Feminist Criminology and Masculinities Theory

For most of the twentieth century, criminology was written as though offenders were male by default. Classic strain, subcultural and control theories were built from samples of male delinquents and male prisoners, and where women appeared at all it was usually in a short chapter treating female crime as a minor variant of male crime, or explaining it through biology, sexuality or emotional instability rather than through the social structures used to explain men's offending.

British sociologist Carol Smart gave this absence its first sustained critique in Women, Crime and Criminology (1976), arguing that the discipline had not simply forgotten women but had built its core concepts around an implicitly male subject, so that adding a chapter on women could not repair the theory underneath.

Smart's target was what later became known, somewhat dismissively, as the "add women and stir" approach: taking an existing male-centred theory and simply inserting female cases into it, as if the theory's categories, evidence base and assumptions were gender-neutral all along.

A strain theory built entirely on male occupational aspiration, for instance, does not automatically explain a woman's route into shoplifting or sex work if the social pressures, opportunities and controls that shape her life are different in kind, not just in degree.

A genuine reframing, by contrast, asks what criminology would look like if it started from women's lives rather than retrofitting them into a male template. That meant treating gender itself, not just biological sex, as a variable that organises opportunity, supervision, victimisation risk and the response of police and courts.

It also meant taking seriously that most theories of crime were, without saying so, theories of masculinity: they explained why boys and men break rules that were written and enforced predominantly by other men. Feminist criminology's founding claim was therefore not that women were being mistreated within an otherwise sound theory, but that the theory itself needed to be rebuilt with gender at its centre rather than at its margin.

The absence had practical consequences beyond the seminar room. Because official crime statistics and prison research were overwhelmingly male, sentencing guidelines, probation programming and even the design of correctional institutions were built around a male-typical offender profile, one usually assumed to have no primary caregiving responsibilities and a different relationship to violence than most women.

When women did appear in the system, in far smaller numbers, they were often handled through facilities, risk assessments and treatment programmes copied wholesale from men's institutions rather than designed around the pathways that actually brought them there. Smart's critique therefore doubled as a policy claim: a discipline that failed to theorise gender properly would inevitably produce a justice system that misread the women it processed.

Criminologists Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind gave feminist criminology its two organising research questions in their widely cited 1988 article "Feminism and Criminology", published in Justice Quarterly. They named the generalizability problem and the gender-ratio problem as the two questions any account of gender and crime has to answer, and they are logically separate even though they are often confused.

The generalizability problem asks: do theories developed to explain male offending, such as strain, control or differential association, apply equally well to female offending, or do they need to be modified, supplemented or replaced for women?

Testing this meant re-running classic theories on female samples rather than assuming a good fit. The answer, across a large body of work through the 1980s and 1990s, was mixed: some mechanisms (weak social bonds, exposure to delinquent peers) travelled reasonably well across gender, while others, especially those built on male labour-market participation or male peer-group status competition, fit far less neatly.

The gender-ratio problem asks a different question: why, whatever the mechanism, do women commit so much less crime than men, and less serious crime when they do offend? This ratio holds with striking consistency across very different societies, legal systems and historical periods, which rules out any explanation resting on a single country's laws or policing style.

Radical and socialist feminist criminologists tied the answer to patriarchal social control, meaning that women are supervised more closely within families, more harshly judged for the same conduct, and given fewer opportunities to offend in the first place, while liberal feminist criminologists tied it more to unequal access to the social roles, such as certain forms of employment, that expose people to criminal opportunity.

Neither question has a single settled answer, and that is part of the point: naming them precisely, rather than collapsing them into a vague sense that "gender matters", is what let feminist criminology accumulate a genuine research programme instead of a set of isolated observations.

Daly and Chesney-Lind also warned against a third temptation: assuming the two problems must have the same answer. A researcher might find that a given theory generalises well to female offenders for one offence type, such as property crime tied to poverty, while the same theory explains almost none of the gender ratio for a different offence type, such as homicide, where situational and relational factors diverge sharply by gender.

Holding the two questions apart, rather than treating a single study as settling both, became a discipline for the field: any claim about gender and crime had to specify which of the two puzzles it was actually addressing.

Feminist criminology is not one theory but a family of positions that share a commitment to centring gender while disagreeing about the cause of gender inequality in crime and justice. Three strands recur most often in the literature.

Liberal feminist criminology traces gendered patterns of crime and justice mainly to unequal access to education, employment and legal rights. On this account, as formal barriers to women's participation in public and economic life fall, the gender gap in offending should narrow, since women gain the same opportunities, and the same temptations, that have long been available to men.

Critics point out that the gap has narrowed only modestly for serious and violent crime even where women's formal equality has advanced substantially, suggesting opportunity alone is not the whole story.

Radical feminist criminology locates the cause in patriarchy itself, meaning a systemic structure of male power that both restrains women's behaviour, through intense informal supervision within families and communities, and produces much of the crime committed against women, including domestic and sexual violence. On this view, low female offending is not simply freedom from criminal opportunity but a product of tighter social control, while high victimisation of women reflects the same underlying power structure operating in the opposite direction.

Socialist feminist criminology combines the radical feminist emphasis on patriarchy with a Marxist attention to class and capitalism, arguing that women's position in the labour market and in the household under capitalism, not patriarchy or capitalism alone, best explains both female crime, often property offences tied to poverty and caregiving responsibility, and the state's differential response to it.

A fourth, later current, sometimes called postmodern or intersectional feminist criminology, pushed further still, insisting that gender cannot be studied in isolation from race, class, sexuality and colonial history, since a poor Black woman's encounter with policing looks nothing like a wealthy white woman's, even where both are formally the same gender.

The three earlier strands are not merely historical curiosities; they still shape live policy debates. Liberal feminist reasoning underlies arguments for expanding women's access to jobs and credit as a crime-prevention measure. Radical feminist reasoning underlies calls to treat domestic and sexual violence as the primary crime problem facing women, rather than as a private matter outside the ordinary criminal law.

Socialist feminist reasoning underlies arguments that welfare cuts and precarious work, not moral failing, best predict spikes in women's property offending during economic downturns. Recognising which strand a given policy argument draws on helps explain why reformers who agree that gender matters can still disagree sharply about which lever, opportunity, protection from patriarchal control, or economic security, should be pulled first.

Meda Chesney-Lind's research on girls in the juvenile justice system extended feminist criminology from adult women to adolescent girls, and it produced one of the field's most cited findings: a large share of girls who end up in the justice system arrive there by way of victimisation rather than despite it.

Girls who run away from physically or sexually abusive homes are disproportionately likely to be picked up on status offences such as running away or curfew violation, offences that exist only because of their age, and are then processed through a system that treats their flight from harm as the delinquent act requiring correction rather than the abuse that caused it.

Chesney-Lind described this as the criminalisation of girls' survival strategies: behaviour that is a rational response to an unsafe home, such as leaving it, gets relabelled as the problem itself. This matters for the gender-ratio problem because it shows that part of what looks like a female offending pattern is really an artefact of how the justice system defines and responds to victimisation differently for girls than for boys, who are less often arrested for comparable status offences.

Kathleen Daly's later work, drawing on official court records rather than only interviews, developed the idea of pathways into offending: rather than one route to crime, women and girls arrive at offending through several distinguishable life trajectories, including childhood abuse leading to running away and street survival crime, relationship-driven offending tied to a partner's criminal activity, and economically motivated property crime tied to poverty and single parenthood.

This pathways approach resists treating "female offenders" as a single category with one cause, and instead asks which life history produced a given woman's specific offence pattern.

The pathways and criminalisation-of-victimisation findings together shifted feminist criminology's focus from asking only why women offend less to asking how the justice system's own categories, from status offences to probation conditions, actively shape which women and girls end up counted as offenders at all.

This body of research also reshaped how researchers read official statistics. A rise in girls' arrest figures for a given period does not necessarily mean girls are behaving more violently; it can instead mean that police and schools have widened what counts as an arrestable incident, for example by treating a family argument or a schoolyard scuffle that would once have been handled informally as a chargeable assault.

Chesney-Lind called this pattern relabelling, and argued that some apparent increases in female juvenile violence reflect changed enforcement practice rather than changed behaviour, a distinction with direct consequences for how much weight policymakers should place on short-term shifts in arrest data.

If feminist criminology asks why women offend so little, masculinities theory asks the companion question: why do men, across virtually every society and offence category, commit so much more crime, and particularly so much more violent crime, than women?

Sociologist James Messerschmidt answered this in Masculinities and Crime (1993) by rejecting the idea that masculinity simply causes crime as a fixed trait, and arguing instead that crime is one resource, among several available resources, that men and boys can draw on to accomplish masculinity in a given social setting.

Messerschmidt built this argument on structured action theory, which holds that gender, race and class are not stable identities a person simply has, but are continuously accomplished through situated social action, and are held accountable to others watching and judging that action. The theory borrows directly from sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman, whose 1987 article "Doing Gender" argued that gender is something people do in interaction rather than something they simply are.

On this account, a working-class teenage boy excluded from school and with few legitimate ways to demonstrate toughness, independence or status may accomplish masculinity through fighting, theft or gang membership, because those settings offer him resources for "doing masculinity" that a classroom or a steady job would otherwise provide.

A corporate executive, by contrast, may accomplish an equally gendered but very differently coded masculinity through aggressive risk-taking or white-collar fraud that never touches a police record. The crime differs by class position, but the underlying logic, using available resources to construct a masculine self that will be recognised as such by others, is the same.

This links to Australian sociologist R. W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, developed through the 1980s and set out fully in Gender and Power (1987): the culturally dominant, idealised version of masculinity in a given setting, defined against both femininity and against subordinated forms of masculinity, such as gay masculinity, or marginalised forms tied to race and class.

Messerschmidt argued that men without access to the resources hegemonic masculinity ordinarily rewards, a stable job, a car, physical safety, may reach for crime and violence as a substitute route to the same masculine recognition.

Messerschmidt was careful to stress that hegemonic masculinity is a position within a hierarchy, not a description of most men's actual behaviour; most men never occupy it fully, and many actively distance themselves from its more violent expressions.

The theory's explanatory power comes instead from showing how the ideal still sets the terms against which men in very different structural positions measure themselves, so that a schoolyard fight, a bar brawl and a boardroom fraud can all be read as differently classed attempts to answer the same underlying demand for masculine standing.

This is also why masculinities theory, unlike older biological accounts of male aggression, predicts that male violence rates should vary sharply across cultures, historical periods and social classes, which is exactly the pattern found in comparative crime data.

Feminist criminology and masculinities theory converge on a single underlying claim: gendered patterns of crime are socially produced and socially maintained, not biologically fixed. Both traditions reject the older idea that men are naturally aggressive and women naturally passive, and both replace it with an account resting on social structure, opportunity and interaction.

A theory that explains low female offending through tight patriarchal supervision, and a theory that explains high male violence through the situational accomplishment of masculine status, are answering two halves of the same puzzle: gender organises who has access to crime as a resource, and for what purpose.

This convergence has shaped concrete justice policy. Gender-responsive programming in corrections, developed from the 1990s onward particularly in the United States and later adopted in various forms in the United Kingdom and other jurisdictions, redesigned women's prisons and probation services around the pathways research: trauma-informed care for histories of abuse, parenting and childcare support, and relationship-focused counselling, rather than programming copied unchanged from men's facilities.

On the masculinities side, some violence-prevention and batterer-intervention programmes now explicitly target the link between constrained economic masculinity and violent behaviour, working with men to build a sense of status and competence that does not depend on aggression or control over a partner.

The two traditions have also drawn a shared and serious critique from intersectional criminology, most closely associated with the framework of intersectionality developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s.

The critique is that treating "women" or "men" as internally uniform categories can flatten real differences of race, class, immigration status and sexuality that shape how gender is policed. A wealthy white woman's shoplifting and a poor migrant woman's undocumented labour are both technically offences by women, but they are governed by entirely different structures of risk, visibility and punishment, and an intersectional lens insists that gender theory account for that variation rather than average over it.

Read together, feminist criminology and masculinities theory did not simply add a missing chapter to criminology. They forced the discipline to treat gender as a structuring force running through every existing theory of crime, from strain to control to labelling, and to ask, for each one, whose experience it was actually built to explain.

The two fields have also converged institutionally, not just theoretically. Training for police, prosecutors and judges increasingly draws on both bodies of work together: understanding why a woman stayed in an abusive relationship draws on radical feminist accounts of coercive control, while understanding why a young man escalated a minor dispute into lethal violence draws on masculinities theory's account of status threat.

Neither theory alone, treating gender as something only women have or only men have, would explain either case as well as reading them as two sides of the same socially constructed system of gender and crime.