Crime And Victimization Analysis

Anybody is able to commit a crime or become a victim to a criminal offence. Gender is a significant factors to consider when analysing crime and victimization. In order to critically understand the reasons behind crime and victimization you must be able to recognise and analyse the influencing factors. This essay will focus on a few of the central arguments which include criminal behaviour of men and women, feminist criminology, hegemonic masculinity and gender victimization of sexual abuse.
The Home Office provides details of the known offending behaviours of men and women. For example, a third of men born in 1953 were convicted of an offence before age 45, whereas only 9% of women were convicted before this age (Home Office 2001 as cited
Does gender influence victimisation? Are people at greater risk to specific types of crime because of their gender?
The general stereotype in society as well as the claim of feminist criminologists is that “all men are violent and women are victims” (Treadwell 2006 p.96) however men are also vulnerable to victimisation but the ideology of ‘manliness’ could explain why male victimisation commonly goes unreported because of issues such as the embarrassment of ‘weakness’ reducing its exposure (Stanko and Hobdell 1993 as cited by Newburn 2007).
The British Crime Survey (BCS) provides evidence on victimisation experienced by men and women. They have identified that men are at greater risk of victimisation than women, according to victim surveys, in 2004/5 the BCS reported that women aged 16-24 had a 6.3% chance of becoming a victim of violence compared with a 14.6% chance for men of the same age (Jansson 2007 as cited by Newburn 2007). However, it has been found that ‘domestic violence’ is the only category of violence that women are at a 0.5% greater risk than men (Nicholas et al 2005 as cited by Newburn 2007). Although victims of ‘stranger violence’ were found to be 2.3% of males in comparison to 0.6% females, this range of statistics suggests that perhaps men and women fall victim to specific types of crimes based on the social stereotypes and
In self-report surveys, men report low levels of fear towards crime however this may not always be true as there are several barriers preventing men from exposing their experiences such as, the macho concealment of fear and socially desirable responses to prevent embarrassment (Sutton et al 2010 as cited by Davies 2010). Furthermore, hegemonic masculinities suggest that “men are not real victims; men and big boys do not cry” (Goodey 1997 as cited by Davies 2010 p.121) making victims fear the humiliation of losing their