(Page 1 of 21) - Life-span Offending Trajectories of Women, Ages 12 to 72 authored by Block, Carolyn., Blokland, Arjan. and Nieuwbeerta, Paul.

Crime Over the Lifespan, by Gender

Abstract

Our knowledge of offense patterns over the life-course has increased sharply in

recent years. There are now detailed datasets following young people to adulthood, as well
as statistical methods created to do justice to these datasets. However, women and girls
have largely been absent from this burst of knowledge. Most studies include only boys and
men, and even when girls and women are included, their numbers are often too small for
detailed analysis. In addition, the length of followup history is usually short, to age 40 at the
oldest. This may confound analysis by gender. For example, if the life-course pattern of
some women began in their 30s and ended in their 60s, we would need to follow them
through their sixties in order to describe accurately their life-span trajectory. This analysis
describes life-course offending patterns of 424 girls and women and 4191 boys and men
sampled from all 1977 CJ contacts in the Netherlands and followed prospectively from
1977 to 2003. With data on each CJ contact from age 12 through age 72 (given age in
1977), we describe patterns of onset, frequency, offense type, career duration, and
desistance, and discuss implications for developmental and life-course theory.

Literature Review

There is not much research on the life-course of women offenders, probably

because they are rare compared with men (Farral, 2002; Chesney-Lind & Belknap, 2004;
Claessen, 2006; Rhule-Louie & McMahon, 2007). For example, in their analysis of the
Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter and Silva
(2001: 226) concluded that “The female life-course-persistent antisocial individual is
extremely rare,” with only about one in one hundred women in a birth cohort who “appear
to be on the life-course-persistent path,” and that, “Almost all females who engage in anti-
social behavior best fit the adolescence-limited type,” with a gender ratio almost on par
with males (1: 1.5). .” Similarly, Graham and Bowling (1995: 24) found in an analysis of
adolescents and young adults that “participation in offending by females declines with
age,” and that the offending careers of males and females tend to follow quite different
paths.” (ibid p. 48).

Moffitt, et al. (2001) also found, however, that those women and girls who did

appear to be on the life-course-persistent path were similar in their risk factors to men and
boys on the same path, sharing the same risk factors of “poor discipline, family adversity,
cognitive deficit, undercontrolled temperament, hyperactivity, and rejection by peers.” In
contrast, Graham and Bowling (1995) found different indicators of desistance for the young
men and young women in their sample. For the young women, “forming partnerships,
getting married and having children were all strong predictors of deslstance . . . . But the
greatest influence on desistance came not from partners but from having children,” while
for young men, “the effects of settling down and having chddren are not so Immediate or
apparent” (Graham & Bowling, 1995: 36-37).

Despite the “common perception that the criminal behavior of women and the

delinquent behavior of girls are not serious problems,” however, Julie Samuels (2000)
argues that, “these facts mask a trend that is beginning to attract attention. The dramatic