Essay on the Theories on Female Criminality

Essay on Theories on Female Criminality

Let us now move from ’causes’ to ‘theoretical explanations’. Various theories about crime have been propounded from time to time but only a few among them have dealt with female criminality. We will first review the old theories about female crime like those of Lombroso, Freud, Kingsley Davis, and Otto Pollak before examining the recent ones.

Lombroso (1903) maintained that his researches produced fewer indications of physical stigmata or biological anomalies among women, supporting his belief that women are organically conservative.

This conservation tendency of women accounts not only for the lesser involvement of women in criminality but also for the cause of crime (atavistic features) among females.

Freud’s (see, Klein Dorie, 1973) physiological explanation holds that law breaking by females represents a perversion of or rebellion against the biologically natural female role, or is evidence of ‘masculinity complex’.

He maintained that all females experience some degree of jealousy of males but ‘normal’ women manage to accept and internalise societal definitions of femininity, centered about a single-minded interest in motherhood.

Kingsley Davis (1937) presented a functionalist interpretation of one specific type of crime by women, namely, prostitution. He argued that commercial prostitution arises as a black-market in sex.

It arises in circumstances where demands for sexual novelty cannot be supplied within the framework of marriage and/or where some males are cut off from access to sex partners because they are unmarried, ugly or deformed.

Otto Pollak (1950) claimed that women engage in hidden crimes like abortions, murder by poisoning, offences against children, etc. because of their greater skill at deceit and cunning behaviour acquired through sexual socialisation.

Besides the surreptitious and cunning nature of women acquired through differential socialisation process, Pollak also suggested that biological factors including lesser physical strength, as well as psychological concomitants of menstruation, pregnancy, etc. enter into the etiology of female crime.

The shared proposition of all these four scholars is that female crime is the result of physiological or psychological characteristics of individuals.

They have not given any importance to socio-cultural factors but have viewed the biological characteristics as pathological distortions or departures from the normal inherent nature of women.

Obviously, the assumptions in all these explanations about biological and psychological traits of ‘normal’ and criminal women are questionable. Rita James Simon (1975) has also contended that all the above explanations are incorrect because they contain erroneous presuppositions about ‘normal’ traits of women.

After the analysis of the viewpoints of the scholars of the past few decades, let us now examine some recent theoretical contributions. A few criminologists have used Role Theory to explain women’s crimes.

While advocating this theory, it is pointed out by scholars like Frances Heidensohn (1968: 170), Marie Andree Bertrand (1969: 74), etc. that owing to close supervision and social restrictions on women, socialisation, development of consciousness, and self-perceptiom, vary considerably between boys and girls.

Girls are usually trained to be passive, domesticated and non-violent and are not allowed to learn how to fight or use weapons. Contrary to this, boys are aggressive, ambitious and outward-going. Girls thus shrink from violence and do not possess the necessary technical ability or strength to engage in crimes of violence, armed robberies, gang fights, etc.

At worst, they engage in petty or domestic offences. Talcott Parsons (1949) also held that the low incidence of female crime was due to the ready availability of a female adult (since mother normally stayed at home) upon which the female child modelled her behaviour.

The male child, however, in the absence of the role model (since father normally remained away from home for obvious reasons) and as a protest against the femininity of the mother, engaged in delinquent behaviour.

Grosser (see, Mukherjee and Scutt, 1981: 72) maintained that it was the inability of females to express themselves through their criminality that accounted for the high disparity in the sex ratio in crime statistics.

Cohen (1955) contended that the subculture of delinquency which presented a solution to the status problems of adolescents was uniquely male in character. Females were unable to ‘prove’ themselves by acts such as theft or vandalism as they represented the very antithesis of their sex role expectations.

Smart (1976: 71) and Scutt (1976: 28) attempted in 1976 to update the role theory by incorporating within the role of school, peer group and occupational group, besides family, as socialising agents. But both of them had strong reservations about the value of role theory as an explanation for female criminality.

My argument against the role theory is that it does not explain the cause of committing of crime by females; it only explains the differential rates of male and female criminality. The role theorists highlight the way in which opportunity structures predispose males rather than females to crime. However, hold that woman’s criminality can be theorised in terms of “contradictory or ill-defined roles in the family”.

Role collision (in which husband and wife, or daughter-in-law and parents-in-law, etc., have roles which are in conflict in some respect), role incompatibility (in which the woman plays roles which have contradictory expectations) and role confusion (in which there is lack of agreement among family members about expectations of a given role) all these create a situation for a woman which compels her to indulge in deviant acts.