By This Process, Parents Help To Ensure That Their Children Do Not Eventually

By this process, parents help to ensure that their children do not eventually become offenders. Getting involved with teachers and adults for more of the time prevents them being involved with people their own age and so prevents them from becoming delinquent.
Theorists have attempted to use both control theory and socialisation theory to explain why women commit fewer crimes. Hagan (1987), for example, has pulled together the theories of socialisation, control and opportunity. For the effective working of industrial society it has become necessary to divide labour. Woman have traditionally had control over the home, a particularly informal area. Conversely men have historically been more involved in the world of work which has been more closely associated with formal control systems, i.e. the criminal justice system. Hagan (1987) also argues that women are the subject of greater attempts to control their behaviour than men. Apart from that, women are also the primary controllers within the family, exerting control over other women. Women have, according to Hagan (1987), become 'over-socialised'. Other theories of opportunity point out that women are seen as unreliable or over-emotional and therefore not suited, as other, probably male, criminals might see it, to a life of crime and risk-taking.
More recently theorists have asked whether female crime can be explained in the same way as male crime or whether specific theories are required for women. Steffensmeier & Allan (1996) review these theories and the evidence, arguing that in explaining general criminological trends, female crime can be seen to be acted on by the same sources as male crime. For example, social backgrounds is important in criminal behaviour: Steffensmeier & Allan (1995) show that, like male offenders, female offenders usually come from lower socio-economic groupings, minority groups and the unemployed. Male and female rates over time and different offences normally vary with each other, tending to suggest that the same factors are influencing them. Where the general theories have problems, according to Steffensmeier & Allan (1996) is in explaining some of the specific trends in female crime, like the correlation between female offending and relationship matters, or the higher barriers women seem to have to entering crime, or the higher preponderance of female offenders in the less serious property crimes.
Turning to review the sociological theories already mentioned here, Steffensmeier & Allan (1996) argue that the implication of the control and socialisation theories is that rates of female offending should vary across time and space. This is because socialisation practices and levels of control should naturally vary between communities. What is actually seen is that the rates are fairly consistent across genders, compared to other variations such as age and social class (Steffensmeier & Allan, 1988).