Gender and crime Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Gender and crime - Essay Example was â€Å"strongly related to rising unemployment and an increasing sense of despair among the groups, which finds expression or outlet through aggression and violence† and these crimes were dominant â€Å"in depressed and impoverished areas, such as council estates in the U.K since the late 1980s, often accompanied by new forms of crime such as ram-raiding, joy-riding and the rise of alcohol-induced brawling in towns and cities†( Edwards, 2006, p. 11). Thus, one can obviously come to the conclusion that crimes in U.K had been associated with masculinity as majority of the crimes in U.K was committed by males and the women were thought to be incapable of subjecting themselves to any violent crimes. However, one can notice that factors such as the emergence of new women liberation movements, growth in feminism and women empowerment have been instrumental in increasing criminal offences by women at an apparently a faster rate than offending by men since the 1960s. While criminology in U.K were always focussed on males crimes and offending towards the last two decades of the 20th century â€Å"female incarceration rates were sky-rocketing, leading to a surge in research on girls, women, crime, and the criminal justice system† and as the researchers have very well put it the war on drugs and the federal sentencing reform were the two factors that resulted in the incarceration of women (Miller, 2009, p. 246). Similarly, one can also notice that female Prisoner Population in England and Wales rose considerably in the 1970s to the 1970s. It is, therefore, imperative that there are more of extensive researches and studies on female offending in the U.K. It was Freda Adler who f irst argued that females crime rates have been on the rise in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The researcher concluded that â€Å"women offenders were changing their patterns of offending to more ‘masculine’ styles, becoming more aggressive and violent; and that this was due to the growth of the