Major crimes that have been reported to be the top committed by women include drug trafficking, fraud, and murder. Despite many women getting increasingly involved in crime, the number of male offenders is still higher. More women are now being convicted for violent crimes; despite their numbers being small, the surge is higher than that of male convicts. Several reasons can be given for the crimes that women now commit. The most common reasons for the top crimes committed by women are the convergence of gender roles, the increase in financial pressures for women in households, and the leniency of the criminal justice system towards women related crimes.
Women now face the same financial pressures that men have been subjected to for a long time by society. In 40% of the households in America, women are the breadwinners, and if the bills of these houses cannot be paid, there is no other way but to resort to crime (Chun, 2020). Fraud, therefore, offers the perfect opportunity to bridge the financial deficit existing in women-dependent households. Another reason why women commit the stated crimes is that the social roles of men and women have converged to the point that women feel like equals to men in society.
Men have for a long time made society patriarchal in nature where they are the deemed as the heads of the households with defined gender roles. The convergence of roles creates behavioral changes in women due to the near equality with men (Estrada et al., 2019). Women are therefore motivated to commit crimes that men are accustomed to, such as murder. A good example is the Bad Barbies, a gang purely composed of women who have committed several murders as revenge (Chun, 2020). Women have also increasingly committed the stated crimes because women who commit crimes are given milder treatment than their male counterparts (Estrada et al., 2019). A female convict guilty of robbery with violence is more likely to be given a lighter sentence than a man with the same crime which acts as a motivational factor rather than being a deterrence.
References
Chun, R. (2020). Female fugitives: Why is ‘pink-collar crime’ on the rise? The Guardian. Web.
Estrada, F., Nilsson, A., & Pettersson, T. (2019). The female offender – A century of registered crime and daily press reporting on women’s crime. Nordic Journal of Criminology, 20(2), 138-156. Web.