Gender and Robbery: A National Test

Abstract

Robbery is a quintessential male crime. Female involvement in this crime is important, however, as they are responsible for a non-trivial amount of robbery each year. While some qualitative studies have examined female involvement in robbery, patterns discerned from these studies have not been examined using alternative methods. The current study adds to our understanding of the gendered nature of robbery by examining patterns associated with male and female robbery perpetration from the victim's perspective using the National Crime Victimization Survey. Findings suggest the role of gender in robbery is not as influential as extent research indicates.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Heith Copes and Dr. Carole Gibbs for their help on earlier drafts of the article. We especially thank Jody Miller for her work with us on the project. Her guidance was especially helpful. We are solely responsible for any mistakes or omissions that remain.

Notes

¹Even though it was common for women in Miller's (1998, 2000) study to report having appeared sexually interested in their male victims in order to manipulate the situational characteristics in their favor, our study is not well suited to examine this particular feature of female perpetrated robbery.

²These years used in the analyses include all NCVS data for which there is a full year of data available following the 1992 split-sample redesign.

³Readers interested in additional information about the NCVS are directed to Rennison and Rand (2007).

Unweighted n = 4,660.

Unweighted n = 4,660.

Dependent Variable: Male = 1; Female = 0.

⁴While initially the use of victim's gender as the “dependent” variable appears unusual, it is an appropriate strategy for our purposes. This method follows approaches used in fields such as taxonomy and biology, and increasingly used in the criminology literature (see, e.g., Swatt and He 2006). Like that work, our research does not treat victim's gender as a dependent variable in the classic—causal—sense, but rather as a measure for the selection of a victim based on their gender which is in line with the extant qualitative research on urban robbery (see Harrell 2001 for more information).

*p < .05; unweighted n = 4,660.

Dependent variable: Male = 1; Female = 0.

*p < 0.05; ⁺ p < .10.

Dependent Variable: Male = 1; Female = 0.

"Supplementary” denotes that additional analyses, not in table format, confirmed this finding.

⁵Copes and Hochstetler (2003:299) continued “[t]he disreputable young men who occupy the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and are responsible for most street crime probably do not have the same conventions and attitudes toward women as middle-class college professors.” We agree with this general statement, and also believe that such respondents are keenly aware of this. Further it is our contention that interviews with male offenders are likely systematically hampered by the pressure of these individuals to adhere to more conventional norms of masculinity, which frowns on the use of violence against women; a classic case of social desirability bias (Groves et al. 2004).

⁶See http://www.census.gov/geo/www/GARM/Ch13GARM.pdf, http://www.census.gov/population/ www/metroareas/metrodef.html, and http://www.census.gov/population/ and www/estimates/metroarea.html for additional information.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Callie Marie Rennison

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Rennison's research focuses on violent victimization with an emphasis on research methodology, quantitative analysis, and measurement. She has published in a variety of areas including violence against women, violence against minority groups such as African Americans and Hispanics, crime data, and victim interaction within the criminal justice system.

Chris Melde

CHRIS MELDE is an Associate Professor and coordinator of undergraduate studies in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His primary research interests include program evaluation, juvenile delinquency and victimization, gangs, perceptions of crime and victimization risk, and criminological theory. His recent work has appeared in such outlets as Criminology, Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology.