Gender, Motivation and the Accomplishment of Street Robbery in the United Kingdom

In an influential study of gender and the accomplishment of street robbery in the United States, Miller (1998) demonstrated that whereas there were few gender differences in the motivations for such crimes, men and women typically committed them in strikingly different ways. Other recent work has similarly established both convergence within and divergence between male and female criminal enactment patterns. Most of that work, however, also was conducted in the United States, making it difficult to determine whether and to what extent these results are culturally bound. This article, based on open-ended interviews with incarcerated male and female offenders in the United Kingdom, explores the ways in which gender shapes the motivation and enactment of street robbery in a non-US context.