Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 72

Age is important because it has been well documented that there are relatively few “career criminals.” Most people who break the law do so roughly between the ages of 15 and 24. Kruttschnitt’s (1996) careful review of existing studies reports that “the age-crime relationship may not be gender invariant,” meaning that there exist gender differences depending on age (p. 139). For example, the ratio of male-to-female offending varies significantly depending on the age group examined, and factors such as age at initiation into offending, age at which one escalates to more serious offending, and age at which offenders stop offending all vary by gender (Kruttschnitt, 1996). In 2018, 7.1% of all arrests, 7.7% of all female arrests, and 6.8% of all male arrests were individuals under 18 years old (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019, Tables 38, 39, and 40). Overall, gender uniformity in youthful offending is most apparent in (1) less serious offenses (see Table 4.1), (2) offending self-report studies, and (3) victimization self-report studies.

Status offenses are only crimes for juveniles (under age 18) and include running away from home, drinking alcohol, and truancy from school. The up-criming discussed earlier is an example of age-related CLS processing. Triplett and Myers’s (1995) classic study using National Youth Survey self-report data from more than 1,500 youths found that for the 22 offenses listed under the categories of “status offenses,” “vandalism,” “theft,” and “assault,” boys were more likely to report every crime except running away and hitting a parent, for which boys and girls reported similar rates (about 5% of each ran away from home and about 4% of each hit a parent). When examining the number of times the youths committed an offense at least once (as opposed to the total number of times), there were fewer gender differences. When analyzing gender differences in the context of youths committing crimes, Triplet and Myers found few gender differences for status, property, and theft offenses. The exceptions were the destination when youths ran away, the form of assaults, the extent of injury in assaults, whether the youths were on drugs during the assaults, the purpose of force in assaults, and whether victims were hurt in the assaults. More specifically, girls were more likely than boys to report running to a friend’s house when they ran away, hurting their assault victims when the victims were students, and using force for reasons other than to get money. Regarding the context of committing assaults, boys were more likely than girls to report being on drugs during the assault, hurting their victims if their victims were not students, beating their victims or attacking them with a weapon, and having their victims cut or hospitalized. Thus, there were few gender differences in the context of offending for status, vandalism (property), or theft offenses, and the context of offending resulted in gender gaps more often in the commission of violent offenses.