When people think about crime, they often think about men committing the crimes. In fact as a society we view crime as almost entirely male. Our ideas about who is in prison are centered around men, and our fears about crime are centered around men. In fact, when we do talk about women and crime, we often are comparing them to men.
This is no surprise though, because men do commit more crimes and they always have. They have always had a higher crime rate in all societies. However, this does not meant that female crime is unimportant. Research tends to focus on male crime, but female crime is also important to study.
When we have studied female crime, it is often seen as an anomaly. There is usually a case study done of an extreme crime committed by a woman. It is analyzed in a variety of ways to explain her deviance, instead of exploring the deeper root causes of female crime. An example would be that of Cheryl Pierson.
Cheryl’s case is complicated and rare. But it has been studied by a variety of groups, all to explain how such a sweet girl could do such a horrible thing. But girls and women commit crimes. It is not such an impossible thing. We just view it as such because it is so rare. The interesting thing about Cheryl’s case, is that she did not kill her father, a male friend did.
We focus on the horror of her crime, and almost completely forget about the murder that the man committed. Because men commit more crimes, it is less of a stretch to think that a male friend could do such a thing, so we do not focus on it. Instead we focus on Cheryl’s crime, not only was it horrible, but women are not supposed to commit crimes.
Citations:
Darrell Steffensmeier and Emilie Allan, “Gender and Crime: Toward a Gendered Theory of Female Offending,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 22 (1996), pp. 459-487.
David J. Krajicek, “A secret turned deadly,” NYDaily News, Feb. 2009, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/02/15/2009-02-15_a_secret_turned_deadly.html
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