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Girls suspected or convicted of assaults make up an increasing proportion of juvenile arrests and court caseloads. There is indication that changes in domestic violence arrest policies, school handling of student rules infractions, and practices of charging youth for assaults rather than status offenses account for these trends. To determine whether girls were treated more harshly for assaults after these policies changed, the present study compared the probabilities of conviction and institutionalization, net of the effect of self-reported attacks on persons, for 1980 and 2000. Data were from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts. Girls experienced a unique increase in the probabilities of justice system involvement that was replicated only for Black males. The increase was magnified for Black girls. Additional research is needed to better connect specific policies to drawing selected subgroups more deeply into the justice system and on the consequences for affected youth.

The power control theory of delinquency is one of the few that has attempted to account for both gender and class in delinquency causation. This paper assesses critically the model's conceptual framework and reformulates it on the basis of these concerns as well as the results of prior research. We then test the revised model using data from the National Survey of Children, for which the members of a nationally representative sample of households were interviewed in 1981. Bivariate analysis showed that, contrary to power control theory, gender differences in delinquency appeared in families regardless of their structure (patriarchal or egalitarian). Moreover, a path analysis revealed that the quality of the relationship with the mother was important in explaining low levels of delinquency, particularly in boys. The quality of a youth's relationships with parents, particularly the experience of negative sanctions from the father, was found to explain delinquency for both sexes. Finally, family's social cla...

In this essay we sketch core elements of feminist thought and demonstrate their relevance for criminology. After reviewing the early feminist critiques of the discipline and the empirical emphases of the 1970s and early 1980s, we appraise current issues and debates in three areas: building theories of gender and crime, controlling men's violence toward women, and gender equality in the criminal justice system. We invite our colleagues to reflect on the androcentrism of the discipline and to appreciate the promise of feminist inquiry for rethinking problems of crime and justice.