Aktiva förövare eller offer för omständigheterna? - En textanalys om kvinnors kriminalitet

The purpose of this study was to get an greater knowledge of why women commit crimes, the reasons of why women end up in crime and how it is for women to live in a criminal lifestyle. In our survey we did a text analysis based on autobiographies, which we found by searching on the words ”crime”, ”women” and ”criminal” on different web sites. To gain a greater understanding of these women’s behavior and way of acting we used Travis Hirschi's social bond theory, which describe various protective effects in a individual's environment that can prevent deviant behavior. We also used Sykes and Mazda's techniques of neutralization, which explains the different ways for individuals to deny and justify his criminal behavior. Some of the patterns we found in our study were that women commit crime to support their family or to maintain their addiction. The women's criminal lifestyle is reflected in both use and sale of drugs. We also found out that the relationships around the woman have had a major and crucial role in the women’s criminal behavior, both as an input to crime and as a cause to continue. Our study revealed that these women lived in a constant risky environment bordered by violence and abuse, the majority of them were more than once exposed to physical- and mental violence and sexual abuse. Furthermore, we see a clear pattern between the lack in childhood conditions and their development of criminal behavior, there were obvious reasons in the woman´s background that we could see may have provided their way of act. Our conclusion from this study is that there, of course, are many reasons why women commit crimes but by this survey we have been able to identify some of them. The most distinctive feature of them has been how women are affected by others through relationships and how they through this find motives to commit crimes