SOC219H5 Lecture Notes - Anger Management, Masculinity, Marxist Feminism
Lecture 2 — May 9 2018 — Doing Gender, Doing Crime?
Last Class
-we are constantly doing gender on our day to day basis
-gender is something that is created and recreated
-taking a theory by men and about men and applying the same framework to women without
really connecting something to them specifically
The Crime Gender Gap
-identifies the gap between mens and women offending
-women commit fewer crimes, when they do commit crime its different types of crimes
compared to men
How do we Account for these Differences?
Traditional Criminological Approaches
-these approaches and theories only used male samples, largely about men and based on men
-main stream theories are actually male stream theories
-Question becomes why do women commit crime less not why do men commit crime more,
shows and talks about women are inferior from men, shows that women are diverting from the
norm, makes women seem worse then men
-looking at traditional criminological theories, focus tends to be on other factors
Reviewing Mainstream Theories
Original Positivist Theories
-early theories believe that men were rational beings
-women were driven by their constitutional….
-standards of femininity were bas on sexist, classist, so women of middle class anyone below
that were tribe to commit crimes
-assumed women weren't smart, they lacked intellect and needed to commit crimes, as
compared to men
-women committed crime cause of their periods according to Oohoda
Traditional Strain Theory
-only really looks at boys, strain theory was developed based on working class and middle class
boys
-more recent aspects of strain theory have began to bring in roles of women
-Albert Cohen - masculinity played in relation to mens strain being it came from employment
and maintaining threshold of their income and women don't commit crimes because they don't
experience strain the only strain they have is trying to find a good man to marry
Differential Association
-learning through others that breaking the law is okay. Ex. children looking at their parents
commit crimes makes it seem like stealing or committing crime is okay
-Sutherland would say living with someone like a police officer would make it less likely for you
to commit a crime
-crime can occur in any class group, differential association looks at things like white collar
crimes
-claimed that it was sex neutral, no real mention of women offending
-differential socialization between boys and girls played a role here. girls were given less
freedom compared to boys and that limited their interaction with people that were pro crime
