ABSTRACT

Alongside awareness of the disproportionate numbers of young people offending is the widely accepted fact that men commit more crime than women. While the bald ‘facts’ of the over-representation of men in the crime statistics have been known for a long time, they have been largely ‘taken for granted’ (Messerschmidt 1986; Heidensohn 1996). Thus, the longitudinal studies, such as the London Study, reviewed in Chapter 3, studied only boys. The gender bias in criminality was not questioned, and there was little interest in studying gender as a significant variable that itself might shed light on the causes of crime. There has, however, been a recent growth in interest in exploring the implications of the gender bias in crime (Jefferson 1997). Can these gender differences tell us something interesting about the cause of crime, or about differences between men and women?