Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 40

SCT was advanced by Gottfredson and Hirschi in A General Theory of Crime (1990). A general theory of crime (GTC) attempts to “bridge” classical and positivist traditions, where “low self-control is an individual-level attribute that causes crime at all ages, when combined with appropriate opportunities and attractive targets” (C. Taylor, 2001, p. 373). Moving the emphasis from social control to self-control, GTC purports that self-control interacts with criminal opportunity to explain criminal and delinquent behavior: Individuals with low self-control and access to opportunities to commit offenses are more prone to offend. GTC suggests that gender, race, age, and class differences in delinquency are due to how these characteristics are related to social control and self-control. GTC has been criticized, however, for (1) ignoring gender (Bottcher, 2001; S. L. Miller & Burack, 1993); (2) dismissing and misrepresenting gender-based abuse (Flavin, 2001; S. L. Miller & Burack, 1993); (3) ignoring feminist research on gender divisions within families (Flavin, 2001; S. L. Miller & Burack, 1993); (4) ignoring the role of power in crime (i.e., crime is the logical result when it is an available and desirable resource when resources are limited) (Bottcher, 2001); and (5) not clearly stipulating what constitutes both social and self-control and how they might relate and interact (“rather than setting them up as contradictory concepts”) (C. Taylor, 2001, p. 383).

K. J. Cook (2016, p. 338) notes that Gottfredson and Hirschi locate “ineffective child-rearing” as the main predictor of youths’ low self-control, implicating parents’ failures in monitoring, punishing, and being aware of their children’s problem behaviors. As feminists might expect, the poor parents are usually the mothers and single parents (who are also more likely to be mothers than fathers). “Like Sutherland and Cressy, and Cohen, again, they miss (or ignore) another important opportunity to advance our understanding of gender and crime” (K. J. Cook, 2016, p. 339).

Gender studies testing GTC, as expected, tend to find that that girls exhibit greater self-control than boys, and even after controlling for self-control and access to delinquent opportunities, boys are still more delinquent/criminal than girls are (De Li, 2004; LaGrange & Silverman, 1999; Nakhaie, Silverman, & LaGrange, 2000). Indeed, self-control was a better predictor of delinquency than social control, but the interaction of social control and self-control was the best predictor (De Li, 2004; Nakhaie et al., 2000). One study found self-control was related to girls’ major but not their minor delinquency, and it was unrelated to boys’ delinquency (Mason & Windle, 2002). Another study of adults found that while self-control was related to gender, and self-control was related to offending for both women and men, gender became nonsignificant in predicting offending when behaviorally based measures of self-control were in the model (Tittle, Ward, & Grasmick, 2003).

A study designed to test whether GTC could explain dating aggression found that lower self-control, greater opportunity to commit the abuse (e.g., more frequent private access to one’s partner), and the perception of rewards from committing the abuse (e.g., more control over a partner and satisfaction from committing the abuse) all increased the likelihood of committing this abuse (Sellers, 1999). Using a large national longitudinal data set, Shoenberger and Rocheleau (2017) found that although parents discipline daughters and sons differently, contrary to GTC, “the consequences of parental discipline on the development of self-control also varies for boys and girls” (p. 283). The only parenting variables that were gendered in their relationship to self-control were spanking and discipline for grades. They impacted sons’ more than daughters’ self-control and in the opposite direction provided by GTC: Both spanking and disciplining for grades decreased boys’ self-control. Muftić and Updegrove’s (2018) large international self-report delinquency study found, as expected, parenting directly impacts both property and violent offending, “and that while self-control weakens this relationship, it does not fully mediate it”; no gender differences were found, however (p. 3058). Similarly, a 2017 Puerto Rican study on status offenses found support for GTC (and SCT) with low attachments to parents, schools, peers, and church increasing the likelihood of status crimes, but that self-control variables partially mediated this relationship (Alvarez-Rivera, Price, & Ticknor, 2017).