ABSTRACT
The two most significant and tenacious features associated with crime are age and gender. For example, young men account for a disproportionate amount of crime in all Western industrialised societies (Beirne and Messerschmidt 1991; Chesney-Lind and Shelden 1992). Moreover, although Albert Cohen’s (1955) thesis on ‘delinquent boys’ can be legitimately criticised for a number of reasons (see Messerschmidt 1993), his awareness of a relationship between the school and youth crime should not be discounted. Research has shown that youth crime declines drastically when state schools are not in session and that young people who leave school during the academic year engage in less crime than those currently enrolled (Elliott and Voss 1974; Messerschmidt 1979). Yet schooling is one of the chief social milieux for the development of youth crime and also a social setting that has institutionalised gender and, therefore, patterned ways in which femininity and masculinity are constructed and represented. School, then, does not merely adapt to a natural masculinity among boys. Rather, it constructs various forms of masculinity (and femininity) and negotiates relations among them (Connell 1987: 291–2).
