Sex differences in crime

Sex differences in crime are differences between men and women as the perpetrators or victims of crime. Such studies may belong to fields such as criminology (the scientific study of criminal behavior), sociobiology (which attempts to demonstrate a causal relationship between biological factors, in this case biological sex and human behaviors), or feminist studies. Despite the difficulty of interpreting them, crime statistics may provide a way to investigate such a relationship from a gender differences perspective. An observable difference in crime rates between men and women might be due to social and cultural factors, crimes going unreported, or to biological factors (for example, testosterone or sociobiological theories). The nature or motive of the crime itself may also require consideration as a factor. Gendered profiling might affect the reported crime rates.

Statistics have been consistent in reporting that men commit more criminal acts than women. Self-reported delinquent acts are also higher for men than for women, although lower than official data. Low levels of self control are associated with criminal activity. Many professionals have offered explanations for this sex difference. Some differing explanations include men's evolutionary tendency toward risk and violent behavior, sex differences in activity, social support, or gender inequality.

The "general theory of crime" is accepted among scholars as one of the most valid theories of crime. Burton et al. (1998) assessed Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) work on the subject, which stated that individuals with lower levels of self-control are more likely to be involved in criminal behavior, in a gender-sensitive context. The purpose of their study was to account for the gender gap in crime rates. By using a self-reporting questionnaire, Burton et al. (1998) retrieved data from 555 people aged eighteen and older in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area. Early results from the study indicated that low self-control was highly positively correlated to criminal behavior in both genders, but was especially significant for males. For females, the relationship became significant when opportunity was introduced and considered with level of self-control. Opportunity was not a significant indicator of male criminal behavior, which the authors attribute to the assumption that opportunity for criminal behavior is ubiquitous for men. In this study, opportunity was measured by the number of nights per week individuals go out for recreation purposes. Similarly, the authors conclude that women are less likely to be exposed to opportunities for criminal behavior, speculating that "constraints often placed on females, and that accompany their lifestyles" contribute to less opportunity for crime. With self-control being significant for males but not for females, the conclusions of this study pointed toward the notion that men and women commit crimes for different reasons. The notion that self-control was only significant for women when combined with opportunity helps account for the gender gap seen in crime rates.

David Rowe, Alexander Vazsonyi, and Daniel Flannery, authors of Sex Differences in Crime: Do Means and Within-Sex Variation Have Similar Causes?, focus on the widely acknowledged fact that there is a large sex difference in crime: more men than women commit crimes. This has been true over time and across cultures. There is also a greater number of men who commit serious crimes resulting in injury or death than women. In a study that looked at self-reports of delinquent acts, researchers identified several sex differences by looking at sex ratios. For every woman, 1.28 men drink alcohol, which is a large influencer in deviant behavior. For every woman, 2.7 men committed the crime of stealing up to $50. Lastly, for every woman, 3.7 men steal more than $50. Also, more males are involved in homicides, as both the perpetrators and victims, than females. Furthermore, one male is more delinquent than another for mainly the same reasons that men typically engage in criminal acts more than women.

Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi compare childhood risk factors of males and females portraying childhood-onset and adolescent-onset antisocial behavior, which influences deviant behavior in individuals. Childhood-onset delinquency is attributed to lack of parenting, neurocognitive problems, and temperament and behavior problems. On the other hand, adolescent-onset delinquents did not encounter similar childhood problems. This study showed a male-to-female ratio of 10:1 for those experiencing childhood-onset delinquency and 15:1 for adolescent-onset delinquency. Moffitt and Caspi hypothesized that "'life-course-persistent' antisocial behavior originates early in life, when the difficult behavior of a high-risk young child is exacerbated by a high-risk social environment". Also, "'adolescent-limited' antisocial behavior emerges alongside puberty, where otherwise healthy youngsters experience dysphoria during the relatively role-less years between biological maturation and access to mature privileges and responsibilities", called the maturity gap. They look at the taxonomy theory, which states that the gender difference in crime are based on sex differences in the risk factors for life-course-persistent antisocial behavior. Based on research, girls are less likely than boys to have nervous system dysfunctions, difficult temperament, late maturity in verbal and motor development, learning disabilities, and childhood behavioral problems.

Considerations of gender in regard to crime have been considered to be largely ignored and pushed aside in criminological and sociological study, until recent years, to the extent of female deviance having been marginalized. In the past fifty years of sociological research into crime and deviance, sex differences were understood and quite often mentioned within works, such as Merton's theory of anomie; however, they were not critically discussed, and often any mention of female delinquency was only as comparative to males, to explain male behaviors, or through defining the girl as taking on the role of a boy, namely, conducting their behavior and appearance as that of a tomboy and by rejecting the female gender role, adopting stereotypical masculine traits.

Eagly and Steffen suggested in their meta-analysis of data on sex and aggression that beliefs about the negative consequences of violating gender expectations affect how both genders behave regarding aggression. Psychologist Anne Campbell argued that "cultural interpretations have 'enhanced' evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression."

One key reason contended for this lack of attention to females in crime and deviance is due to the view that female crime has almost exclusively been dealt with by men, from policing through to legislators, and that this has continued through into the theoretical approaches, quite often portraying what could be considered as a one-sided view, as Mannheim suggested.