gender, motivation and the accomplishment of street robbery in the united kingdom, 17

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

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GENDER, MOTIVATION AND THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF STREET ROBBERY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Fiona Brookman , Christopher Mullins , Trevor Bennett and Richard Wright *

In an infl uential 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 diffi cult 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.

In an infl uential article on gender and the accomplishment of street robbery, Miller (1998) compared the motivations for and accomplishment of such crimes among males and females using a sample of active offenders in St Louis, Missouri. She demonstrated that whereas there were few gender differences in the motivations for such crimes, men and women typically committed them in strikingly different ways, concluding that the robbery styles adopted by women refl ected ‘ practical choices made in the context of a gender-stratifi ed environment ’ ( Miller 1998: 61 ) in which men are perceived as strong and women as weak.

Miller’s article made an important contribution to criminological understanding, but there is a need to expand this work to other socio-cultural settings and to a more diverse sample of offenders. This article examines how gender shapes the accomplishment of street robbery in the United Kingdom. Such a comparative study is necessary because much of the extant qualitative work on street crime in the United States posits culturally oriented theorizations that may or may not apply cross-nationally (e.g. Anderson 1999 ; Mullins 2006 ; Oliver 1994 ; Shover and Henderson 1995; Shover and Honaker 1992 ; Wright and Decker 1994 ; 1997 ). As Zimring (2006) has pointed out, cross-cultural stud-ies must be performed if we hope to understand the uniqueness or otherwise of any given country’s crime patterns.

There are some clear differences between the socio-cultural contexts of street crime in the United States and in Britain, most notably lower rates of lethal violence and lower gun-ownership rates in the United Kingdom. At the same time, street crime, especially violent street crime, has risen dramatically in the United Kingdom in recent years, reaching offending rates equal to or higher than those in the United States (see Langan and Farrington 1998 ), and, as in the United States, much of that increase has been

* Please address correspondence to Richard Wright, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St Louis, St Louis, MO 63121, USA; [email protected] . The research on which this article is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council for England and Wales (Award Number: RES-000-22 – 0398).

doi:10.1093/bjc/azm029 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. � (2007) 47 , 861 – 884 Advance Access publication 7 July 2007

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attributed to increased drug sales and use. It is interesting, for example, that an increas-ing number of British-based researchers have noted the development of a criminogenic hedonism similar to that found in the context of US street culture (see, e.g. Hobbs et al. 2003 ; Winlow 2001 ; Wright et al. 2006).

British researchers also have begun to explore the intersection of gender and street crime in the United Kingdom (see Hobbs et al. 2003 ; Winlow 2001 ). The present study, then, will build on this emerging body of British research and apply a fruitful line of American inquiry to the UK context. In doing so, it will extend feminist theories of offending into a new socio-cultural setting, thereby advancing the current focus in femi-nist criminology on contextualization and situationalization (see Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez 2006; Burgess-Proctor 2006 ; Miller and Mullins 2006 a ).

Researchers in both the United States and the United Kingdom have generated an increasingly substantial literature on the interrelationships between gender and street offending. In the United States, much of this literature has explored the so-called gen-der gap — the large differences in offending rates between the sexes — but a growing body of work there addresses differences between males and females within offending populations (see, e.g. Giordano et al. 2002 ; Heimer and De Coster 1999 ; Miller 1998 ; 2001 ; Mullins and Wright 2003 ; Mullins et al. 2004 ). That work explores not only gender differences in offending rates, but also gender convergences and divergences in crime choice, motivation, enactment and the social organization of offending (see Miller and Mullins (2006 a ) for a comprehensive overview).

Street-crime researchers working in numerous countries have linked masculinity and criminality, pointing out that criminality often fl ows directly from the general tenants of masculinity, serving to build masculine capital in street-based social networks that lion-ize aggressive displays of toughness (see Alder and Polk 1996 ; Hochstetler and Copes 2003 ; Hobbs et al. 2003 ; Katz 1988 ; Messerschmidt 1993 ; 1997 ; 2000 ; 2004 ; Mullins 2006 ; Mullins et al. 2004 ; Oliver 1994 ; Polk 1994 ; Winlow 2001 ). Acknowledging that there is a potential pitfall in assuming that criminal behaviour is masculine simply because it is male-dominated, the work cited above strongly establishes the emically held notion of an interconnection between manhood construction and criminality. That work, based on data collected in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, convincingly demonstrates that men’s participation in certain crimes is linked to the perceptions and demands of ‘ doing masculinity ’ . Men use crime to establish their manhood on the streets; many of their assaults, for example, evolve out of perceived status challenges to their gendered reputations (see especially Alder and Polk 1996 ; Hobbs et al. 2003 ; Mullins 2006 ; Mullins et al. 2004 ; Polk 1994 ; Winlow 2001 ).

Work in a similar vein on women offenders, however, has been far less productive and the intersections between gender and criminality for women — especially those engaged in street offending — are far less clear (see especially Miller 2002 ). Conceptually, research-ers have had diffi culty linking femininity to criminality, which is hardly surprising given that feminist criminologists have long noted the ‘ double deviance ’ inherent in female offending. That is, female lawbreakers are deviant not only because they have broken the law, but also because their actions violate general expectations of feminine behav-iour. Some researchers have suggested that women engaged in criminal activity are sim-ply acting like the men they associate with (see Messerschmidt 1997 ; 2000 ; 2004 ), while others point out that such masculine-seeming behaviour represents women’s and girls ’ individualized negotiations of a sexually stratifi ed environment (see Maher 1997 ;

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Miller 1998 ; 2001 ). While a few researchers have concluded that there are little to no gender differences in offending behaviour (e.g. Baskin and Sommers 1998 ), most main-tain that streetlife social networks are highly gender-segregated and stratifi ed ( Maher 1997 ; Miller 1998 ; 2001; Mullins and Wright 2003 ; Steffensmeier 1983 ; Steffensmeier and Terry 1986 ), and that this leads to signifi cant differences in the perceptual and lived experiences of female offenders. At the same time, recent work establishes a considera-ble amount of gender convergence in the phenomenology of offending experiences (see Anderson 1999 ; Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez 2006; Miller 1998 ; Miller and Mullins 2006 b ).

We should note that all of the above work was conducted in the United States, and that there is a need for research on the ways in which gender shapes street offending by females in different socio-legal settings. The United Kingdom offers an excellent oppor-tunity for such a study because (1) the United States and the United Kingdom share many socio-cultural structures, especially within the realm of gender ideologies, and (2) the United Kingdom has experienced a recent increase in street violence and witnessed the apparent growth of streetlife criminal subcultures similar to those found in the United States.

The gendered division of crime and criminality in the United Kingdom mirrors that found in the United States. For example, males comprised 88 per cent of those arrested for robbery in England and Wales during 2002 – 03 and females comprised 12 per cent (Home Offi ce 2005 a ; 2005 b ). For 2003, males composed 89 per cent of those arrested for robbery in the United States, while 11 per cent were female (FBI 2004). This striking similarity in arrest distributions suggests that there might be similarities in the ways in which gender shapes the motivation for and enactment of robbery in the two societies. In an analysis of street robbery in seven of the 43 police forces across England and Wales, Smith (2003: 15 – 16) found that both offenders and victims in such crimes were predominantly male; males accounted for 94 per cent of offenders and 76 per cent of victims. As in other Western societies, males in the United Kingdom are generally more likely than females to fall victim to robbery and street-based violence. For example, dur-ing the period 2004 – 05, men comprised 72 per cent of robbery victims and 60 per cent of common-assault victims ( Jansson et al. 2006: 78 ). Beyond these basic statistics, how-ever, little is known about how gender shapes the dynamics of street robbery in the United Kingdom.

In this paper, we analyse interviews conducted with men and women incarcerated for street robbery in the United Kingdom. We present a typology and analysis of robbery events based on the gender of the victim and offender (i.e. male-on-male, male-on-female, female-on-female and female-on-male). In doing so, we explore not only the general dynamics of street robbery in the United Kingdom, but also how gender moulds enactment patterns. We conclude with a discussion of how our data compare to those collected in the United States and elsewhere.

Data and Methods

The sample used in this paper was drawn from a larger sample of 120 offenders cur-rently serving prison sentences for various forms of street violence, including robbery, assault, wounding and fi rearm offences. From among these, we selected all women who had reported committing a robbery during their interview. We then selected a matched

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sample of men (based on age and race) from among all males who reported committing a robbery. This method of selection resulted in a sample of 24 women and 31 men. The average age of the women was 23 years, with a range of 18 – 31 years old; the average age of the men was 25, with a range of 19 – 37. Three-quarters (76 per cent) of the respond-ents were white, while the remainder were black (11 per cent), Asian (1 per cent) or mixed-race (12 per cent).

Data were generated from the transcripts of semi-structured interviews with these 55 offenders. The interviews resulted in details of 75 separate offences (40 reported by men and 35 by women). On average, each offender reported 1.4 incidents (1.5 for females and 1.3 for males). In order to maximize the data collected, we used incidents rather than offenders as the unit of analysis. The main advantage of using incidents was that it resulted in more examples of offence enactment. It also generated more offence variation than might have been achieved by asking offenders to name just one offence, which might have resulted in a more typical offence type being reported. The main disadvantage of using incidents over offenders is that certain individuals might bias the results by reporting signifi cantly more incidents than others and having their voice heard more frequently as a result. In fact, 38 (71 per cent) of the 55 offenders reported just one incident and a further 15 (28 per cent) reported two incidents. Only two offend-ers (1 per cent) reported more than two incidents (one reported three and one reported four). Hence, in most cases (99 per cent), there was no substantial difference in the number of incidents reported by any particular person (i.e. either one or two). In the remaining two cases, the offences described were signifi cantly different from one another (which was why they reported them). Hence, the problem of bias (one person providing multiple examples of a specifi c type of offence) was minimized.

The research was conducted in six prisons selected by purposive sampling. This method of selection was designed to yield reasonable numbers of male and female pris-oners and young and adult offenders. The ultimate purpose of this method was to gen-erate a wide range of responses that would reveal a variety of aspects of street violence in general and robbery in particular. The method of selecting prisoners to interview varied slightly across the establishments. In most prisons, the researcher, with the assist-ance of a liaison person (usually a psychologist), conducted searches on the prison database to locate suitable offenders who were serving sentences for ‘ robbery ’ , ‘ GBH ’ (grievous bodily harm), ‘ ABH ’ (actual bodily harm), ‘ wounding with intent ’ or any offence involving fi rearms. Where the computerized system was not available, the researcher searched paper records by hand to locate suitable prisoners. When permis-sion was granted to do so, we also displayed a large poster on the wings, informing inmates of the study and requesting suitable volunteers who met our selection criteria. As mentioned, generally, the demographic structure of our sample mirrored that of those incarcerated for robberies, but we cannot be sure that those who volunteered to be interviewed for this study are representative of the prison population on attitudinal or other measures (i.e. they could be more or less violent in their offending). In any event, only a handful of those approached to be interviewed refused to take part, with just a few others terminating their interviews prior to completion.

The main method of data collection was a semi-structured interview. The interview was given a broad structure by using a schedule that covered the four main topic areas. The fi rst concerned the offender’s personal and criminal justice history. The second included questions on his/her most recent street robbery (regardless of whether

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he/she had been arrested or prosecuted for it). The third concerned details of any other forms of street violence in which he/she had been involved (such as retaliatory violence, respect or status-related violence). The fourth included questions on the offender’s lifestyle immediately before imprisonment. On average, the interviews lasted one hour. All interviews were tape-recorded, with the offender’s permission, using a dig-ital recorder and subsequently transcribed verbatim. Offenders were asked at the begin-ning of interviews to provide us with a false name as an identifi er and these self-assigned pseudonyms were used throughout the research.

A major advantage of this kind of interviewing is that respondents are allowed to answer questions in their own words with minimal direction from the interviewer, with the fl ow of the discussion determined in part by the offender. The main disadvantage of the semi-structured interview is that the responses can sometimes be wide-ranging and not every issue raised might be covered by every respondent.

As the sample of violent offenders was selected by purposive sampling, it was not intended to be strictly representative. Instead, the aim was to generate a broad spectrum of responses. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to consider whether the sample is represent-ative of a larger population. The most appropriate comparison is between the selected sample and the prison population in England and Wales. The results of the Prisoner Criminality Survey ( Budd et al. 2005 ) of male prisoners showed that 41 per cent of the prison population was aged under 26, which compares with 47 per cent of our sample, and 14 per cent were from an ethnic minority group, compared with 24 per cent of our sample. Hence, it is plausible that our sample over-represents ethnic minority prisoners.

Studies of prisoners are sometimes criticized on the grounds that the responses given are untruthful or otherwise invalid. It is impossible to determine whether interviewees always tell the truth. However, prison-based interviewing is a common method of data collection and it has been shown that there is reasonable concordance between what offenders say in relation to verifi able facts about themselves and offi cial records (e.g. their conviction history) ( Martin 2000 ). It is also believed among fi eld workers that it is rare for offenders to attempt deliberately to deceive them ( Bennett and Wright 1984 ). This is not to claim, however, that their memory is always accurate or that their under-standing of the truth is always valid. As a result, the fi ndings of the research are pre-sented in terms of what offenders said and include, where possible, extracts of their responses in their own words. Such an approach is important to our purposes here, as not only are we interested in generating a comparative dataset to explore convergences and divergences present in male and female perpetrated robbery incidents, but we are also interested in the accounts that the offenders provide. Even if not totally accurate, they are still refl ective of the cognitive maps that structure offenders ’ perceptions and lives (see Orbuch 1997). Analysing such worldview elements provides an additional layer of insight into how offenders view their crimes and criminality.

For this project, we removed all discussions of robbery incidents from the dataset to create a smaller, more focused set of accounts. In analysing the data, we were infl uenced by grounded theory approaches ( Glaser and Strauss 1967 ) and began with the process of open coding ( Strauss and Corbin 1990 ) of the interviews. Once major themes within motivation and enactment were identifi ed, we re-analysed the robbery incidents to look for sub-themes. We then proceeded to compare the sub-themes to broader themes both within and between genders. We also paid attention to the deviant cases, not only to

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identify subaltern themes, but also to better understand the more generally present pat-terns in the data (see Agar 1996 ; Pearce 2002 ). We also employed contingency tables to establish the prevalence of themes across the sample.

Motivation

Streetlife subculture

For both men and women, the primary motivation for robbery was, unsurprisingly, the acquisition of money (or items to be sold) for drugs. Sixteen of the men and 14 of the women identifi ed this as the main catalyst for the criminal incident discussed in the interview. Paddy 1 made no attempt to disguise his robbery motives: ‘ I was taking drugs, smoking crack … I wanted more crack … it makes you want more and more and that’s what I wanted, I done a robbery … with robbery [over burglary] you just get a mobile phone, a dealer will buy it off you anyway and you get money, cash cards and pin number[s]. ’ Tallulah not only expressly linked her robberies to a desire for drugs and fl ashy clothes, but also openly disdained alternative ways of generating the income to obtain such things: ‘ I ain’t going to lay on my back and make my money that way because that is my privacy, and I would never do it, never do it, I am not selling my dignity to no man for a crack, for a rock, I don’t think so, I am not that low. ’

Closely related to direct discussions of buying drugs, eight men and three women identifi ed needing the money to fi nance ‘ life as party ’ as a direct catalyst for one or more of the incidents they discussed (see Shover and Honaker 1992 ; Shover and Henderson 1995 ; Wright and Decker 1994 ; 1997 ). When aggregated with specifi c men-tions of drugs, 24 men and 17 women committed street robberies to facilitate the self-reinforcing pursuits promoted by a culture of ‘ desperate partying ’ ( Wright and Decker 1997 ; Jacobs and Wright 1999 ). For example, when asked what he did with the proceeds of a robbery, Thomas replied ‘ [I] partied the money away ’ . Similarly, Res explained that he spent the money on ‘ more good times. Drinking … more drugs and drink and clothes ’ . Such responses were not limited to men. Gemma claimed that while on one robbery she only got £15, she and a friend immediately spent the money on ‘ drugs, speed and pills and cannabis ’ . While this criminogenic subculture has been well exam-ined on the streets of several US cities, until recently, little work has explored its exist-ence and permutations in a British context (see especially Wright et al. 2006 ).

In addition to a focus on hedonistic pleasure, research into US streetlife has estab-lished that violence there often is intimately tied to issues of reputation. The same appears to be true on the streets of Britain. For example, one of the female interviewees — Jane — called attention to the expectations of violence inherent in the reputational demands of embedded criminality:

In the area I grew up, my family had quite a reputation for being violent and … I felt I had to live up to that and I had something to prove … I had to live up to the reputation I built myself. Couldn’t let myself be walked over … I couldn’t back down.

1 All interviewees are identifi ed by pseudonyms to maintain anonymity and confi dentiality.

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Similarly, Laura highlighted the role of violence in generating respect among her peers on the street:

[Violence on the streets] it’s not to do with drugs … [it’s to do] with respect … . It’s like the clothes you wear, a lot of them [gang members] have been in and out of jail, I think that’s why I’ve got respect, because I’ve been in and out of jail, survived. If you’re a survivor [you do] stupid things like fi ghting. I got respect when I did that street robbery.

She then turned her attention to the role played by status-enhancing items in building and maintaining a reputation on the streets: ‘ They [local participants in streetlife] wear like … Stone Island jeans … a fi t jacket with the fur … they’ll have nice trainers on … I’m not walking around where I’m from looking like a tramp! ’ Such themes almost pre-cisely parallel those uncovered in research on US streetlife social networks (e.g. Anderson 1999 ; Wright and Decker 1994 ; 1997 ).

Buzz

In six of the men’s incidents and three of the women’s, it was clear that the main reason the street robbery was committed was for the ‘ buzz ’ or thrill of it. When asked about the motivation behind his robberies, Tyrese explained that ‘ It’s for the fun … cos the point of street robbery is to get them to fi ght back innit? ’ Similarly, Ben emphasized the ways in which he and a gang of male peers used robbery to intimidate victims, reveling in the fear this produced: ‘ We’d have a fi rearm, we’d have a knife, we’d have a bat … for intimidation, [to put the] fear of violence, fear of being shot [into the victims] … we were good at what we did and that was my buzz, that’s why I committed [the robberies]. ’ Reinforcing the primacy of the thrill motive, he added ‘ I didn’t need the money … I’d got a good job that was paying me … four and a half thousand pound a month ’ . Katz (1988) noted a similar pattern among US robbers. The allure involves the sense of power, the adrenaline rush and the ‘ kick ’ of interpersonal violence. In these episodes, property is taken only as an afterthought or seen as a side benefi t of the offence.

Street justice

Street justice has been identifi ed by a number of scholars as a major motivation for some robberies ( Jacobs 2000 ; Jacobs and Wright 2006; Katz 1988 ; Wright and Decker 1997; Wright et al. 2006 ). When individuals feel that they cannot resort to formal law to resolve a dispute (due, for example, to its criminally connected nature) or do not want to resort to formal law, they often use violence to rectify the perceived wrong (see Black 1976 ; Jacobs 2000 ; Jacobs and Wright 2006). We found numerous examples of this within our data: six men and seven women mentioned incidents of robbery that were primarily motivated by a desire for payback. For example, Paul Mika discussed robbing:

An associate of my younger sister who had, basically done something he shouldn’t have, stepped over a few lines, he owed us some money as well, so I went out looking for him and found him on the street … and basically took out an awful lot of anger on him. [I] informed him not to take the mickie with my sister any more and emptied his pockets … it wasn’t set out as a robbery … I’m taking back what you owe a member of my family.

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Gemma2 discussed a robbery instigated by the attempted rape of her friend. Under the infl uence of ecstasy and amphetamines, the women called up a male acquaintance and asked him to borrow some money. The man initially agreed, but once the two arrived at his place:

He tried forcing Sam to sleep with him for the money, so it took about 15 minutes until she come out and she were crying her eyes out. He’d been grabbing hold of her hands … tried to get her clothes off her so I went in and then I just ended lashing out on him … he pulled out a knife and so we took the knife off of him and threatened him with it … then Sam took his phone, we took his money. I battered him and we went.

While money was the motive for Gemma2 seeking the man out to begin with, the violent robbery was a direct result of his attempted sexual assault on her friend.

In addition to robbery as payback, two related sub-themes emerged: robbery as debt collection and robbery in response to an immediate interactional status chal-lenge. Offenders who discussed debt collection framed their robberies as being motivated by a desire to collect money that was owed either to them or to a friend or member of their family. Here, the drive to rob, as well as the target selected, emerged out of pre-existing relationships. As one would expect, the robberies are discussed as a form of righting a wrong, with the wrongness of the action strongly neutralized by the robber’s perception that the money taken was ‘ owed ’ (see also Mullins 2006 ).

Mike, for example, said ‘ I have taken things off people in the street … for debts and things like that … people have owed me money and my way of collecting that money is, well, if I was arrested it would be classifi ed as street robbery. In my eyes … I’m just col-lecting the debt ’ . Such debt collections were often tied to other motivations, including desperation for drugs and other partying-related activities. Toni described just such an incident:

I was at me friend’s house, me girlfriend working and she was supplying this girls with drugs, cause we were told we would get the money back, morning after from her Sugar Daddy. Come the morning there was no money there … I’d found out his money had gone into the post offi ce, so I walked to the post offi ce with him … it just ended in a scuffl e … he ended up falling to the fl oor … and I took the money off of him.

A few of the robberies in our sample were described as being motivated by status chal-lenges (see Miller and Mullins 2006 b ). These are different from the retaliations dis-cussed above due to their immediacy, namely that the robbery evolves directly out of the interaction. And they are different from the category of general assaults discussed below, as the robbery emerged out of specifi c elements within the social interaction that attacked or challenged the prevailing reputational dynamics. Jay described an interac-tion with a stranger at a phone booth that led to a robbery:

I was meeting a crack cocaine dealer … I was waiting to use the phone box and there was someone using the phone. I kept tapping the window and saying ‘ hurry up, mate. I want to use the phone. ’ And he called me a fucking arsehole. So I walked off and thought nothing of it. About 10 minutes later he came out of the phone box and called me an arsehole again, so I crossed over the road and we started exchanging words and before I knew it we were both fi ghting … his wallet came out … I picked his wallet up and said: ‘ That’ll teach you, you stupid twat ’ and just walked off.

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Here, the immediate interpersonal interaction produced a status challenge for Jay, which he resolved through assault and robbery. Indeed, had the victim not cursed Jay, the robbery might not have occurred.

Rabbit discussed another incident in a pub where his victim had initially angered him by disrespecting his girlfriend:

There was a boy in the pub and he was winding me up like. The only way to wind me up is to go on about my Mrs. … He was talking about my girlfriend. He said he slept with [her] … so I told him I was going to kick the hell out of him … then I found out that he had like three, four hundred quid on him … my mate put the idea [to rob him] in my head by telling me about the money … he walked out the pub like and we dragged this boy down the alley way … he dropped the money and run … we dragged him back and nicked his trousers … and beat him up.

Rabbit’s motivation was clearly retaliatory, otherwise, once his victim dropped the money, the encounter would have ended, but, when presented with the opportunity to gain money, he and his mates could not pass it up.

Women also discussed status challenges that morphed into robberies. Tallulah described the following episode: ‘ We [Tallulah and her boyfriend at the time] was at a nightclub and she [the victim] got right cheeky with me and I were just off my face [severely intoxicated] … and I thought “ Right, you bitch, I am going to get you back ” and I took her car … and I beat her up. ’ Similarly, Jane told us how she selected a male victim both because she recognized an opportunity and because she took an immediate dislike to him: ‘ This bloke was fl ashing [his cash] in the pub. He was a bit of a perv and was fl irting with all the young girls so me and my mate … she said, “ Let’s take him ” … he was fl ashing the cash, we didn’t set out to rob anyone … he was fl ashing the cash … being a perv and he annoyed me. Really annoyed me. ’

Six incidents described by men, but no incidents described by women, began as assaults, with robbery occurring as an afterthought. An episode described by Sean is typical:

I was walking home [late at night and] saw this kid I didn’t get along with, I’d been drinking and … he was coming down the other side [of the street] so I just [ran] over, knocked him out, stamped on his head a couple of time[s] and took everything he had … I don’t like his people and they don’t like us.

With the exception of these few exclusively male incidents that evolved out of assaults, however, there were few differences in the factors that motivated the men and women in our sample to commit robberies (see also Wright et al. 2006 ). This is very much in keeping with the results of research into the ways in which gender shapes street crime in American cities. That work has shown that men’s and women’s motivations for com-mitting street crimes are broadly similar, if not the same (see Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez 2006; Miller 1998 ; Mullins and Wright 2003 ). Simply put, involvement in streetlife and desperate partying presents men and women with the same needs for cash and hence the same motivations for robbery.

Interestingly, though, one difference between the male and female robbers did emerge concerning the manner in which they talked about the motivation for their ille-gal drug use. Men were far more likely to offer accounts that placed their drug taking in a recreational context (e.g. a life embedded in the context of desperate partying) and their references to drug use were typically terse and matter-of-fact (e.g. when asked what they did with the proceeds of their robberies, men were likely to say simply ‘ I bought

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drugs ’ ). Women, on the other hand, were more likely to describe themselves as ‘ addicted ’ or ‘ dependent ’ on drugs. As Terry Ann said when asked about her participation in rob-bery, ‘ I was robbing people and doing stuff like that to feed my habit ’ . Similarly, when asked if drugs were the motivating factor for a specifi c robbery incident, Tallulah replied ‘ Yes, oh fucking hell yes, I needed a rock … I don’t care what people say, you do rattle off crack [get sick from withdrawal], when you have had that much of it … when I was coming off crack I had stomach cramps, I were fucked, I had back pains, I was ill, diarrhea ’ . No men used language such as this.

While this difference did not necessarily alter the male or female offenders ’ behav-iour (both motivational drives led to the commission of a robbery), it does hint at a gen-dered set of perceptions. The emphasis that masculinities place on independence and control might lead men to discount heavy, habitual drug use as unproblematic; adopt-ing the self-perception of an addict is a de facto admission that they cannot control their own lives and actions. Women, who are more structurally and culturally habituated to perceptions of dependency and limited agency, may be more likely to accept and inter-nalize the ‘ addict ’ label, and this, in turn, may provide them with an ‘ acceptable ’ cogni-tive neutralization of their doubly deviant behaviour (see Chesney-Lind and Pasko 2004 ). 2 Men, lacking the experience of double deviance and in fact being able to draw upon crime as a core form of masculinity construction (see Katz 1988 ; Messerschmidt 1993 ; 1997; Mullins 2006 ), would seem less likely to need to provide neutralizations or other ‘ excuses ’ in accounting for their criminal behaviour.

Accomplishment

Once motivated to commit a robbery, the would-be offenders then begin the process of enactment: target selection, approaching the victim, announcing and committing the robbery (including the exchange of goods), and fl eeing the scene. Prior work on acquis-itive crimes has shown that while men and women may experience parallel motivations to offend, the ways in which they actually approach and accomplish their crimes are often different, especially in confrontational crimes like robbery. To tease out the poten-tial effects of gender on enactment, we present a typology of incidents based on the gender of the offender (or primary offender in the case of group offending) and victim (or primary victim in the case of group victimizations). Thus, we now turn to an explora-tion of various enactment strategies uncovered in male-on male (35 incidents), male-on-female (two incidents), female-on-male (15 incidents) and female-on-female (15 incidents) street robberies.

Male accomplishment

Male-on-male robberies . When men robbed other men, they adopted one of two broad approaches in selecting a target. The fi rst approach involved robberies that grew out of perceived personal or status challenges (e.g. revenge for slights, debt collection) or else

2 Alternatively, this could be a product of the women’s incarceration experiences. If they were involved in prison-based substance-abuse treatment programmes, for example, this could infl uence how they perceived the role played by drugs in their offending. While some of the women were indeed in drug treatment, systematic data for the entire sample were not collected, so we could not verify or discount this possibility.

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emerged in the context of an assault. As target selection in such offences cannot be separated from the initial motivation, which we have discussed already, there is little more to be said about them here. The second approach used by men when they targeted other men involved identifying cues that suggested that the victim was either an easy target or had something worth stealing.

Target selection. In 34 of the 40 male-on-male incidents, the offenders targeted strangers, 3 either because they were seen as vulnerable and/or because they were perceived as having something worth taking. Leon1 described why he selected his target — a student who was selling hashish: ‘ I knew I could just lure him where I wanted him. I didn’t expect to have to hit him … I thought he would give me the stuff [drugs and money]. ’ John5 ’ s perspective was similar: ‘ He [the victim] was on his own, didn’t have no friends around with him … it’s just easier if there’s one person and it’s less confrontation. ’

Additionally, the men described cues that indicated to them that potential victims had something worth taking; some of those cues were direct (e.g. actually seeing cell phones, gold chains, money being fl ashed, etc.) while others were indirect (e.g. the would-be target was dressed nicely). For example, Marcus described targeting one stranger because ‘ He was on his own, he looked a bit drunk as well … [he seemed to have money on him] by the way he was dressed, you can tell really … he’s got money, he’s gotta have a bit of change … he’d been out and he’d had a drink himself and he was dressed kinda nice ’ . Where the motivation was purely material, the offenders self-evidently were seeking to minimize their risk by identifying weaker or lone individuals, while employing perceived signs of wealth in an attempt to maximize their reward. As many commentators on urban streetlife have noted, however, these are not purely rational calculations, but rather cognitive scripts enacted in a highly bounded manner (e.g. Wright and Decker 1994 ; 1997).

Approaching the target . Once a target has been selected, the robber must then approach it to enact the offence. In the majority of the male-on-male incidents (25), the offender either walked or ran up to the victim and proceeded with the robbery. In most of these incidents, the offender calmly walked up to the victim and announced the robbery or else rushed the victim and used violence to initiate it.

The next most common strategy employed in male-on-male robberies involved ambushing potential victims. These seven incidents differed from those described above in that they were less spontaneous. Thus, in ambushes, offenders staked out a territory and waited for a suitable victim to happen along, whereas in the walk-or-run-up-to inci-dents, the decision to rob seemed to follow the discovery of a viable target. Various sorts of ambushes were used to set up would-be victims. Three ambushes involved men rob-bing the clients of prostitutes while they were otherwise occupied (see below). One involved a group robbery in which several males waited at a bus stop for a suitable victim to show up; another involved a robber who hung out in neighbourhoods known for drug traffi c, waiting for a vulnerable-looking buyer to pass by. Two involved ambushing

3 The six male-on-male cases in which the offenders targeted acquaintances grew out of pre-existing disputes — two were assaults of rivals, two were committed out of revenge and two were debt collections.

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a pre-identifi ed shopkeeper taking business proceeds to the bank. Tyrone described a typical ambush:

I watch[ed] him [the victim] for a few hours in the day and wait[ed] for the shop to close. He stayed in the shop for about an hour. It was nice and quiet and as soon as he walked out the door, I followed him until he gets to the bank. Four or fi ve minutes. He gets the key out to open the night safe and [I] hit him and I takes the money.

The practical advantages of this approach are clear: the offender is able to get the drop on an unprepared victim, reducing the overall risk of the event.

Enactment. When it came to male-on-male robberies, the men interviewed here relied heavily upon either a quick display of physical force or strong intimidation to establish control of the robbery situation. Some of the incidents involved no form of announcement, demand or any preliminary interactions between victim(s) and offender(s); the robber(s) simply rushed the target and violently took what they wanted. John’s discussion of a spontaneous robbery is a good example: ‘ We decided to rob a person who was on his mobile phone … sat on a bench chatting on his phone. Just went over, dragged him off the bench, pinned him down, got his wallet out of his pocket and took his phone out of his hand and then ran off. ’ Similarly, John2 described an incident in which he and a partner robbed a group of tourists:

We’d seen three tourists that were sitting alone taking photographs … [they were] Asian, Chinese … we seen them … get their camcorder out. I was the fi rst one to go, I ran straight over to them. I got the camcorder off one of them with a head butt and then jumped the other. My mate had the other, punches him … [the third] was cowering in the corner. He was just standing there holding his bag out … the one I head butted is all bleeding so I went through his pockets and the one I hadn’t hit gave me his stuff.

This strategy clearly minimizes the amount of interaction required and, while using more force than other approaches, it allows the offender to establish control of the situ-ation through surprise attack. As with an ambush, the victim is never given a chance to resist or prolong the interaction.

In other incidents, male offenders sought to avoid physical violence, instead using intimidation to coerce victims into compliance. Marcus described a robbery in which no force was required:

Me and my friends me … about 6 of us [are on a bus] … they [the targets] was there sitting at the back of the bus … as well … . My friends saying like ‘ Yo look at them ’ … one of them’s got a walkman in ’ is ears and the other one’s sitting down and … so I’ve gone over and I’ve just like, squeezed in right by them and I said … ‘ Yo what you listening to ’ and I’m being like proper feisty and up in his face … he knew by the way I was going on that he was going to get robbed. You get me? So I said like, I’ve took the ear phones off him and I’m listening and I said ‘ Let me see that walk … , stereo ’ and I got his walk-man … he knows he’s not getting it back … . And I says to him ‘ Yo how much dough you got on you? ’ and I said ‘ Yo take out your wallet ’ and he’s took his wallet out … . His friend got robbed as well. My other friend robbed his friend. Took a chain off him, a ring and erm, and his wallet as well.

Weapon use. In roughly one third of the robberies committed by men, some sort of weapon was used. Most of these robberies involved lone men robbing lone men. Of 14

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cases in this category, eight involved the use of weapons. When looking at robberies committed by males working in pairs (11 incidents), four involved the use of weapons. Among the 10 robberies carried out by gangs of men (three or more), only one involved weapons. This constitutes the major difference between the varying group contexts of robbery. In fi ve of the cases, the weapon was used simply to lend credibility to the threat. Paddy recounted a typical incident in this category:

I was up in … the West End of London where lots of people and lots of back streets … I seen a person looked a bit tipsy and a bit drunk, walked up to him and told him ‘ I’ve got a knife ’ I had like a little sil-ver bit on the knife, it was off a window but, but like I had that up my sleeve, I showed him and he got frightened and basically he give me his money, his pin number.

Three cases of male-on-male robbery involved the pre-emptive use of a weapon to dis-courage victim resistance. In another four incidents, a weapon was employed to overcome initial resistance and enhance the level of credible threat. Mark2 described a robbery in which the force required to generate compliance continued to escalate until he had to pull a knife:

[I] was waiting for someone to pass by … asked him did he have a cigarette … I grabbed him, threat-ened him. I did have a weapon on me. I just grabbed him and took his stuff. ‘ Give me your wallet. Give me your phone ’ … he doesn’t want to give up his stuff. Obviously, I am there and I am not going to go that far and not follow through … . I had a knife … [I didn’t show it] immediately, [but] after I grabbed him under the shoulder [I did] … I wouldn’t have used it … I had no intentions of stabbing him or anything like that.

Whether Mark2 would actually have used the knife is unknowable, as the threat of the knife led the victim to give up his wallet and phone.

Some of the male-on-male robberies involved much more force than was necessary to generate compliance, with the offenders reporting that they often beat victims for long periods of time. In describing just such an extended assault, John2 told the interviewer ‘ I was there for ages just hitting him and punching and head butting him … I have a tendency to keep the person down ’ . Another offender — John3 — described beating a victim for ten minutes after the robbery had been accomplished. And Tyrese went even further, claiming that victim resistance was central to enjoying a robbery: ‘ The point of street robbery is to get them to fi ght back, innit? ’

In contrast to work done with street robbers in the United States, the offenders here are decidedly not trying to create an ‘ illusion of impending death ’ (see Wright and Decker 1997: 96) to establish control of the social interaction. There was less of a ten-dency for the UK robbers to ‘ go for bad ’ by creating a violent defi nition of the situation (see also Katz 1988 ). In all likelihood, this is due to the fact that fi rearms are far less prevalent in the United Kingdom. Yet, as the prevalence of assaultive behaviour indi-cates, these men are drawing on a form of masculine capital to accomplish their street robberies, whether by constructing a credibly threatening image or by deploying over-powering force.

Male/female partnerships . There were three cases in the sample in which men worked directly or indirectly with women to enact a street robbery. All of these cases involved a male robbing ‘ punters ’ , as the clients of sex workers are known in the United Kingdom. In two of these cases, the sex worker was in on the robbery; in the other, she

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was not. 4 The method of enactment was very similar in each case: the prostitute would acquire the client and have him drive her somewhere to perform the agreed-upon sex act. The male robber would be waiting when the two arrived and rob the punter. Given the punter’s compromising position, intimidation often was all that was required to accomplish the robbery. Charlie Brown described how he committed this type of robbery. First, however, he explained the arrangement between himself and the sex worker:

We had a little partnership … she gets in [the punter’s] car and she is going to the strip, to the place they pick her up, now if she gets in the car she gonna do him anyway, but they get paid fi rst, so I say like if he got money, take him to the … place I know or other than that, take him to the normal place where they do punters … she still get the money for doing what she was doing but if he had a big per-centage … of money on him then she let me know and I rob [him].

The interviewee indicated that this was a fairly typical and recurring arrangement. While the women in the sample discussed committing more typical street robberies with male accomplices (see below), this is the only sort of partnerships that the men described. This could easily be a function of the small sample being worked with here, but it could also be that the men who committed more typical sorts of robberies with women did not regard them as full or even partial participants, seeing them as bystanders not worth mentioning.

Male-on-female robberies. Overall, the men in our sample tended not to target women, or, if they did, they did not admit it. Overwhelmingly, the cases discussed here involved men robbing men or men robbing male/female couples; in the latter case, the robbers focused their discussions on gaining the males ’ compliance, not the females ’ . The only references to the female victims in these cases concern either their screaming or their attempts to get a non-compliant mate to give the robber what he demanded. Thus, of the 40 incidents of robbery committed by males analysed here, only fi ve involved female victims, with three being incidents in which a man or group of men had robbed a couple, or collection of couples. Thus, only two cases were exclusively men robbing women, both committed by lone offenders. One robbed a lone female, the other robbed two females.

Mark described robbing two females under the infl uence of an alcohol/valium cock-tail. In the interview, he expressed considerable shame for his actions: ‘ I robbed a girl as well so it makes it so much worse … I was heartbroken … I gutted her … I don’t do shit like that. ’ The other male, Thomas, who robbed a lone female, also said that he was ashamed of having robbed a woman. In fact, he went out of his way to suggest that such activities were not typical of his modus operandi : ‘ I never done anything like that before, that’s not really me … . I feel terrible that I robbed that woman so I don’t want to talk about it really … I am so ashamed of myself. ’

A number of other men in our sample offered up explanations for why one should never rob women. In outlining how he chose targets, Mark2 interjected: ‘ You must be thinking I have no morals. I wouldn’t go out and rob an old person. I would look for a

4 Even though, in one case, the prostitute was not in on the robbery, the overall dynamic is the same in every offence insofar as these men were using women — willingly or unwillingly — to set up a victim. These techniques also have been noted in the United States (see Miller 1998 ; Jacobs and Wright 2006; Mullins 2006 ; Mullins et al. 2004 ).

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bloke … . It wouldn’t be right to be robbing women and little kids or anything like that. ’ When asked if he had ever robbed a woman, John2 replied: ‘ Yeah, but not violently … generally I don’t want contact with women because I don’t like to be violent with them … I never hit a woman in my life. ’ Then he expressed empathy with the potential female victim: ‘ It’s just that if it was my mother or sister … it is all right to nick their bag, but not alright to hit them [women]. ’ Similar philosophies have been described by male street offenders in United States-based studies (e.g. Mullins 2006 ; Wright and Decker 1997). Whether such sentiments refl ect real internal controls that robbers place upon themselves as opposed to fabrications and justifi cations is not fully knowable; some scholars suggest that this is largely a matter of presentation of self (see Mullins 2006 ; Mullins et al. 2004 especially), but our data do not provide enough detail to draw a fi rm conclusion.

Female accomplishment

Female-on-male robberies. Half of the robbery incidents described by the British women in our sample involved a male victim. A weapon, usually a knife, was used in eight of these 15 cases.

Target selection. The majority of the female-on-male cases involved strangers (ten cases). A further fi ve victims were acquaintances. As with the male robbers, acquaintances tended to be targeted due to some pre-existing dispute or animosity. Four of the fi ve cases revolved around securing money that the woman believed the man owed her (e.g. for drugs or in payment for sex). One of the cases, discussed earlier, involved a revenge attack upon an acquaintance who had tried to rape the woman.

All of the male victims who were robbed by women were alone at the time. The modal way in which women robbed men was in partnership with another man or woman (eight cases). Women were alone in six of the cases, though there was an audience of one or more friends or associates nearby (so, while they were committing the robbery by themselves, there was potential support if required within the social context). For example, Abby committed the following robbery alone while her boyfriend sat in a nearby car:

Abby: Seen like a young lad walking past and I had the urge … to go over to him and I got a knife and I said to him, ‘ I want your money, I want to know how much money you got. ’ I took his money, his phone … his watch and his ring and he just give it me and went off … .

Interviewer: Did you say anything to your boyfriend?

Abby: No. I just got out the car. I hadn’t … even been smoking a spliff or had a drink or nothing … I think he was more scared of me fella in the car, than what he was of me.

While it was not uncommon for men to be in a group when they decided to commit a robbery, none stated that the victim appeared more afraid of their accomplices than of themselves.

Some of the same cues that guided males to suitable targets clearly infl uenced tar-get selection for females, too (such as visible goods, general opportunity and, as already mentioned, informal justice). However, women were much less likely to target males simply because they saw them as ‘ easy ’ or ‘ vulnerable ’ . That said, a few women

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mentioned targeting men precisely because they are widely perceived to be more formidable than most women. As Laura explained:

[I target men] cause they won’t be able to go to the police and say some girl’s just robbed me. Especially if they’ve got a bit of street cred or something … if I was a man and some little girl come up to me and robed me, I’d be ashamed to go to the police … he [her latest victim] walked like a thug and he talked like a thug.

In a related vein, Jane described being arrested for a robbery in which no charges were brought because the male victim assumed he had been attacked by two men. In reality, she had approached the victim from behind and hit him with a hammer.

Approach . The strategies that the female robbers used to approach their male victims differed in several respects from those employed by the male robbers. While women also sometimes walked or ran towards their male targets, they were much more likely to be with their victims already or to follow them. The women never ambushed their targets in the way that the men described.

Of the cases in which the woman was already in the company of the male she robbed, two incidents involved prostitutes and clients and revolved around disputes over pay-ment for sexual favours. 5 Other cases also revolved around monetary disputes. Toni, for example, accompanied a male acquaintance, who owed her money for drugs, to the Post Offi ce, where he was collecting his social security payment. Toni asked him for her money; when he refused, she overpowered him and took it by force. In another case, the victim was a taxi driver who was being hired as a ‘ run around ’ while the offender, Tracey, and her male companion tried to purchase drugs. The driver became agitated, suspect-ing that Tracey was not going to pay him and an argument ensued. This culminated in Tracey’s snatching the driver’s takings while her male companion scuffl ed with him.

In four cases, the woman followed her victim for some time, having spotted him by chance. The offender then made her move when the location was more conducive (e.g. in an alleyway) to the offence. Janney and her male associate, for instance, followed their potential victim for some time, hoping to arrive at a spot at which they could safely relieve him of his gold:

We were walking, following him through town forever, town center you know what I mean, town center following him all over town and in the end I was getting pissed off and going, ‘ look, fuck it, let’s go up and have his phone ’ you know what I mean because the phone was in his hand and that getting his chain would have meant all kinds of drama, do you know what I mean, so fuck it, just grabbed his phone.

Such incidents suggest that while both males and females were minimizing danger and maximizing reward, the women were far more attuned than the men to risk reduction. Overall, women were less likely than men to rob on the spur-of-the-moment and when they did so, they took steps to fi nd a safer locale in which to accomplish the crime.

Enactment . The women used several of the same strategies as men when robbing males, deploying debilitating violence from the outset and/or to overcome resistance. However, they were much less likely than the male robbers to adopt an initial stance of intimidation. To us, the fact that some of the female robbers relied on a quick, violent attack to

5 While some might question whether or not these incidents truly were robberies, since the money was owed, once force is resorted to, such incidents legally become robberies. In both cases, weapons were used to get the punter to comply.

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accomplish their crimes indicates a criminal calculation informed by their perceived inability to use intimidation to generate compliance — something that was not characteristic of the male robbers ’ decision making.

Weapons. Generally speaking, weapons were brandished more often in female-on-male robberies than they were in male-on-male robberies. Women who robbed men in partnerships with other women were most likely to use weapons. Half of the female-on-male robberies committed by a lone woman also involved the use of a weapon. Weapons were most often used by the women who robbed men when they opened the offence with violence or when they aimed to threaten or intimidate the victim into compliance. Laura, for example, explained how she used a knife to subdue a recalcitrant male victim:

I was drunk and I was walking down ‘ Piccallo ’ and there was this lad and he had a lot of gold on. It was quite a while back but he had a really good phone and I always use to carry a blade round with me … I put me knife to his throat and told him to give me his gold, he took his gold off, but he wouldn’t give me his phone, so I stabbed him.

As already indicated, women also used weapons as a means of intimidating their male victims and, in fact, all three cases of intimidation or threat of violence against a male involved the use of a weapon; as with the male robbers, the mere sight of the weapon often was suffi ciently threatening to ensure that the victim complied.

Female-on-female robberies . Unlike their male counterparts, females reported robbing women as often as they did robbing men. In half of the robberies described by the women, the victim was female, with only two of these cases involving the use of a weapon.

Victim selection. Female victims, who overwhelmingly were strangers, were most likely to be selected because they were perceived to represent an ‘ easy ’ or ‘ vulnerable ’ target; four of these robberies were handbag snatches. Snatches were highly opportunistic encounters in which the victim was seen as an easy target that could be robbed quickly to generate fast cash. Billy described why she chose the victim that she did:

Cos … [she] looked easier. Cos she was weighed down with bags, she was weighted down with bags and her bag was strapped to [her] shoulder so it was [hanging] straight off the shoulder. Erm, I walked up to her. I didn’t say anything. I just took the bag off her shoulder.

Female targets were often selected by the female robbers because they appeared to have something worth taking. Several of these victims were spotted withdrawing money at cash machines or were seen to be in possession of lots of cash. Laura explained that she targeted a woman for the latter reason:

There was this woman, and she was in the arcade and she like, she pulled a roll of money out of her pocket. We just waited around until she fi nished on the machine. She walked back on to Chip Pan Alley and we robbed her.

Still other female victims were targeted because they were seen as very likely to have a signifi cant amount of cash on their person. Tallulah, for example, explains her choice of target this way: ‘ She looked like she was going out, so therefore she had money, she

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was dressed up to go out … “ dolled up ” to go out. ’ Sometimes, the themes of appearing vulnerable and displaying attractive goods overlapped. Donna and her group of female friends, for example, robbed a teenager because she was young and vulnerable in appearance, but also because she had ‘ gold around her neck ’ :

We just seen this bunch of girls on the street, on the corner, they were young, you know they looked vulnerable and we just, we walked past them and one of the girls said ‘ see all gold on her neck then ’ and I looked around and I said ‘ wow, yes. ’

Thus, as with the men, the women are seeking to minimize risk and maximize reward in their selection of victims. Such calculations are gendered insofar as the targets that the women perceived here to be safe were much more limited in scope.

Approach. Consistent with the dynamics of stranger robberies, the most usual way in which women approached their female targets was to walk or run towards them. In contrast to those situations in which they robbed men, the female robbers were never already in the company of the woman that they ended up targeting. These were cases in which the female robbers identifi ed a stranger and then attempted to facilitate the robbery encounter quickly through approach strategies.

Enactment. As already indicated, women who were robbing other women very rarely used a weapon (just two cases). Clearly, female victims were not perceived to present the female robber with the same sort of challenge that a man would. Once again, the female robbers ’ enactment strategies do not vary greatly from those adopted by the men, although they are less likely to adopt intimidation or threats and more likely to resort to violence having met with initial resistance. In fact, the women did not hold back when they were met with resistance, as Tallulah’s example indicates:

I think I did ask her for the bag fi rst, yes I went ‘ Give me your bag ’ , she said, ‘ No. ’ I went, ‘ No, no, no? ’ … and I kicked ten balls of shit out of her, poor cow … . [S]he wouldn’t let go of that bag though and Jane came around the corner and Jane see me kicking shit out of her … Jane got hold of her bag and started dragging it out of her hands, she weren’t letting go of that bag … she took some beatings as well.

Different enactment strategies were adopted by the women, depending on the gender of the victim. For example, weapons were used largely when robbing males as opposed to females. In addition, over half of all male victims were robbed by women in partner-ships compared with just three female victims being so robbed.

Discussion

In line with prior work, we have uncovered a convergence of motivational elements between the genders, yet some key divergences in enactment strategies. It is not surpris-ing that males and females expressed similar motives for robbery; such similarities have been well documented in the criminological literature (e.g. Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez 2006; Miller 1998 ; Mullins and Wright 2003 ). Regardless of socio-cultural loca-tion, a life focused strongly on drug use and accumulating street capital via status-enhancing items seems to lend itself to robbery — an offence well suited to obtaining the fast cash needed to fi nance the desperate partying characteristic of streetlife. Importantly, though,

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our data here document for the fi rst time the presence of these social networks and sub-cultural drives in a nation other than the United States (see also Wright et al. 2006 ). These data, coupled with the recent spate of studies examining the interconnections of masculinities and street crimes in both the United States and the United Kingdom, not only establishes a cultural similarity between nations (not surprising given their long-standing historical ties) but also suggests that deindustrialization and the associated con-centrated disadvantaged produced by it have a tendency to produce similar criminal subcultures in other national contexts. To date, studies exploring these patterns have been limited largely to poor, African-American populations in the United States (e.g. Anderson 1999 ; Mullins 2006 ; Oliver 1994 ; Wright and Decker 1994 ; 1997). Our data suggest that, oppositional to what Anderson (1999) and Oliver (1994) argue, while race may be a crucial variable in understanding active criminals ’ perceptions and world views, it is not a necessary condition to produce a subculture of desperate partying and acute attention to status challenges. Specifi cally, no strongly discernable patterns emerged in the data along racial or ethnic lines, especially in the realm of motivation or adherence to some sort of street code lionizing violence and creating among its adherents a strong attention to personal reputation. 6 Future work undertaken in multiple cultural contexts should continue to explore this issue.

There are many similarities between the male robbers here and those interviewed in other studies of robbery. In general, the men used violence or the threat of violence to establish a defi nition of the situation conducive to the enactment of the crime. Yet, and in contrast to Wright and Decker (1997), there was not the widespread creation of an ‘ illusion of impending death ’ . While that study identifi ed the quintessential announce-ment phrase ‘ This is a robbery, don’t make it a murder ’ , the British robbers in our study were as likely to saunter up to the victim and more reservedly demand ‘ give it up ’ or ‘ give me your wallet ’ . By no means does this suggest that the robberies were non-violent, but rather there tended to be an escalation of violence within the incident based on the level of victim resistance. Similarly, unlike US encounters in which the forceful presenta-tion of a fi rearm is central to the establishment of control, in our study, the possession of a weapon often need only be alluded to; recall that both men and women mentioned using artifacts (e.g. pieces of metal) to make victims think they had a weapon when they actually were unarmed. Yet, following Katz (1998) , Messerschmidt (1993 ; 1997 ) and Mullins (2006) , there is a use of masculine capital regardless of handgun use. The men drew heavily upon intimidation and the threat of physical force to accomplish their robberies — a form of doing gender (see West and Zimmerman 1987 ). Though, as might be expected in a different socio-cultural context, the exact dynamics differ. Specifi cally, manhood is not as interconnected with handgun usage in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States.

Compared with other studies, the UK female robbers were more likely to target men and, when doing so, their enactment patterns differed from those of the female robbers in St Louis studied by Miller (1998) . Indeed, this suggests profound differences overall between street robberies in the United States and those in the United Kingdom

6 Our informants, though, did point to one potential difference. Caucasians suggested that black respondents were more likely to use weapons during their offending. This assertion was not supported by our own analysis. Thus, it is impossible for us to say whether this is a reality of the UK street scene that our interviews did not uncover, or if this was just a race-based perception that white offenders drew upon to distinguish themselves from other groups.

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(see below), yet we should recall that this sample is composed of incarcerated women, while Miller’s were active offenders recruited through a few urban social networks. It is fully possible that enactment strategies similar to what we have seen here exist in the United States and that criminological researchers there have yet to document them. Some studies performed on incarcerated (or formerly incarcerated) offenders in the United States do suggest patterns of more intensely violent behaviour in that popula-tion (see, e.g. Baskin and Sommers 1988), though other work shows that even the most violent and aggressive women in the US street scene exhibit convergence with men and divergence from them in their patterns of violence and aggression (see Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez 2006; Mullins et al. 2004 ). A full accounting of these forces in Western socio-cultural confi gurations requires more inquiry, but our work here further solidifi es the importance of such analysis and investigation.

Overall, these differences may in part be due to differences in the social organization of crime enactment in the United States and United Kingdom. They may also simply be differences between the ways in which robberies occur in the samples obtained in low-income African-American neighborhoods in St Louis (the main site of research for our US comparisons) and the various locales in the United Kingdom from which the present sample was recruited. 7 Female robbers face numerous practical challenges in enact-ment, especially when they select males for victimization. Miller (1998) showed that the women in her sample simply avoided victimizing men alone, at least in a directly con-frontational way. Because they believed that the men they encountered in their daily lives would not take seriously a women’s violent presentation of self, even if supported with a fi rearm, they either targeted other women, used an appearance of sexual availa-bility to set up the would-be male victim or robbed in collaboration with a man. In our data, women were similarly cautious about target selection, but were not as fully avoid-ing of men as those in Miller’s sample. There are two potential reasons for this. First, fi rearms are ubiquitous on the streets of major US cities. Especially in neighborhoods structured by concentrated disadvantage, robbers tend to assume that any potential vic-tim is armed (see Jacobs 2000 ; Wright and Decker 1997). Thus, the decision making of female robbers in the United States often assumes the potential presence of a handgun and that male victims are unlikely to be intimidated. These twin assumptions combine to produce a strong deterrent effect. Such a concern is not as common in our sample of female robbers in the United Kingdom; women may risk robbing a male with little fear that he is carrying a fi rearm. Though, as discussed, when robbing males, they did tend to be more likely to use other weapons. This points towards an embedded perception among female offenders that men are not as likely to take threats seriously unless backed up with a knife or other artifact. While we see the absence of fi rearms as changing the broad dynamics of street robbery in the United Kingdom, this absence does not fully ‘ de-gender ’ the interactions. Women still have to reinforce their constructions of use of force with a weapon of some sort, while men can rely simply upon the physicality of their bodies.

Second, there appears to be more social distance between the robbers and their vic-tims in our data than in other mostly United States-based studies. Many of the offenders

7 As one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out, the differences could be due to the fact that our sample here draws on incarcer-ated robbers, whereas the St Louis sample that Miller drew upon was composed of active offenders.

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here described targeting tourists, clubbers, suburbanites and shop keepers. It is likely that such individuals are easier to intimidate, regardless of gender, than the robbers ’ peers. Many of the locales in which the robberies described in our data occurred are cosmopolitan commercial districts, with highly diverse populations. The robbers can draw upon social class-based reputational capitals to control the situation, though vic-tim resistance was not uncommon. In contrast, robbers included in the best known US studies (e.g. Wright and Decker 1997; Miller 1998 ; Jacobs and Wright 1999 ) are target-ing people much like themselves who are less easily intimidated and perhaps even moti-vated to vehemently resist unless a fi rearm is used to control the situation (see Anderson 1999 ; Baumer et al. 2003 ). Our discussion of fi rearms, however, is speculative due to a general lack of comparative qualitative data on gun cultures and the intersection of handguns and crime in non-US locations.

Overall, the differences that emerged between the strategies used by male and female offenders are simultaneously both practical and gendered. Such concerns are practical in that to rob a male successfully, a female must use a weapon to generate compliance. As we saw in some of the male-enacted robberies, masculine capital in the form of a physical threat was enough to generate compliance, especially from a victim distanced from the offender by social class. Yet, due to the social defi nition of gender and gender abilities in the minds of both offender and victim, female physical threats must be backed up with a weapon to be taken seriously. Typical female accomplish-ment of gender does not involve a level of physical threat and prowess which can de facto intimidate a male crime victim. Additionally, it is important to note that when women robbed men, they chose lone men — again, a practical aspect of target selec-tion. Men in groups would be more likely to resist even an armed female. Further, women often worked in small groups from which they had potential back-up if needed. Again, these are practical considerations tied to an assessment of a gendered environ-ment. To wit: such steps are practical due to the fact that both men and women hold gendered perceptions about the violent potentials of women. These perceptions must be successfully negotiated — and overcome — by female robbers, especially when targeting males.

Such accomplishment dynamics are reinforced by the fact that when robbing women, female assailants tended not to use weapons, but could play upon cultural capitals of toughness and threats to generate compliance. In these instances, the female robbers, like their male counterparts, are ‘ doing ’ a class-based gender performance. In fact, overall, when women robbed women, their enactment patterns were nigh identical to men who robbed other men. Similar to Miller’s (1998) fi ndings, the gendered nature of armed robbery seems to emerge most strongly in inter-gender interactions rather than intra-gender ones.

Likewise, when looking at male accomplishment, we see a similar gendering of the offender’s perceptions of the event. Here, though, the focus is on the hegemonic mas-culinity that frames men’s cognitive maps such that women are not perceived as allowa-ble victims (at least of armed robbery). Put differently, the same paternalistic perceptions that lead men not to see women as potential offenders (i.e. as innately weak and in need of protection) also makes females subjectively unavailable as potential victims.

The encounters described above highlight the importance of situational effects on the gendering of behaviour in general and crime specifi cally. Numerous feminist crimi-nologists have pointed to the fundamental necessity of understanding situational and

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contextual aspects of gender’s intersection with crime and criminality (see Maher 1997 ; Miller 2002; Miller and Mullins 2006 a ; 2006 b ). Gender-specifi c perceptions of threat strongly structure the dynamics of street robbery, especially in inter-gender situations. The value of a cross-cultural study, even with the limitations here, is the ability to explore the contours of how gender infl uences street robbery in a non-US context. The cross-class differences between victim and offender point to a different intersectionality of intimidation and accomplishment in the United Kingdom versus the United States. By targeting a more middle-class population, women here enhance their ability to control a robbery dynamic by drawing upon victims’ more general fears of crime and victimiza-tion. While street-involved men are more dismissive of women’s capabilities and threat levels — recall that when targeting their male peers, the women often used a potential combination of surprise and force — tourists and club-goers were more susceptible to their threats because they perceived the class source of the threat as serious despite the gender of the robber. Also recall Lisa’s discussion of selecting criminally-embedded men as targets because they are perceived as being less likely to report the crime to the police. Such negotiations mirror the fi ndings of other feminist analyses in which women use what advantages they have to negotiate the gender inequity that structures life in criminal networks (see Maher 1997 ; Miller 1998 ; 2001; Mullins and Wright 2003 ). Simply put, these women are making use of what resources they have available to them, even when those resources are quite limited. Increasingly, fe minist criminologists are attend-ing to the social context of offending and to issues of convergence and divergence. We feel that our analysis here provides new insight into the nature of these processes and, in doing so, encourages future work in this direction.

This study has documented the embeddedness of UK street robbery in networks of hedonistic partying. A commitment to such behaviour, for men and women alike, pro-duces a generalized motivation to crime that, in these interviews, manifested itself as violent street robbery. While motivated by similar direct and indirect forces, we did uncover key differences between men and women in their enactment strategies. Yet, the women’s enactment of robbery in this sample differed from prior studies performed in the United States. This points to the importance of comparative studies on street-crime structuration and to the need for in-depth examinations of both convergences and divergences in the processual dynamics of criminality between male and female offend-ers, in the United States and cross-culturally.

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