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A Critical Inquiry Into the Field of Multinational Research on Women’s Offending

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Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive and critical look at the current state of multinational research on women’s offending and scrutinizes how this knowledge has been derived. The importance of global research for theoretical advancement is discussed. Questions about the validity of official data estimates as proxies for women’s offending in cross-national research focus on the extent to which research findings are reflecting behavioural differences among the populations being studied or other exogenous factors, such as policing, policy and data collection. This paper carries on a tradition of inquiry into the data by presenting visual heuristics to facilitate easy interpretation of definitional differences in specified crime types across time and between country and by determining societal factors that correlate with the “dark figure of crime” when contrasting arrests and reported victimization across nations. The findings suggest cautious optimism for proceeding with rigorously compiled multinational official data sources to advance this important field of work.

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Notes

  1. Notable exceptions include illegal drug use and the offending of youth.

  2. Bowker 1981; Hartnagel 1982; Marshall 1982; Messner 1985; Hartnagel and Mizanuddin 1986, Widom and Stewart 1986; South and Messner 1986, Clark 1989, Simon and Baxter 1989; Steffensmeier et al. 1989.

  3. Notably, when women commit fraud it is typically of the more minor variety; men still constitute the bulk of higher level fraudulent and white collar criminality (e.g. Steffensmeier et al. 2013)

  4. Normative values were determined by survey responses to three statements about the position of women in society relative to men: (1) “Men should have more right to a job than women”; (2) “university is more important for a boy than for a girl”; and (3) “men make better political leaders than women do.” The Gender Inequality Index (GII) focuses on women’s position with regard to reproductive health, economic status and empowerment.

  5. Definitions changed across the years, making it difficult to show visually how the data was affected. For example, the definition of intentional homicide in 2010 excluded assistance with suicide, abortion and negligent killing. The definitions in 2006, 2003 and 1999 only mention excluding assistance with suicide. Perhaps abortions and negligent killing were excluded in these years as well, but it was not articulated. Additionally, in 1995 the definition of homicide included assistance with suicide, whereas later definitions excluded it. Standardising the definitions across years is important for accurate assessment of change over time, so the table remains faithful to the definition used in the later four collection points (deviating from adherence to the definition from 1995—a country is marked as more encompassing if it included assistance with suicide, despite this element being a part of the definition).

  6. For example, there are considerably more assaults leading to death than euthanasia. Both components are part of the standard definition, and if one country excludes acts involving euthanasia, and another excludes acts involving assaults leading to death, both are indicated as a one degree difference from the standard definition, but the scale is different across the two acts.

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  1. State University of New York at Cortland, P.O. Box 2000, Cortland, NY, 13045, USA

    Samantha Applin & John-Michael Simpson

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  1. Samantha Applin
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Applin, S., Simpson, JM. A Critical Inquiry Into the Field of Multinational Research on Women’s Offending. Eur J Crim Policy Res 26, 83–103 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-018-9402-5

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