The Relationship Between Gender, Crime & Poverty (WJEC Eduqas GCSE Sociology): Revision Note

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

• Feminist thinker Carlen (1988) used control theory to explain why some working-class women turn to crime

  • Like Heidensohn (1985), she focused on how women are controlled by social expectations

• Carlen also drew on Hirschi’s (1969) idea that people are less likely to offend when they have strong social bonds, i.e.:

  • attachment to others, e.g. friends and family

  • commitment to goals, e.g. education or work

  • belief in society’s rules and values

• Carlen argued that women conform to society because of two main “deals”:

  • the class deal – the promise of material rewards, e.g. wages, consumer goods and independence, if they work hard

  • the gender deal – the promise of emotional and financial rewards from family life in return for being a good wife and mother

• When the rewards from these deals are not available, or not worth it, the deals break down, weakening social control and making crime more likely

Aims

• Carlen wanted to find out what the women in her study believed were:

  • the main influences on their criminal careers

  • the major turning points in their criminal careers

Method

• Carlen studied 39 working-class women aged between 15 and 46 who had been convicted of at least one offence

  • These offences included:

    • assault

    • burglary

    • shoplifting

    • fraud

    • prostitution

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

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

Findings

• Carlen identified four key factors linked to the women's criminal behaviour:

  • Poverty

  • Living in residential care

  • Drug or alcohol addictions

  • Search for excitement

• Women who rejected the class deal:

  • felt exploited by the capitalist system

  • had few opportunities for respectable work or decent pay

  • saw crime as a rational response to inequality

  Women who rejected the gender deal:

  • had suffered abuse or neglect

  • lacked stable relationships or family support

  • had more to gain than lose from offending

• When both deals broke down, the illusion of fairness disappeared, and women became more likely to offend

• Carlen described their crimes as “crimes of the powerless”

Links to control theory

• Carlen applied Hirschi’s social bond theory, arguing that when bonds with work, family and society are weak, people have little to lose and so are more likely to commit crime

• For these women, broken bonds and lack of opportunity meant social control failed to prevent deviant behaviour

Evaluation of Carlen's theory

Strengths

• Carlen's work gave a voice to marginalised women, showing how poverty and inequality shape crime

• It provided a feminist critique of traditional theories that ignored female offenders

• Carlen's work also highlighted the role of social control and structural inequality in criminal behaviour

Criticisms

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

• It focused on women already in the criminal justice system (CJS) - 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, ignoring free will and resilience