Generally, a common way to perceive the dynamic between men and women in the context of crime and deviance underestimates women’s capacity to be self-sufficient and expects to see the predator-prey relationships between the genders. Gender expectations define women as vulnerable people and automatically assign them a victim niche, while men are generally regarded as people in power and potential danger to women. Therefore, the main difference between genders concerning crimes and victimization derives from the imbalanced power dynamics established by society.
A general dynamic within crimes displays that most victims of the assault caused by a person of the opposite gender are women (Andersen & Witham, 2011). However, the prosecution process has two common variations of interpreting victimization. On the one hand, certain people initiate victim-blaming and base their arguments on misogynistic claims related to women’s sex appeal. On the other hand, once the case concerns a woman who potentially assaulted someone, many people could argue that women are not capable of committing serious crimes. This opinion is majorly based on the stereotypes about the feminine characteristics of women and their soft nature.
For instance, in the recent case of Lisa Montgomery, who killed a pregnant woman, some people claimed that she should not have been punished strictly due to her mental health condition (Hart, 2021). However, when men commit similar crimes, people rarely speak up about their mental health. Thus, due to gender-specific expectations, women are more vulnerable and prompt to irrational decisions based on external and internal factors than men.
Nonetheless, in both scenarios of prosecution interpretation, people partially base their arguments on outdated gender expectations rather than focusing on simplistic evidence. As a result, the severe binary expectation of how men and women should behave according to their feminine or masculine features is the primary element that leads to gender variations in the prosecution and context of crime. As a result, the fairness of judgment within the prosecution is often biased by gender-specific stereotypes.
References
Andersen, M. & Witham, D. H. (2011). Thinking about women: Sociological perspectives on sex and gender (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Hart, R. (2021). U.S. executes first woman in nearly 70 years after supreme court lifts last-minute stay. Forbes. Web.