ABSTRACT
Women commit less crime than men and their crimes are typically less serious, violent, and profitable. Most investigations of this “gender gap” in offending consider differences in social control or socialization. This helps explain overall crime participation disparities, but cannot account for the sex-segregated character of offending. Building on ethnographic research and feminist labor market analyses, our study explores how gender affects access to criminal opportunities. Using NIBRS data, we examine the effect a male co-offender has on women’s offending. We find that the presence of a male co-offender broadens women’s criminal involvement in distinctive ways.
Women commit significantly less crime than men and the crime they commit is typically less serious, less violent, and less profitable. This has been true for as long as social scientists have been measuring crime. Relative to men, women’s crime participation rates have remained remarkably stable over time. In spite of the potential theoretical significance of this finding, the discipline of criminology has been slow to consider gender at all, much less conceptualize crime as a gendered activity. This has prompted numerous calls for researchers to pay greater attention to the relationship between gender and crime and critiques into criminology’s near-exclusive focus on men
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study The persistence and rise of crime continues to damage the social fabric of the society especially in the country’s’ urban areas. Crime is not a new phenomenon both locally and internationally but the intensity and nature of crime is different within different borders. Crime also does not distinguish between the developed and developing countries such as Kenya which continue to grapple with the effects of increased incidences of criminal activities in its urban areas. An emerging trend of crime in the urban areas reflects an increase in youth participation in violent criminal activities which has been associated with the rising unemployment rates among the youth which is far more explicit in urban areas. Onoge (1988) in Adebayo (2013) perceives crime as dysfunctional as it threatens the
