Women’s crime: why it is actually lower than men’s

In modern Russia (let’s use Modern Russia as a case study), women account for only about 13–14% of the total number of illegal actions. Even so, they often turn out to be accomplices of male criminals. Why is this happening? And why is female crime on the rise?

Women’s crime statistics

According to Lyudmila Brushkova, author of the Sociology textbook, most crimes in the world are committed by men. According to statistics, in Russia about 86% of all crimes are committed by men. Some researchers point out that the female crime rate was almost always 5–8 times lower than the male one.

And this despite the fact that the number of women (approximately 53%) in this country exceeds the number of men. However, the male population has been arriving lately. However, at the same time (in the period from 2006 to 2016), the number of women criminals also doubled. Moreover, women began to commit more serious crimes.

However, the structure of female crime is still distinguished by the predominance of mercenary crimes, mainly related to professional activities: embezzlement by embezzlement or appropriation, theft, fraud and other acts against property.

Experts note that women most often act as accomplices of men, that is, they commit thefts, robberies and robberies with them. Quite often the “duties” of women include searching for the victim, luring her to a place favorable for committing a crime. As for violent crimes, in most cases women commit them in the domestic sphere.

Secluded lifestyle

Indeed, it is precisely in the isolation of a woman in the family circle, as well as in her disenfranchised position in society, in “underdevelopment” in the legal and personal aspects, many researchers (including EN Tarnovsky, I.Ya. Foynitsky, AF Koni) and saw the reasons for the low crime rate observed among women, especially in tsarist Russia.

Lawyer, criminologist, doctor of jurisprudence, professor MN Gernett noticed that there were always more female criminals where their position in society approached that of men. So, in the Russian Empire, the least crimes were committed by women in the Tauride, Kazan, Ufa and Orenburg provinces, in which the Muslim religion predominated, and women, accordingly, led a more secluded lifestyle.

The isolation of women even in an Orthodox family is also indicated by the statistics of the crimes they have committed. So, for the period from 1876 to 1885, 98.5% of women were convicted of infanticide and expulsion of the fetus.

Even today, as mentioned above, women most often commit violent and serious crimes in the domestic sphere. This is also why the supporters of the criminal-anthropological theory of the psychotherapist Cesare Lombroso (for example, PN Kozlova-Tarnovskaya) believed that the low level of female crime is due to both physical and mental weakness of the female body.

Thus, criminologists of the 19th century argued that female crime is inferior to male crime, because a woman leads a more secluded lifestyle, is physically weak and has a low intellectual level of development.

Changing social role

However, not all scientists believed and still believe so. For example, another lawyer NV Reinhardt expressed confidence that the small (in comparison with male) number of female crimes is due to the fact that a woman is a more highly developed person in moral terms.

And it is precisely the morality and spirituality of female representatives that determines the low level of female crime. Yuri Antonyan, author of the academic bachelor’s textbook “Criminology” (2021), also names the historically conditioned place of women in the system of social relations and her social role as one of the reasons for the peculiarities of female crime.

It so happened that many women identify themselves primarily as mothers and wives, hence the morality in question.

Indeed, a certain conservatism of consciousness is inherent in modern women. Meanwhile, Yuri Antonyan also mentions the biological and psychological characteristics of the female personality, that is, he considers the causes of female crime in a combination of factors.

But most researchers still tend to the social role of women as the primary source of low crime among women. The fact is that the growth of female crime throughout the world in recent years, experts associate with the changing social role of women, with the change in society itself.

Today, in many countries, the maternal role of women is decreasing, the birth rate is falling. The role of a woman as a hostess and a homemaker is diminishing. A woman rises on the same level with a man and begins to commit similar crimes.