The female offender - A century of registered crime and daily press reporting on women’s crime

ABSTRACT This article examines how women’s crime has been reflected in crime statistics and media crime reporting. We employ a long-term historical perspective, looking at developments from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. We describe the overarching processes that underlie the decline in the gender gap in convictions for theft and violent crime, respectively, at different times during the past century. The study also use a new data set comprised of newspaper articles on women’s and men’s offending published by the Swedish press between 1905 and 2015. We compare the trend in the number of articles focused on offences committed by women and men respectively, variations in the offence types that the daily press choose to report on and the overarching explanations for crime that are discussed in the articles. The results show that levels of coverage and the types of crime that attract media attention are strikingly similar for men and women, but throughout the whole period there is a greater need for the newspapers to find reasons for women’s offending. Moreover, there has been no marked increase in the press focus on women’s crime as women have comprised an increasing proportion of those convicted of criminal offences.