Feminist Criminology and Masculinities Theory (UGC-NET Unit IV)

For most of the twentieth century, criminology treated the male offender as the default subject: classic strain, subcultural and control theories were built from male samples, and where women appeared it was usually through biology or emotional instability rather than the social structures used to explain men's offending.

British sociologist Carol Smart named this absence in Women, Crime and Criminology (1976), arguing the discipline had built its core concepts around an implicitly male subject, so that simply inserting female cases into an existing theory, the "add women and stir" approach, could not repair it.

A genuine reframing meant treating gender itself, not just biological sex, as a variable organising opportunity, supervision, victimisation risk and the response of police and courts. It also meant recognising that most existing theories of crime were, without saying so, theories of masculinity, since they explained why men break rules written and enforced mostly by other men. This is why feminist criminology's founding claim was that theory needed rebuilding around gender, not a footnote correcting it.

Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind, in their 1988 article "Feminism and Criminology" (Justice Quarterly), named the two questions that organise feminist criminology's research programme. The generalizability problem asks whether theories built to explain male offending, such as strain, control or differential association, apply equally well to women, or need modification. The answer has been mixed: some mechanisms travel across gender reasonably well, others, especially those built on male labour-market status competition, fit far less neatly.

The gender-ratio problem asks a different question: why do women commit so much less crime than men, a ratio that holds across very different societies and legal systems.

Radical and socialist feminist criminologists tie the answer to patriarchal social control, closer supervision of women within families and harsher judgement of the same conduct, while liberal feminist criminologists tie it more to unequal access to the social roles that expose people to criminal opportunity. Treating the two problems as distinct, rather than assuming one answer covers both, is the recall point examiners test most often.

Feminist criminology is a family of positions, not one theory. Liberal feminist criminology traces the gender gap in crime mainly to unequal access to education, employment and legal rights, and expects the gap to narrow as formal barriers fall.

Radical feminist criminology locates the cause in patriarchy: a structure that both restrains women's behaviour through informal supervision and produces much of the crime committed against women. Socialist feminist criminology combines patriarchy with class and capitalism, tying women's crime, often property offences linked to poverty and caregiving, to their position in the labour market and household under capitalism.

Meda Chesney-Lind's research on girls in the juvenile justice system extended this analysis to adolescents, showing that a large share of girls enter the system by way of victimisation: those who flee abusive homes are disproportionately arrested for status offences such as running away, a pattern she called the criminalisation of girls' survival strategies.

Kathleen Daly's pathways research later showed women and girls arrive at offending through several distinguishable life trajectories rather than one common cause, including abuse-driven survival crime, relationship-driven offending, and poverty-driven property crime.

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

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

Messerschmidt built this on structured action theory, which holds that gender, race and class are continuously accomplished through situated social action rather than fixed traits a person simply has, drawing on Candace West and Don Zimmerman's 1987 article "Doing Gender". This links to R. W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity (Gender and Power, 1987): the culturally dominant, idealised form of masculinity in a given setting, defined against femininity and against subordinated or marginalised masculinities.

Messerschmidt argued that men without access to the resources hegemonic masculinity ordinarily rewards, such as stable employment, may reach for crime as a substitute route to masculine recognition, a claim that predicts male violence should vary sharply by culture and class rather than stay constant as a biological account would suggest.