Crime and Gender: Closing The Gap?

The second offering in our short season of new crime films (the first provides an empirical example of Situational Crime Prevention in the form of Painter and Farrington’s Stoke-on-Trent street-lighting experiment) looks at the enduring relationship between gender and crime.

This relationship, as sociologists have long-observed, is one that, both historically and cross-culturally, is dominated by men – to the extent that statistical analysis consistently shows that in almost every country over 80% of crime is committed by men.

In recent years, however, the gender gap in countries like Britain and North America has been closing: the male crime rate has been steadily falling while the female rate, particularly but not exclusively for violent crime, has been increasing.

This short (8-minute) film provides a general introduction to the relationship between gender and crime through various sociological theories – from control, through strain to hegemonic masculinity – that seek to both explain gender differences in crime and why things may be (slowly) changing.