Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 92

Research on robbery consistently finds it highly male-gender-related; indeed, 85% of the 2018 UCR arrests were of men and boys. Ira Sommers and Baskin’s (1994) in-depth study of young women robbers found two thirds of the women reported the robbery occurring in the course of and subsequent to other crimes, such as prostitution, drug-dealing, nonviolent theft, and fraud. Most of the robberies were spontaneous and not planned. Regarding motivations to rob, 89% reported committing the robbery to obtain money, with four fifths of those stating that it was money for drugs and the remaining one fifth wanting the money for clothes, jewelry, and electronic equipment. About 10% reported their motivation was loyalty to friends, vengeance, or the excitement. Notably, however, for many of these women, their early robberies were not motivated by financial desires, but their subsequent robberies were financial, usually to buy drugs. Almost three quarters of their victims were strangers, chosen because they looked weak or vulnerable. These young women were equally likely to rob other women as rob men, but they were less likely to use a weapon if their victim was a woman. Sommers and Baskin’s (1993) findings are also interesting in terms of agency and co-offending: “From early on” in their offending, the women “reported that they acted out of self-determination and not in concert with or for boyfriends” (p. 149). They co-offended about two thirds of the time, 60% were committed with other women, and if with men, “they did so most often as equal partners” (p. 149).

J. Miller’s (1998) robbery ethnography found overall gender similarities in motivations to rob: to get money, primarily for status or material goods (e.g., jewelry), and to a lesser degree to support a drug addiction, and less often, for the thrill of it or for revenge. Young men were more likely to report the pressure to have their own money and to own status goods. Far more gender differences existed in carrying out the robbery. Men used primarily one method to rob: “physical violence and/or a gun placed on or at close proximity to the victim in a confrontational manner” (p. 47). Women, on the other hand, were more eclectic, reporting three strategies. The primary strategy was targeting female victims (71%), but they also worked with men (friends, relatives, or boyfriends) to rob men (50%), and in a third strategy promised men sexual favors for money but did not “deliver” (50%). The latter is similar to Maher’s (1997) “viccing,” which refers to a type of robbery specific to sex workers who rob their clients. Maher and Curtis (1992) view viccing as motivated by sex workers’ frustration with the devaluation of their work and their bodies and their extreme vulnerability to victimization.

Rennison and Melde’s (2014) unique approach to studying robbery relied on 4,660 robbery victims’ accounts from 1993 to 2011 NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey) data. Four fifths (80%) of robbers were men/boys, one tenth (10%) women/girls, and 5% included both genders (the remaining 5% were unknown). Men/boys robbing alone or together (25%) were 12 times as likely to use guns as women/girls robbing alone or together (2%), and almost twice as likely as mixed-gender robberies (15%) to use guns. For both women/girls (62%) and men/boys (65%), over four fifths of the time their victims were their same gender. Rennison and Melde (2014) are the first to take on the inconsistency of robbers wanting to pick easy victims: Robbers (especially men) see women as easy victims, and yet these victim reports indicate a third of men robbers’ victims were women/girls. And men/boys are far less likely to rob women/girls when co-offending with other men/boys, suggesting the masculinity pressure of male peers (p. 290).

Male offenders have suggested that females are likely to carry less cash, and thus robbing them is less profitable. Perhaps more importantly, there is a social stigma associated with males using force against females, and thus males receive no status enhancement for engaging in such behaviors. In fact, doing so may lose social standing for males. (Rennison & Melde, 2014, p. 291)