Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: a Gendered Theory of offending

Jennifer Schwartz

The 1960s cultural revolution, including the women's movement, focused attention and created a spate of research on female offending. Although it had long been known that male offending surpassed female offending in frequency and seriousness, theory testing in criminology rarely involved female samples and theories of female offending were not yet well developed. Due to the changing social context, however, questions about the origins of female offending and whether they differ from those of males became central to sociological criminology in the 1970s. Scholars debated and empirically tested whether gender-neutral traditional theories of criminology or gender-specific theories could better explain female offending. To develop a middle-range theory of gender and offending, Darrell J. Steffensmeier and Emilie Andersen Allan exhaustively reviewed theory and empirical research relating to female and male offending. Middle-range theory integrates general theories of behavior with empirical findings on group differences so as to better understand their organization ...

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