Criminal justice and crime problem - Essay Example

A special report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics released in 2000 showed the number of violent women offenders as being 14% of the total, while they formed 22% of all arrestees. (Special report 2000). But this gap is closing and experts estimate that in about ten or 20 years, the statistics on crime for men and women will be equal, largely due to the fact that women are now more involved in what is going on in the world than they were a generation ago. According to behavioral experts, contrary to the popular conception of women as nurturers, they have as great a tendency as men to be violent.

The only difference between the two sexes is that they need greater incentives before they take to violence. (Yeoman, 1999). However, present rates for women offenders are still considerably lower than males and many reasons have been put forward to explain this differential rate of offending. While some rest their theories on the gender profiling of society, others point to the fact that women resort to crime only when they are forced into it because of poverty, drug addiction or other compelling factors rather than any natural inclination to be violent.

Albert Bandura (1973) examined the tendency to violence in both male and female children, in order to study the effect of violent TV programs upon young children. In his experiment, both girls and boys were given dolls and asked to play with them. While boys demonstrated more violent behavior and girls tended to play peacefully with the dolls, Bandura found that the scenario changed when incentive was offered for being violent and destructive to the dolls. In such a case, the girls turned out to be as violent as the boys.

This led Bandura to speculate that it was the gender conditioning of girls that led them to gravitate away from violence, since aggression was frowned upon in girls. The females in society were expected to be docile and submissive, nurturing and caring rather than aggressive and