls or have viewed them through a stereotypical lens that usually distorts their real-life experiences (particularly abuse victimization). Any analysis of gender must avoid a similarly restricted view by accounting for differences among women and girls based on their age, race and ethnicity, social class, sexuality, nationality/citizenship (and immigration status), religion, disability status, and other factors. As noted already, the main source for measuring U.S. crime rates, the UCR, is limited for a variety of reasons, such as they only report on offenses that were reported to the police and where arrests were made. Additionally, they report no information on class or socioeconomic status, and although this has improved some, the information they report on sex, race, and age is done so in a manner that too often makes it impossible to determine the intersection of these variables, such as race × sex, or race × sex × age. Also, it is important to keep in mind that officially collected crime data (e.g., the UCR) are likely a better indicator of those individuals detained by the police and formally processed by the system than of actual offending, given that the majority of crimes are not reported to the police and, of those reported, the police do not always “solve” them. This section analyzes some of the important variables and characteristics often related to actual offending and/or how offending is perceived.
Co-Offending
Whether an offender commits crimes alone or with others (co-offending) is gendered. Like solo offending, most co-offending, particularly serious offending, is by boys and men (e.g., Becker & McCorkel, 2011; Charette & Papachristos, 2017; Holleran & Vandiver, 2016; J. Schwartz et al., 2015; Steffensmeier, Schwartz, & Roche, 2013). Becker and McCorkel’s (2011) co-offending NIBRS study included the widest range of offenses. They found over 62% of offenses were committed by one man/boy, 20% by one woman/girl, 9% by two or more boys/men, 6% by mixed-gender pairs or groups, and only 2% by two or more girls/women. Moreover, the only crimes for which “all-female groups” did not “account for the smallest proportion of incidents” were shoplifting (mixed-gender groups are the smallest) and prostitution and embezzlement (where all-male groups were the least prevalent) (p. 88). A study of corporate crimes found that 71% of the cases were men acting alone or with other men, while mixed-gender groups constituted the remaining 29% of the corporate crimes (Steffensmeier et al., 2013). Thus, every case of a corporate criminal acting alone was of a man (no women acted alone). Moreover, the few times women corporate criminals were “ringleaders” was in collaboration with men, usually their spouses, and in all corporate crimes, the women offenders profited significantly less, and in some cases not at all, compared to the men with whom they co-offended (Steffensmeier et al., 2013).
When offending without boys/men, women/girls tend to “cluster in a relatively narrow range of offenses” (Becker & McCorkel, 2011, p. 99). When they co-offend with men/boys, however, they commit a broader range of and more serious crimes (Becker & McCorkel, 2011; J. Schwartz et al., 2015). Additionally, regardless of offenders’ gender, they are more likely to co-offend with men/boys (Becker & McCorkel, 2011; J. Schwartz et al., 2015), and girls/women are even more likely to co-offend with men/boys when more force or aggression is required, the crime is more for profit than emotional, the victim is a stranger (thus a less certain outcome), and “skill, knowledge, or access to weapons such as guns is required” (J. Schwartz et al., 2015, p. 69). Women/girls are more likely than men/boys to commit a sexual abuse/assault offense with a male co-offender (Becker & McCorkel, 2011; Comartin, Burgess-Proctor, Kubiak, & Kernsmith, 2018). A study of women convicted of sexual abuse/assault found they were more likely to have a co-offender when they had been threatened with a weapon by an intimate partner, had experienced childhood disruptions in parental attachment, and the victim was female (Comartin et al., 2018). Seventy percent of co-offending women/girl sexual abuse offenders reported being coerced by their co-offenders, and they were more likely to have experienced childhood abuse victimization (Comartin et al., 2018).
Age and Juvenile Delinquency
Age is important because it has been well documented that there are relatively few “career criminals.” Most people who break the law do so roughly between the ages of 15 and 24. Kruttschnitt’s (1996) careful review of existing studies reports that “the age-crime relationship may not be gender invariant,” meaning that there exist gender differences depending on age (p. 139). For example, the ratio of male-to-female offending varies significantly depending on the age group examined, and factors such as age at initiation into offending, age at which one escalates to more serious offending, and age at which offenders stop offending all vary by gender (Kruttschnitt, 1996). In 2018, 7.1% of all arrests, 7.7% of all female arrests, and 6.8% of all male arrests were individuals under 18 years old (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019, Tables 38, 39, and 40). Overall, gender uniformity in youthful offending is most apparent in (1) less serious offenses (see Table 4.1), (2) offending self-report studies, and (3) victimization self-report studies.
Status offenses are only crimes for juveniles (under age 18) and include running away from home, drinking alcohol, and truancy from school. The up-criming discussed earlier is an example of age-related CLS processing. Triplett and Myers’s (1995) classic study using National Youth Survey self-report data from more than 1,500 youths found that for the 22 offenses listed under the categories of “status offenses,” “vandalism,” “theft,” and “assault,” boys were more likely to report every crime except running away and hitting a parent, for which boys and girls reported similar rates (about 5% of each ran away from home and about 4% of each hit a parent). When examining the number of times the youths committed an offense at least once (as opposed to the total number of times), there were fewer gender differences. When analyzing gender differences in the context of youths committing crimes, Triplet and Myers found few gender differences for status, property, and theft offenses. The exceptions were the destination when youths ran away, the form of assaults, the extent of injury in assaults, whether the youths were on drugs during the assaults, the purpose of force in assaults, and whether victims