6 Extracting a summary

Discussion

Our short notes for the first part of the extract are reproduced below and any additional information, for example link sentences and words as well as quoted material that we added to make a summary, are underlined. Below each set of points we have included a translation of our notes so that you can understand them.

Figure 2

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Figure 2

Figure 2

Translation:

• assumed men commit more crime than women: based on conviction rates

• do they? how is this explained?

Figure 3

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Figure 3

Figure 3

Translation:

• criminal convictions are more normal for males than females

• men and women are convicted of different types of offences

• women in all offence groups but represent the majority only regarding prostitution and TV licence non-payment

• women are more likely to be involved in theft/handling stolen goods/ fraud/forgery

• women are convicted for less serious offences

• but: trends reflect conviction rates as opposed to crime rates – therefore they could reflect patterns of policing or problems with statistical data

Figure 4

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Figure 4

Figure 4

Translation:

• assumes women are naturally less criminal than men as a result of biological differences, hormones and reproductive function being related to non-aggression

• female crime is therefore seen as pathological – resulting from a non- adjustment to social change, biological abnormalities, mental illness and ‘women's problems’

• but: gender differences cannot be reduced to biological/genetic differences alone as many women do commit crime

• sex role theory claims that crime is more consistent with male roles: role of socialization

• but this is functionalist: it rarely questions the naturalness of gender roles or the relationships they reflect, thus giving rise to claims that criminal women are abnormal

Figure 5

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Figure 5

Figure 5

Translation:

• sociological approaches increase the focus on class, social deprivation and age

• women remain largely invisible

• the anomie paradigm, subcultural theory, labelling theory, and critical/ radical approaches all neglected the gender dimension

• control theory has potential but accepts stereotypical notions regarding gender

As you can see we made a note of the bibliographical details of the extract (from the list of references on page 20) at the top of our notes. This is crucial if you want to use notes at a later stage, perhaps for writing assignments, as it enables you to acknowledge the source of these ideas and arguments (see Section 8 - page 15 of this course - for more on referencing, acknowledging sources and avoiding plagiarism). We also thought it might be useful to note down some of the proponents of particular perspectives. This means that if we need to write about these ideas we can attach them to relevant ‘owners’. This in turn enables us to (a) stand back from different viewpoints and subject them to critical scrutiny, and (b) present a whole range of different and competing ideas and viewpoints without appearing to contradict ourselves. We can simply represent these views as different takes on the same issue. No quotes ‘jumped out’ at us, so we did not include any this time, but we did use our highlighted subheadings which proved to be a useful way of organizing our notes.