Looking for ‘Ms Big’

Abstract

Recent criminological attention has tended to focus upon those areas from which direct policy proposals can be made, whether it be to improve the ways in which the criminal justice system treats victims or the specific measures that can be taken to prevent specific types of crime and criminal. Two areas in particular have proved fruitful: the ‘broken windows’ thesis of Kelling and Wilson has led to studies of crime prevention strategies, including ways in which communities can be encouraged to self‐police, and the work of Levi, Burrows, McBarnet and others has focused attention upon the attitudes of those involved in the financial services sector towards financial and business crime. It is argued that the issue of gender has been largely ignored in the consideration of financial crime; that aspects of the ‘broken windows’ thesis lend themselves to consideration in the context of financial crime, and that to investigate attitudes towards female criminality in the context of the financial services sector — to look for ‘Ms Big’ — may throw unexpected light upon the reported incidence of both male and female criminality in this area. Since the inception of criminology the issue of the involvement of women in crime has been problematic. Theories about women's criminality have frequently taken a basically biological stance; although more recently this view has been challenged by (female) criminologists, nevertheless there has been a tendency cither to ignore the question of whether there are different attitudinal factors at play, or to assume that the best explanation for the persistence of the ratio of male to female crime must lie in women's biology and psychology. Of course, originally biological and psychological explanations for criminality were not given solely for women alone. Yet whereas the general failure of criminology to provide a causal theory for criminality led to a change of emphasis in the nature of its concerns, moving on to consider specific types of criminal and criminal activity, such as delinquency, the behaviour of gangs, rational choice‐making by burglars, and the like, the exploration of gender in specific types of criminality has largely fallen by the wayside. Yet the positivist notion, that the difference in recorded criminality rates for the sexes reflects reality, can still be detected in the persistence of the question ‘Why do women commit less crime than men?’ The idea that reported and recorded crime rates can be safely taken as ‘true’ has been abandoned otherwise, and indeed the way in which crime statistics are produced has become a topic of study in its own right. One issue that has been raised in relation to females and crime is whether there is a ‘new’ female criminal. This idea sought to link together female emancipation and rates and types of crime committed. The evidence for this has been much criticised, however, it being pointed out by Smart that not only do the statistics, when compared over a 40‐year period, cast doubt upon the asserted recent percentage increase, but that in its own way this is another monocausal explanation. Moreover, it ignores the effect that the existence of the women's movement may have upon ‘significant defining agencies such as the police and the courts’. In short, utilising other theoretical developments in criminology, feminists have formed what might be called ‘critiques from within’: that is, if the premises of criminology are correct, they should be able to cope with female criminality: criminogenic factors should be able to explain the comparative level of female criminality as opposed to that of males. Thus, by adopting the so‐called ‘strain’ theories one may re‐evaluate the role of social structure, power and privilege in the economic relations of society to suggest that women are systematically deprived of access to sources of power and prestige, although this again treats women as an homogeneous group. Furthermore, these factors are not sufficient to explain the level of criminality either individually or at aggregated levels, for women should be among the most criminal and more women should be criminal. As Morris says, a theory that cannot explain this, cannot even be said to be an adequate explanation for male criminality. This is not to deny that the targets of criminology today are thought‐provoking. For a number of reasons current criminology takes on more specific targets than the production of grand theory: it looks at policing and policers, regulation and regulators, victimisation, specific venues for crime: it looks towards the creation of policy and the establishment of a body of crime‐and‐victim‐specific data. The redefinition of the subject‐matter of criminology, to include not only objective crime but perceptions of crime, has also encom‐passed the realisation that the definition of deviance relates not only to delinquency but also to those in the upper socio‐economic strata. For example, the ability of certain advantaged participants actively to define and redefine the boundaries between the legal and the illegal has been raised, notably by McBarnet. Such developments have also occurred in what was once known only as ‘white‐collar crime’. Suitable topics for attention now include the evaluation of self‐regulation versus criminal law as effective sanctions, the rating of different crimes in terms of their seriousness by those in the financial services sector, the attitude of those employed to enforce the self‐policing of the regulated sectors of the economy to the police and indeed their definition of what is, and is not, ‘criminal’ behaviour in normal busi‐ness life. Yet whilst the effect of the criminal justice system in differentially sanctioning and sentencing offenders has been looked at in terms of the gender of the offender, those working in the specific area of financial crime and the financial services sector do not appear to have linked together the type of crime with the gender of the offender. There would appear to be good reason to do so.

Citation

Tupman, A. (1994), "Looking for ‘Ms Big’", Journal of Financial Crime, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 179-186. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb025645