ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago, Pollak claimed that female crime was masked by its relative invisibility and that because ‘crimes of women remain underreported to a greater extent than do the crimes of men’, (1950:44) the ‘numerical sex differentials…furnished by the official crime statistics’ (1950:56) are mythical. He came to this peculiar conclusion-that women commit as many crimes as men-by way of arguing that illegal abortion, prostitution, and shoplifting were reported very infrequently to the police. Because these offences were either female-specific or female-related, the contribution females appeared to make to crime was significantly deflated. Of course, he was aware that some male crimes were also invisible. For instance, white-collar crimes were, by virtue of the superior cunning of those perpetrating them, rarely brought to the attention of officials. But Pollak considered that these and other examples were always offset by comparable female crimes, such as, in this instance, domestic servants stealing from their employers. And naturally, there were always those demonic figures haunting his and all guilty men’s consciousness-wives who practise the dark, undetectable art of murdering husbands and lodgers by poisoning their steak and kidney puddings. Finally, he argued that even where some crimes were committed equally by either sex but not reported or prosecuted, this diminished the relative female
contribution to crime; if there were more prosecution, then the proportionate increase in female crimes, starting from a smaller absolute base figure, would be much greater than in male crimes and the result would be a narrowing in the sex-differential.
