Feminist School of Criminology

The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the perceived general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. Proponents assert that the patriarchal domination of the field of criminology has led to the field being inherently biased and androcentric. This, they argue, leads mainstream criminology to either generalise or ignore criminological inquiry relevant to women in an effort to support the male dominated status quo.

The feminist school was closely associated with the emergence of the Second Wave Feminism and it speaks with multiple viewpoints developed from different feminist writers. The feminist theory emphasises that crime is caused by the hostility in men, but also states that crime is a result of inequalities within society. Politically, there is a range from Marxist and socialist to liberal feminism addressing the "gender ratio" problem (i.e. why women are less likely than men to commit crime) or the generalisability problem (i.e. "adding" women to male knowledge, whereby the findings from research on men are generalised to women).