1 Theft was addressed earlier, and WCC is theft, but it deserves its own section given the women’s liberation/emancipation hypothesis (WLEH) and assumptions about women’s financial and other “equalities.”
More recent research confirms many of Daly’s (1989) findings. A corporate crime study confirmed there are still far fewer opportunities for women, relative to men, to commit corporate crime, which is one reason they were only 9% of the defendants (Steffensmeier et al., 2013). A National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) study concluded that women’s larceny, fraud, forgery, and embezzlement arrests involved small financial gains, were primarily misdemeanors or low-level felony charges (not WCCs), and were disproportionately shoplifting, bad checks, and welfare/benefit fraud (men’s were disproportionately theft from motor vehicles, transportation fraud, and counterfeiting) (Steffensmeier, Harris, & Painter-Davis, 2015). Kristy Holtfreter (2005) conducted an analysis of three occupational fraud offenses (to determine if occupational fraud is a “typical” WCC): (1) asset misappropriation (theft or misuse of an organization’s assets), (2) corruption (employees wrongfully using their influence in business transactions to obtain benefits for themselves that were contrary to duties to their employer), and (3) fraudulent statements (falsification of the organization’s records or documents). Like Daly (1989), Holtfreter found that the less serious WCCs (in terms of dollar loss), asset misappropriation and corruption, were equally likely to be committed by women and men. However, fraudulent statements (the more serious offenses) were distinctly linked to being male, being educated, and holding a higher-level position in the organization, and thus more consistent with WCC.
A 2019 Pennsylvania court “low-level” WCC study reported that women constituted 42% (Cassidy & Gibbs, 2019), and both a 2012 Florida felony “low-level” WCC study (Van Slyke & Bales, 2013) and a 2019 U.S. sentencing study (Testa, 2019) reported that women constituted 49% of WCC offenders. This might indicate a converging gender gap, at least for “lower-level” WCCs, but it could also mean these researchers were using data with the same or similar problems as Daly’s (1989) data, which require further parsing to determine whether these are truly WCCs. Many mainstream criminologists have stressed, often without mentioning gender, that WCC research needs to distinguish between occupational crime and white-collar crime (Clinard & Quinney, 1973), and account for the seriousness of victimization and the organizational complexity (station), instead of lumping truly serious WCCs with petty offenses, such as low-level bank tellers pilfering small amounts of money at work (Reese & McDougal, 2018; Weisburd & Waring, 2001).
WCC is still a male-related crime, indeed a white-male-related crime, due to white men’s overrepresentation in position and opportunity in the elite corporate, political, and economic world (see Dodge, 2013, p. 198, for this explanation regarding gender, but not race). As noted in the previous chapter, embezzlement, typically considered a white-collar crime was the only solidly gender-neutral offense in the 2018 UCR data. As Dodge (2013) explains, women have “flourished” in embezzlement “due to low-level occupations such as bookkeepers, bank tellers, or secretaries who have access to company funds,” women who are not exactly in high-paying positions themselves (p. 200).
Sex Work and Prostitution
Recall that in Table 4.1, prostitution was the only female-gender-related offense in the 2018 UCR. Feminist scholars and activists frequently struggle with not “othering” sex workers and not denying their agency, as well as the criminalization of sex work (for adults). Notably, most of the activists are sex workers, and they, as well as many feminist activists and scholars who are not sex workers, increasingly use the labels “sex work” and “sex workers” in lieu of “prostitution” and “prostitutes,” but the criminal legal system and many others, including many sex workers, also or predominantly use the terms “prostitution” and “prostitutes.” Updegrove, Muftic, and Niebuhr (2019) provide one of the most recent and best quantitative sex work/prostitution studies, distinguishing between three prostitution roles: sellers (ones performing the sexual act for a fee), buyers (ones purchasing the sexual act), and facilitators (sex work where a person arranges between the buyer and seller and benefits financially from the sex work). Men/boys were 23% of the sellers, 77% of the facilitators, and 97% of the buyers. Notably, the sellers averaged 33 years older and the buyers 40 years older than the sellers (sex workers) (p. 1601). Conover-Williams’s (2014) extensive Add Health data study examining self-reported offenses found the greatest difference in SMS and non-SMS offending was SMS youth were far more likely to report trading sex for money, and this was significantly higher for males than females, but they found no race/ethnicity differences.
Prostitution is often considered a “vice” or “victimless” offense (many sex workers would disagree, and many would agree, with this categorization). Individuals who do sex work do it primarily for the money. While this is not always for survival, it often is. Along with women’s property and financial offending, sex work offenses appear to be highly correlated with the feminization of poverty. A recent study found “correlates of sex trading status included age, lifetime injection drug use, lower education, child sexual abuse, and unstable housing” (A. A. Jones et al., 2019, p. 15). An example of this is “sugar babies,” whereby a company is specifically interested in recruiting women college students to be paid companions for (primarily) older men. Although the website for this claims it is not prostitution/sex work, it is clear many of the young women do exchange sex for money and/or other perks (thus fitting most legal definitions of prostitution), so that they can do things such as pay college tuition (Hernandez, 2016; Rosman, 2018). Frederick (2014) details the intricate interconnections among SMS young people with sex work, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health: “Involvement in sex work can feed back into drug use by involving youth in drug using milieus, as well as through the use of drugs to cope with the stress and trauma of sex work” (p. 481). But at the same time that we need to recognize such young people’s vulnerability, Frederick also urges an emphasis on their “diversity of experience, and the opportunities that street life holds for finding acceptance and belonging” (p. 473).
Bachman, Rodriguez, Kerrison, and Leon’s (2019) intensive interviews with drug-involved women released from Delaware prisons, who had an average of 16 arrests each, reported that “their criminal records prevented them from obtaining legitimate employment” resulting in nearly half of them in “survival prostitution,” living in fear of “dying on the street” (p. 587). Shdaimah and Leon’s (2015) powerful ethnographic and qualitative work on sex workers in Baltimore and Philadelphia, also described their participants as “engaged in survival prostitution”:
We found a nuanced picture of moral and rational choice-making in an extremely circumscribed universe of options. Women faced limited economic and social opportunities, and prostitution provided a means to sustain themselves. Our respondents were also influenced by their family and relational ties in ways that made prostitution a logical choice. Sometimes, this was through coercive relationships, in which women were pressured to engage in prostitution by parents or partners. On other occasions, it was a chosen means to help support family members, including sick relatives and children. (Shdaimah & Leon, 2015, p. 330)
Almost one in ten had been sexually assaulted, including extensive child sexual abuse, and 29% had been sexually assaulted during sex work. The participants reported their further denial of agency once caught up in “the system,” where their main goal was not staying or being incarcerated, and they used agency to resist and self-advocate (Shdaimah & Leon, 2015, p. 332).
Aggression and Assault
A study examining the context of assaults committed by 65 violent women offenders reported that the motivations were often aggressive responses to aggression from those designated as their victims (Sommers & Baskin, 1993). “These women are not roaming willy-nilly through the streets engaging in ‘unprovoked’ violence. They are frequently thrust in violence-prone situations in which the victim enters into it as an active participant, shares the actor’s role, and becomes functionally responsible for it” (Sommers & Baskin, 1993, p. 154). However, the respondents’ aggression was typically more aggressive than that of their