The Relationship Between Gender, Crime & Poverty (AQA GCSE Sociology)

Key thinker: Carlen's (1988) control theory: class deal and gender deal

Background

• Feminist Carlen (1988) used control theory (like Heidensohn, 1985) as the basis for her approach, which examines why most people conform to societal rules

• Carlen proposed a concept that describes a deal that working-class women make which controls their behaviour

• The workplace and the family are mechanisms of social control for working-class women

• Women are controlled by:

  • The promise of rewards at work if they conform to the class deal:

    • This deal offers them consumer goods if they work for a wage

  • The promise of rewards in the family if they conform to the gender deal:

    • This deal offers them material rewards (and happiness/fulfilment) from a male breadwinner in return for their love and domestic labour

• When women feel that these rewards are not attainable or worth it, they refuse to conform to societal rules as they become aware of their exploitation

  • This means that the class and gender deals break down and crime becomes a possibility

Aims

• Carlen wanted to find out what the women in her study thought was

  • the main influence on their criminal careers

  • the major turning point in their criminal careers

Method

• Carlen studied a group of mostly working-class women aged between 15 and 46 who had been convicted of one or more crimes

  • These offences included

    • assault

    • burglary

    • shoplifting

    • fraud and

    • prostitution

• She carried out in-depth unstructured interviews with 39 women

  • Some of whom were in prison or youth custody at the time

Findings

• The 39 women in Carlen's study identified four major factors linked to their criminal behaviour:

  • Poverty

  • Living in residential care

  • Drug or alcohol addictions

  • Search for excitement

• Women refusing to conform to the class deal felt exploited by the capitalist system as they:

  • lacked opportunities to find respectable ways of earning a decent living

  • didn't experience the rewards that the class deal is meant to provide, such as earning enough money to buy consumer goods

  • had more to gain than lose by offending

  • thought that crime was a solution to the issues of poverty

• Women refusing to conform to the gender deal felt exploited in families as they had:

  • not experienced the rewards that the gender deal is meant to provide, such as financial stability from a male breadwinner

  • lived in care and did not have bonds with family and friends

  • been abused by partners and fathers

  • more to gain than lose by offending

• For the women, when the illusion of fairness and respectability about these deals faded, they were unable to be kept under control

  • This meant that they were vulnerable to criminal behaviour

Evaluation

• Carlen’s work was based on a relatively small sample, making it difficult to generalise to all women who commit crime

• The women in the study were already in prison or on probation, which may skew the findings as the sample didn't include women who faced similar hardships but weren't involved in the CJS

• Carlen's work may overemphasise the role of patriarchy and poverty as the causes of crime

  • It doesn't take into consideration free will and resilience that prevent women in similar situations from committing crime

• However, her findings support the view that criminal behaviour becomes more likely when social control breaks down