Socio Economic Status and It's Relation to Crime

Choose one of the following socio-demographic characteristics: age, sex, ethnicity, or socio-economic status (SES). Describe its relationship to crime, paying attention to whether that relationship is observable at the individual and/ or the aggregate-level. What are the major theoretical explanations for that relationship? To what extent are the results of prior empirical research consistent with those theoretical explanations?

Women have traditionally been perceived as “the nurturer’s” in the family unit,

and men as the “bread-winners”. However, the recent battle for gender

equality, and the dissipation of the rigid guidelines of masculinity and

femininity shaped by the politics of gender, in conjunction with a media frenzy

over the subtly sexy violent woman depicted on screen, has seen the

increase in the acceptance of women in crime. Statistically the percentage of

female arrests between 1960 and 1990 has risen by 8%, rising from 11% to

19%, almost doubling itself. Most criminologists will agree that males are

largely overrepresented in crime statistics, this is recognized universally. This

issue of the gender-gap is multi-faceted as it addresses not only the need to

understand female criminality, but also, male criminality, and the motivations

for crime amidst both genders. Thus, the issue of understanding gender with

regards to crime is ternary; firstly it must be established what the reasoning

behind women who commit crime is, secondly the gender gap must be

addressed, and thirdly the reasoning behind men who commit crime with

regards to their gender must be established.

Women account for a very small percentage of all crime statistics, 19% in
1990. Furthermore, men offend at much higher rates than women for all crime

categories except prostitution. The gender gap in crime is greatest for serious

crime and least for mild forms of law-breaking. When considering that the

gender gap is smallest in