Crime and Gender First Document

Crime and Gender

First Document

More than any other minority group, blacks remain residentially segregated. That is, they tend to live together in small areas away from other ethnic groups. The segregation is a result of discrimination toward blacks in rental agreements and mortgage loans, in addition to neighbors' desire to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. When this occurs, only the middle class, or the relatively wealthy, can afford to move, leaving a concentration of poverty. The effects of this poverty concentration, or concentration effects, include an increase of poverty rates since more impoverished people are concentrated in one area, the decline of places of business, social services, and other properties, and general decline of political or social awareness and power. These neighborhoods no lack the ability to hire others to lobby government officials for their causes. As a direct result of residential segregation, therefore, are a number of serious concentration effects.

Intersectionality is the understanding that person has more than one identity. For instance, a person is not simply a student, but that person can be a student, mother, daughter, female, and member of the African-American and Muslim communities. All of these characteristics combine to make each person the unique individual that they are. The concept applies to crime because this unique intersection of characteristics not only gives a person his or her personality, but also affects his or her position, research, and way of thinking. Intersectionality creates biases, but an informed researcher can determine what types of biases they are and attempt to avoid them when conducting criminal research.

Second Document

The sex-gap in crime is the term used to describe the apparent large difference between the number of crimes committed by males and females. This gap suggests that men commit the majority of crimes. While the gap exists for all crimes, it is the largest for violent crime, such as homicide, rape, and robberies, and the smallest for property crime. Unlike self-report data, official statistics and victimization reports generally describe the gender-gap as most apparent, as these types of crime reporting suggest large gaps in the number of crimes committed by men and women. Official statistics and victimization reports probably show the largest gender gaps both because they deal more with violent crimes, whose perpetrators tend to be men and because self-report data allows researchers to choose samples that have equal amounts of men and women to study similarities and differences across gender. In other words, self-report data generally has a lower sex-gap because researchers can have a great deal influence in manipulating the data set.