Women generally commit crimes at lower rates than men. However, female criminality has been understudied due to biases that view women as less threatening and their crimes as less serious. While statistics mostly come from police and courts, certain female crimes may go unreported, such as shoplifting, abortions, domestic assaults, prostitution, and poisoning relatives. Sociologists also note that male law enforcement officials tend to be more lenient towards female offenders.

1. Women and Crime
1. Women tend to have consistently lower rates of officially recorded crimes than men.
2. The low-criminal participation rate has not been sufficiently studied. Feminists have viewed this as
another example of the characterisitc invisibility of women in social science or social policy).
3. The only certain data on the sex offenders comes either from police statistics or from judicial figures of
those tried in courts.
4. The tendency to report female crime may differ from the tendency to report male criminal activity.
5. Females tend to be more conformist than males to social mores.
Carol Smart asserted the following:
1. Women tend to commit fewer crimes than men, therefore female offenders are viewed as less of a
threat to society, than male offenders.
2. Most crimes committed by women seem to be of a comparitively trival nature and may therefore be
considered unworthy of research.
3. Sociology and criminology are both dominated by males.
4. Traditional criminology have been originally motivated by the objective to control behaviour that is
viewed as problematic. Since women's criminality has been viewed as less problematic than men's, it
has recieved correspondingly less attention.
Otto Pollak noted that certain crimes committed by women tend to go unrecorded by the authorities.
1. Shop-lifitng
2. Abortions
3. Assalts against female domestic servants by female employers
4. Prostituion
5. Poisioning relatives
6. Sexually abusing children
Further, sociologists tend to agree that magistrates and other law enforcement officalis tend to be
men, brought up by women and therefore tend to be more lienient towards women than men.
Finally women are more adept at hiding their crimes and usually are good at decieiving men, therefore
stand a better chance of getting away with minimal or no penalties.