ABSTRACT
Feminism has had a considerable impact on criminology in recent years – using feminist or critical social theories to consider the significance of gender in crime and criminal justice – and has provided both critiques of the traditional explanations of female criminality that we encountered in Chapter 8 while at the same time offering its own perspectives. We should note that a distinction can be made between the biological characteristics that define and distinguish males and females and the cultural expectations inherent in the social roles defined by societies as being applicable to men and women. ‘Sex’ is a biological term used to describe the anatomical differences between males and females while the term ‘gender’ refers to learned behaviour associated with men and women which is developed through the socialisation process. Gender is thus the social construction of non-biological differences between men and women and this can be further explained by the identification of at least two sub-groups such as masculinity and femininity which are partially based on physical difference.
