Research project Women's crime as a social problem
The project has shed light on women's crime as a social problem and studied society's attention to, understanding of and reaction to women's crime. The overall purpose has been to 1) analyze the development of women's crime, 2) study the image of the criminal woman and the emergence of women's crime as a social problem.
The project has taken a historical perspective on gender and crime, where we have studied women and crime over a period of 100 years. The project has had three interrelated sub-projects, and results from these have been published both in separate publications (Estrada et al. 2015 & 2017, Sandman accepted, Camenius et al. Forthcoming) and in publications where the sub-studies have been combined with each other (Estrada et al. 2019, Pettersson under publication). The various projects are based on the following material: 1) Statistics on criminal offenses 1905-2015, 2) Articles in the daily press between the years 1905–2015, and 3) Articles in Swedish scientific journals in the period 1920–2015. The main results of the studies are presented below within More about this project.
In two studies we elucidate the way the gender gap in crime has changed in Sweden since the mid-19th century. The studies are based on analyzes of convicted crimes, with a special focus on theft offences and violent crime. Over time, especially from the middle of the 20th century, the gender gap in crime decreases significantly. The long historical perspective provides a background to an analysis that focuses on the period since the 1980s, where our principal data are comprised of the registered offending of different birth cohorts. Most of the findings from our studies refute the hypothesis that the declining gender gap in crime is due to an increasing number of women committing offences. Instead, the most important driving forces in recent times have been a powerful decline in the number of men convicted of theft crime and a net-widening effect causing a rise in womens’ convictions for violence.
An analysis of articles in the daily press shows that the degree of reporting and the type of crime the newspapers report on is strikingly similar for women and men. Throughout the period, however, there is a greater need to find explanations for women's crimes. Despite the fact that women have been responsible for a larger proportion of the registered crime during the period, there has been no increased focus on women's crime in the newspapers. The qualitative analysis shows that there is a greater variation in “available” representations than previous research suggests. Rather, the descriptions tend to move between and beyond previous research's clear categories "bad", "mad" and "sad". At the same time, there is a clear continuity between cases and over time, but women's crimes are not described as so different from men's as has been emphasized in some previous studies.
One study is based on both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of how women are represented in scientific articles on crime and criminality. The quantitative part shows that explanations and proposed measures against crime are more gender-neutral than previous research has described. At the same time, the qualitative analysis shows that when women are made visible, it is almost exclusively in relation to issues concerning the body, sex and sexuality, or victimization and vulnerability. Women as victims appear in the latter part of the period, and then almost completely replace descriptions of women's crimes. Women's actions have above all been given relevance when their crime can be placed in the context of major socio-economic problems and / or reforms.
Overall, the project nuances previous research on women's crimes. It is clear that the images that emerge through the quantitative and qualitative materials complement each other, which emphasizes the importance of both these parts for the project's main results. The project's theoretical starting points and empirical contributions are included as important parts of the project manager's new book on Gender and crime.