NCJ Number
190498
Journal
Aggression and Violent Behavior Volume: 6 Issue: 5 Dated: September-October 2001 Pages: 481-497
Date Published
September 2001
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This article reviews literature on female criminality and argues that resource scarcity drives both property and violent offending in women.
Abstract
Property offenses represent women’s attempts to provision themselves, whereas violence reflects competition among females for provisioning males. Evolutionary pressure in terms of the importance of maternal survival to females’ reproductive success resulted in females’ lower threshold for fear in comparison to males, when experiencing the same level of objective physical danger. This adaptation inhibits women’s involvement in crime and makes them more likely to be involved in property crimes than violent crimes. In addition, when direct confrontation is inevitable, this adaptation causes females to use low-risk or indirect tactics. Existing theories of female crime highlight either economic factors or gender differences in social control or self-control and are parallel to this analysis of female criminality with respect to the emphasis on resource needs and fear levels. This proposal that female crime is a function of the motivational effect of resource scarcity in interaction with the sex-differentiated inhibitory effects of fear accounts for four types of empirical findings. These include the high correlation between rates of male and female offending, the high correlation between female property and violent offending rates, the differences in crime rates between the sexes, and the increase in the magnitude of this difference with the increase in the dangerousness of the offense. 121 references (Author abstract modified)