How important is gender to an understanding of crime?

... How important is gender to an understanding of crime? The fact that men commit more crime than women is a truth universally acknowledged in most western industrialized countries. However, this fact has been taken for granted and many theories of crime have used it as an underlying assumption, without analysing in more detail the reasons behind this gender gap, which more recent theories have attempted to understand, most notably within the field of feminism. This issue is multi-faceted as it must deal not only with an understanding of female crime, and the inextricably linked questions of whether the patterns and motivations behind criminal activity are the same for both genders, but also must ask the more basic question of why this gender gap exists. Many feminist criminologists have attempted to tackle this issue, criticizing the more mainstream (or malestream) criminological explanations for crime, whilst attempting to understand female criminal activity, however

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