U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Gender and Crime: Patterns in Victimization and Offending

NCJ Number
214516
Editor(s)
Karen Heimer, Candace Kruttschnitt
Date Published
2006
Length
342 pages
Annotation
This book presents a series of studies on the ways in which crime and victimization are gendered experiences.
Abstract
The studies in this book attempt to fill a void in the research literature concerning the patterns and etiology of women’s victimization and offending. Part 1 presents five chapters that focus on the pathways, circumstances, and social context of female criminal involvement. For example, chapter 1 presents results from the longitudinal Ohio Serious Offender Study, focusing specifically on whether the girls’ delinquency was grounded in gender or was due to more gender neutral factors. Chapter 5 discusses the results of a study that compared the gender gap in arrests with the economic well-being of men and women in order to examine the link between economic deprivation and crime among women. Part 2 contains four chapters that focus on the gendered nature of victimization. The study presented in chapter 6 compared the predictors and circumstances of violent victimization for two groups of women--a national U.S.-based sample and a public jail sample--in order to determine the applicability of routine-activities theory to each group. Chapter 8 offers a study that compared the cross-national and longitudinal similarities and differences between male and female homicide victimization rates and chapter 9 offers a case study analysis of the use of restorative justice practices in cases of juvenile sexual assault. Part 3 presents two chapters that focus on how race, poverty, gender, and crime converge. For example, chapter 10 discusses the findings from a study on whether four general theories of delinquency can explain juvenile offending better than an intersectional model that accounts for how gender, race, and class impact delinquency. The study in chapter 11 examined differences and similarities in levels, trends, and correlates of nonlethal violence among Black, White, and Latina women in the United States to determine whether their sources of risk were similar. Index