Socio Economic Status and It's Relation to Crime Essay

Words: 2596
Pages: 11

Choose one of the following socio-demographic characteristics: age, sex, ethnicity, or socio-economic status (SES). Describe its relationship to crime, paying attention to whether that relationship is observable at the individual and/ or the aggregate-level. What are the major theoretical explanations for that relationship? To what extent are the results of prior empirical research consistent with those theoretical explanations?

Women have traditionally been perceived as “the nurturer’s” in the family unit,

and men as the “bread-winners”. However, the recent battle for gender

equality, and the dissipation of the rigid guidelines of masculinity and

femininity shaped by the politics of gender, in conjunction with a media frenzy
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Critics have underpinned vast problems with traditional criminology theories

in describing the relationship between gender and crime. Freda Adler

contended that women were becoming more aggressive as they moved from

traditional roles into the competitive marketplace. She believed that women

were undertaking masculine qualities to survive in a male dominated

marketplace, and claimed that the same transformation was being evidenced

in the criminal world, where “a similar number of determined women are

forcing their way into the world of major crimes”, in women’s attempts to
“establish themselves as full human beings, as capable of violence and

aggression as any man”. Rita James Simon also described recent changes in

the types and volume of crime committed by women, but argued that as

women moved from homebound roles, they encountered an array of criminal

opportunities, particularly economic and white collar crimes. Both Adler’s and

Simon’s theories contended that female evolution would result in increased

crimes committed by women. However, both authors differed on their

predictions of the types of crime these newly liberated women would commit:

Adler’s theory suggested a larger proportion of violent