Understanding Female Criminality: Criminological Perspectives

For the longest time, crime has been viewed as an overwhelmingly male domain. Women were seen as passive, law-abiding, and confined to domesticity. But data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) tells a different story – one of steadily rising female arrests, shifting crime patterns, and deep-rooted socio-economic causes that push women toward criminality. Understanding why women commit crimes requires looking beyond the act itself and into the conditions that breed it. Criminological theories on female criminality have evolved dramatically – from outdated biological explanations to sophisticated frameworks that account for poverty, patriarchy, and gendered oppression.

Why female criminality was historically ignored 🔗

Criminology, for most of its history, has been the study of male crime. The dominant theories – from anomie to cultural transmission to conflict theory – were built around male offending behaviour. As scholars have pointed out, these frameworks treated female crime as irrelevant or insignificant, mainly because official statistics showed that women committed far fewer offences than men. In India, the male-to-female criminal ratio has historically hovered around 20:1. This massive gap led researchers and policymakers to simply overlook women as offenders.

The neglect wasn’t just academic. As FactChecker’s analysis of NCRB data noted, there is no dedicated sub-heading in NCRB reports for “crimes by women” – only “crimes against women.” This framing positions women solely as victims and never as agents, creating a blind spot in criminal justice policy and research.

Early biological and psychological theories 🔗

The earliest criminological explanations for female offending were rooted in biology and were, by modern standards, deeply sexist.

Lombroso’s biological determinism 🔗

Cesare Lombroso, in his 1895 work The Female Offender, argued that women who committed crimes were biological anomalies with masculine characteristics. He believed that criminal women could be identified by specific physical features and that their offending was an inherent deviation from femininity. His view was that female criminals were inherently more cruel than their male counterparts, making their crimes a kind of perversion of the feminine role. These ideas have been thoroughly discredited, but they established an unfortunate tradition of treating female offenders as pathological and irrational rather than responding to their environment.

Freud, Pollak, and hormonal explanations 🔗

Sigmund Freud contributed to this tradition by framing female deviance in psychosexual terms. Otto Pollak, in The Criminality of Women (1950), took a different but equally problematic approach. He emphasised the role of hormonal changes during menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause as contributing factors to female offending. While these theories acknowledged physical factors like mood swings and impulses, they reduced female criminality to biology alone and ignored the social realities women faced. By the late twentieth century, these single-factor biological models had lost credibility among mainstream criminologists.

Sociological theories of female criminality 🔗

As criminology matured, researchers began to examine the social, economic, and structural conditions that led women to crime. These theories provide far more useful explanations, particularly for the Indian context.

The role theory 🔗

The role theory, associated with Ralph Linton and George Herbert Mead, holds that societal expectations shape behaviour. Women are socialised from childhood to be passive, polite, and non-violent. This suppression of aggression and self-assertion limits women’s involvement in violent crime (like gang fights or armed robbery) but does not eliminate their involvement in crime altogether. When the expectations placed on women become unbearable – through abuse, financial crisis, or social exclusion – the cracks in this socialisation begin to show.

Differential association theory 🔗

Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory argues that criminal behaviour is learned through interactions with others. Under this framework, women historically committed fewer crimes because their gender roles confined them to the home, limiting their exposure to criminal networks and techniques. As Legal Service India explains, women were largely restricted from the social circles where criminal behaviour is transmitted. However, as women’s mobility and social interactions have expanded, so has their exposure to criminal opportunities.

Opportunity theory 🔗

Rita J. Simon’s opportunity theory, put forward in her 1975 book Women and Crime, proposed that there is no inherent moral difference between men and women when it comes to crime. The difference lies in opportunity. As women gained greater access to education, employment, and public life, their opportunities to commit certain crimes – particularly property offences like fraud, embezzlement, and forgery – increased as well. Simon argued that while increasing opportunities may reduce violent crime among women, they simultaneously increase white-collar and property offences.

Marginalization theory 🔗

Among the four major theoretical traditions – masculinisation, opportunity, marginalisation, and chivalry – marginalisation theory is considered the most relevant for explaining female criminality in developing nations. This theory posits that women are pushed to the margins of society through poverty, illiteracy, and exclusion from economic opportunities. Crime becomes not a choice but a survival mechanism. In India, where millions of women face severe economic deprivation, this explanation carries significant weight.

The chivalry hypothesis 🔗

The chivalry hypothesis suggests that the low official crime rate among women is partly a result of lenient treatment by the criminal justice system. Police officers, prosecutors, and judges – influenced by paternalistic attitudes – may be more inclined to overlook, excuse, or minimise female offending. While this does not explain why women commit crimes, it helps explain why the statistical picture may underrepresent the actual extent of female criminality.

Feminist perspectives on female criminality 🔗

Feminist criminology fundamentally reshaped the field by centring gender as a key variable in understanding crime. Rather than asking why women commit fewer crimes than men, feminist scholars asked what structural forces constrain or push women toward offending.

Patriarchy and gendered power imbalances 🔗

Feminist theorists argue that female criminality often occurs within the context of patriarchal power structures that restrict women’s choices. In India’s patriarchal family system, a woman moves through life defined by her relationship to men – as daughter, wife, and mother. When these relationships become sites of oppression through domestic violence, dowry harassment, or abandonment, some women respond through acts that the law categorises as criminal. Research by Ram Ahuja on female offenders in India found that familial maladjustment was the primary cause of female criminality, a finding supported by subsequent Indian scholars.

The victimisation-to-criminalisation pathway 🔗

A crucial insight from feminist criminology is the victimisation-criminalisation pathway. Many women who end up in the criminal justice system have themselves been victims of abuse, exploitation, or violence. Their criminal behaviour often emerges as a response to trauma rather than from inherent deviance. Studies have shown a direct correlation between the type of victimisation a woman experiences and the type of crime she commits – for instance, victims of physical abuse are more likely to commit offences involving physical harm.

Economic causes of female criminality in India 🔗

Economic hardship is arguably the most powerful driver of female criminality in India. The link between poverty and crime among women is well-documented and has even been acknowledged in Indian judicial decisions. Courts in cases like Shreerangyee v. State of Madras and Re Maragatham have recognised that poverty directly contributes to women’s involvement in crime.

Poverty and the feminisation of poverty 🔗

Women in India bear a disproportionate share of economic hardship. Limited access to education, employment, and financial resources leaves many women entirely dependent on male family members. When these support structures collapse – through divorce, widowhood, abandonment, or a husband’s imprisonment – women are left with few legitimate means of survival. Crimes like theft, pickpocketing, and involvement in illicit liquor trade often stem directly from economic desperation rather than criminal intent.

Illiteracy and lack of employment 🔗

Illiteracy severely limits the employment options available to women. Without education or vocational skills, women in economically vulnerable households have minimal access to the formal job market. According to research published in the International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences, the socio-economic environment – marked by poverty, lack of education, and limited employment – is the single most significant contributor to the making of female criminals in India.

Social and personal factors 🔗

Beyond economics, several social and personal factors contribute to female criminality in the Indian context.

Marital discord and domestic violence 🔗

Stressful family situations are a recurring theme in studies on female offenders. Husbands who are abusive, addicted to alcohol or gambling, or who engage in extramarital affairs create unbearable domestic conditions. In some cases, prolonged frustration from domestic abuse has led women to commit acts of violence, including homicide. Studies consistently show that in a significant proportion of female homicide cases, the victim is a family member – usually the husband or an in-law – highlighting the central role of domestic conflict.

Changing social values and urbanisation 🔗

Rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, and the weakening of traditional social structures have created new pressures. As scholars like Pattanaik and Mishra have noted, female criminality in India is a consequence of diverse socio-economic-cultural and environmental factors resulting from rapid industrialisation, westernisation, and urbanisation. The breakdown of joint family systems and community-based social controls has left many women without the support networks that previously insulated them from criminal involvement.

The numbers: what NCRB data reveals 🔗

The data confirms that female criminality in India is on the rise. Between 2015 and 2020, women’s arrests increased by 10% even as male arrests dropped by 21%. Approximately 3.55 lakh women were arrested in 2020. While the vast majority (99.5%) were chargesheeted, only about 8.6% were actually convicted.

The nature of crimes has also shifted. Earlier, women were mostly associated with offences like drug trafficking and prostitution. Now, women are increasingly arrested for offences affecting the human body, with “hurt” being the most common conviction category. At the same time, women’s involvement in heinous crimes like murder and dowry deaths has actually declined significantly – falling by about 49% and 70% respectively since 2015. Under Special and Local Laws, a striking 91% of convicted women were found guilty of liquor and narcotics-related offences, pointing to the economic dimensions of their involvement.

The types of crimes women commit 🔗

Female offenders in India are largely involved in property offences driven by economic need. Theft, pickpocketing, and shoplifting remain common, with Lombroso and others historically observing that shoplifting is disproportionately committed by women due to their proximity to domestic and retail environments. Women are also frequently involved in excise offences – often as accomplices to their husbands in illicit distillation.

In cases involving offences against persons, the victim-offender relationship is particularly significant. Unlike male-perpetrated violence, which often targets strangers or acquaintances, female-perpetrated violence is overwhelmingly directed at family members. Homicide by women is frequently the endpoint of prolonged domestic abuse and frustration. Kidnapping by women, where it occurs, is sometimes linked to trafficking – including the selling of daughters or female relatives into brothels under conditions of extreme economic distress.

Moving beyond labels: addressing root causes 🔗

The criminological evidence is clear – female criminality in India is overwhelmingly a product of socio-economic deprivation, patriarchal oppression, and systemic marginalisation. Treating women offenders purely through a punitive lens misses the point entirely. Effective responses require addressing the root causes: expanding women’s access to education and vocational training, strengthening economic safety nets, enforcing laws against domestic violence, and reforming a criminal justice system that often fails to account for the unique circumstances of female offenders.

As the Social and Political Research Foundation has noted, policy effectiveness in protecting women depends on adequate resources, staff, infrastructure, oversight, and scalability. The same applies to preventing women from becoming offenders in the first place. Without addressing structural inequality, the cycle of victimisation and criminalisation will continue.

What do you think? Can female criminality in India be meaningfully reduced without first tackling the systemic economic and social inequality that women face? And should the criminal justice system adopt a fundamentally different approach when dealing with women offenders whose crimes are rooted in survival rather than intent?

References

1. https://ncrb.gov.in/
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334113027_Theories_of_Female_Criminality_A_criminological_analysis
3. https://www.factchecker.in/data-dive/data-dive-in-5-years-police-nabbed-10-more-women-21-fewer-men-798626
4. https://www.ijhsss.com/files/3.-Prof.-Sunishtha-Moghe-05-11-19.pdf
5. https://blog.ipleaders.in/female-crimes-related-theories-and-postulations/
6. https://legalserviceindia.com/legal/article-15659-critical-analysis-of-female-criminality.html
7. http://ijcst.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/ijcst/article/viewFile/39737/35977
8. https://ijcjs.com/menu-script/index.php/ijcjs/article/view/159
9. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1692045475
10. https://sprf.in/crimes-against-women-in-india-trends-challenges-and-policy-responses/