Feminist scholarship, relational and instrumental control, and a power-control theory of gender and delinquency.

Abstract

This paper incorporates an emphasis placed on relational processes in contemporary feminist scholarship, and in so doing extends the development of a power-control theory of gender and delinquency. Feminist scholarship emphasizes that relational processes involving shared intimacy, mutual understanding, caring and other kinds of interpersonal atTect are more characteristic of women than men. However, there is debate among feminist scholars, such as Gilligan and MacKinnon, as to the sources of this difference. An elaboration and test of power-control theory suggests that mothers in patriarchal families are assigned roles in controlling daughters, relationally and consequently instrumentally, more than sons, and that this leads daughters to prefer risk taking less than do sons. Therefore daughters in such families engage in less delinquency than do sons. In other words, these data indicate that there is a sexual stratification in the social control of adolescents that is connected to patriarchal family structure, and that this is important to the explanation of gender differences in delinquency. The analysis indicates that these gender differences are social structural in origin rather than biologically inherent. Nearly a decade ago thisJournal published the first of a series of papers that develop a power-control theory of gender and delinquency.} A central premise of this theory is that there is a family based sexual stratification of the social control of children in industrial societies. The theory asserts that this stratification is imposed through an instrument-object relationship in which mothers more than fathers participate in the control of daughters more than sons. In turn, it is postulated that this instrument-object relationship makes daughters less inclined than sons to take risks, and therefore also makes them less inclined to engage in related forms of delinquent behaviour. The theory further postulates that these relationships are a product of the The British Jounzal of Sociology Volume.TIf.&X/X Number.'S This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:37:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms John Hagan, John Simpson, and A. R. Gillis