ABSTRACT
Women, who comprise more than half of the world's population, account for only about 15% of criminal arrests on average, and great variance exists in the arrests of women across nations where women represent from just 4% to nearly 30% of all arrests (Bowker, 1978; Marshall, 1982). Scholars have long struggled to understand both the curious underrepresentation of women among those arrested for crime and the striking cross-national variance in women's arrest rates. Unfortunately, most theoretical perspectives adopt sexist, racist, and class-based notions of women as explanations for women's crime specifically or women's responsibility for juvenile and adult male crime generally (Klein, 1973; Smart, 1976).
