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The academic field of criminology is implicitly colonizing … a discipline built upon penal tourism, applying a tour-bus approach to ideas on crime, casually sightseeing and piecing together snapshots of medical anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, and patriarchal conceptions of racial gender to produce an incomplete yet seemingly cohesive conception of “the criminal.”

—Saleh-Hanna (2017, pp. 698, 691)

Most criminological theories were constructed by men and about why (some) men and boys break the law (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2016; Leonard, 1982; Messerschmidt, 1993; Naffine, 1996). Criminology is not unique among academic disciplines in its historical exclusion of women and girls from most research questions (Fausto-Sterling, 1985; Allison Morris, 1987; Smart, 1976; Spender, 1981), but it is ironic given that sex/gender is one of the best predictors of criminality across time (Britton, 2000, p. 60) and age (Loeber & Farrington, 2000). There are two important implications of focusing solely on men and boys’ experiences: (1) The theories and findings are really theories and findings about boys and men’s crime, and (2) we must question the validity of any “general” theory if it does not also apply to girls/women (Allison Morris, 1987, p. 2).

Rasche (1975) offered three explanations for the historical neglect of women’s offending: (1) Women make up a small percentage of prisoners (approximately 7%, currently); (2) prison authorities are more likely to oppose research on women (than on men) prisoners; and (3) women are deemed insignificant compared to the more “deserving” offenders: men. Smart (1976) reported that when women offenders were acknowledged in criminology research, it was in terms of their deviations from the stereotypical aspects of women’s lives, such as maternal deprivation. Further, women law-breakers historically (and to some degree today) have been viewed as “abnormal” and as “worse” than male law-breakers—not only for breaking the law but also for stepping outside of prescribed gender roles of femininity and passivity.

Rasche’s (1975) and Smart’s (1976) charges still prevail to some extent, although there has been a huge increase in research on women prisoners and girl delinquents since 1975, particularly from a feminist perspective. This is due to three reasons. First, since 1980, the beginning of mass incarceration in the U.S., women’s increasing rate of incarceration even outpaced men’s (see Chapter 7 in this book). Second, the feminist movement influenced most scholars to acknowledge the significance of gender in studying crime and proposing theories. Finally, as stated previously, the feminist movement also resulted in far more women and feminist scholars studying crime.

It is impossible to discuss all theories that have been applied to offending and victimization, even in two chapters. The chapters are divided starting with some of the more sexist (and racist, classist, and heterosexist) theories, although not all of the theories in this chapter fall into this category, and some have been supported in feminist scholarship. The most sexist theories in this chapter are the positivist, evolutionary, and women’s emancipation theories. The ones that have omitted girls/women underpinnings but have been more carefully applied include strain, differential association, and social control theories.¹ Finally, many of the studies reported in this and the following chapter use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data, often referred to as Add Health. These longitudinal data of nationally representative U.S. youths began in 1994 with the Wave I of questionnaires distributed to about 20,000 students in Grades 7 through 12, followed by Wave II in 1996 when almost 15,000 of the same individuals were interviewed, and to date, three more waves involving reinterviews. Wave IV, the most recently available at the time of writing this edition of this book, were when the research subjects were 24 to 32 years old.

¹Some of these were or are called hypotheses instead of theories, but for simplicity, they will almost routinely be referred to as theories in this and the next chapter.