5 Reasons Females Turn Criminal

2 – Women’s Liberation theory – Women are empowered to do what men do, including crime.

If you listen to traditional gender roles women should be timid, quiet, attentive and soft. These traits hardly make a good criminal, and some suggest this is why, traditionally, less women were engaged in criminal activities.

Women and men are socialised from an early age to adhere to certain gender roles and stereotypes, and this prevents women from having the same criminal opportunities as men. However, due to women’s liberation and feminism, society is changing its views towards gender. Women have more rights than before, and these strict gender roles are being blurred more and more in Western society.

This change means women are becoming more confident, and having higher self-esteem. It also means women have more opportunities in many aspects of their lives. An unfortunate side effect of this is that they also have more opportunities in the criminal world, and are more likely to commit “masculine” crimes. According to this theory, women commit crimes due to the loosening of gender roles. This is supported by Giordano and Cernkovich (1979) who found delinquent girls were more likely to agree with the statement “I can do whatever a boy can”. However, even then female criminals do still hold some traditional views, usually surrounding family (Berger, 1989).