L’eterno ritorno del disuguale. Una riconsiderazione del ‘gender gap’ in criminologia.

One of the most stimulating and complex theoretical challenges that criminology has been trying to face since long is the explanation of the “gender gap”, that is of the differential in the recorded crime rates between authors of male and female gender. Such differential reveals a remarkable persistence in cross-sectional and longitudinal researches, with only slight variations depending upon social and cultural contexts, as well as times. The relevance of such issue lies mainly in its ability to demand coherent answers from almost all the great theoretical perspectives in criminology. We can also expect that the increasing attention towards the several forms of female victimisation throws new light to the same dynamics of woman criminalisation, offering itself as a good vantage point to survey and test the theoretical basis of those perspectives. An enlightening contribution to a deeper understanding of the gender gap in female criminalisation and victimisation can come also from literature, whose “attention” towards essential features of the human being is playing an increasing role within legal (law and literature) as well as criminological studies..