This article addresses two issues that have received little attention in empirical research-the mechanisms explaining variation in violent delinquency within gender and variation in levels of violence across gender, or the gender gap. Toward these ends, the article synthesizes arguments from differential association theory, feminist theory, and gender studies. The outcome is a theoretical model of gender and violent delinquency that focuses on the interplay between structural positions and cultural processes. The theoretical model includes a core construct of differential association theory-the learning of definitions favorable to violence-as well as arguments about cultural definitions or meanings of gender and gender differences in the role of familial controls and peer influence, which are derived from feminist theory and gender studies. It then examines how these cultural processes are conditioned by structural positions. One of the key arguments is that the violent delinquency of females is controlled through rather subtle, indirect mechanisms, while the violence of males is controlled in more direct, overt ways. The results of the empirical analysis support the theoretical arguments, contribute to the limited understanding of the variation in violent offending among females, and explain the sources of the gender gap in violent delinquency. The article thereby allows greater understanding of the broader phenomenon of juvenile violence.Youth violence is considered to be a serious contemporary problem. Yet, theoretical explanations of the causes of violent delinquency have focused on males and largely ignored females (see Kruttschnitt, 1994), perhaps because there has been a tendency to view violence as a "male" phenomenon. This view is inconsistent with the findings of self-report studies, however. Studies of self-reported delinquency find gender ratios ranging *Portions of this article were presented at the

WORK AND OCCUPATIONS De Coster et al. / SEXUAL HARASSMENT This article draws from criminological research on victimization and on organizational models of the social context of sexual harassment to propose a routine activities explanation of sexual harassment victimization. The authors propose that certain features of organizations can be used to conceptualize guardianship as well as the proximity component of target suitability in the routine activities framework. The authors also discuss the features of individuals (target attractiveness) that may make them more or less susceptible to victimization, holding organizational features constant. They test hypotheses from a routine activities explanation of sexual harassment using data from a national company in the U.S. telephone industry. The authors find general support for the importance of both organizational features and individual characteristics in the prediction of sexual harassment victimization. However, they find little evidence that individual characteristics and organizational features interact in the production of harassment victimization, which is counter to a routine activities approach.

This article integrates arguments from three perspectives on the relationship between communities and crime-constrained residential choices, social capital, and street context perspectives-to specify a conceptual model of community disadvantage and the violence of individual adolescents. Specifically, we propose that status characteristics (e.g., race, poverty, female headship) restrict the residential choices of families. Residence in extremely disadvantaged communities, in turn, increases the chances of violent behavior by youths by influencing the development and maintenance of community and family social capital, and by influencing the chances that youths are exposed to a criminogenic street context. We assess our conceptual model using community contextual and individual-level data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our findings suggest that individual or family status characteristics influence violence largely because of the communities in which disadvantaged persons and families reside. Although we find that community social capital does not predict individual violence, both family social capital and measures of an alternative street milieu are strong predictors of individual violence. Moreover, our street context variables appear to be more important than the social capital variables in explaining how community disadvantage affects violence.A central focus in contemporary criminology has been identifying structural characteristics of communities that are associated with crime and violence (e.g., this research has focused on neighborhood rates of crime. 1 However, recent studies have begun to explore how community-level features impact individuallevel differences in crime and violence (e.g.

This paper integrates arguments from differential social control theory with sociological research on mental health to develop an interactionist explanation of the relationship between law violation and depression. We focus on the possibility that law violation and depression are related because they share common antecedents, as well as the possibility that these problems mutually influence one another over time. We test hypotheses derived from our theoretical perspective using covariance structure analysis and panel data. Our results show that the relationship between law violation and depression can be explained largely by common antecedents—social‐structural positions, stressful life events, and adolescent problems shape social relationships and identities, which together influence the likelihood of both early adulthood crime and depression. We also find limited support for mutual influence.

In their strain theory explanation for the gender gap in delinquency, Broidy and Agnew posit that the joint experience of anger and depression, which is more typical among females than males, should help explain gender differences in delinquency. The authors extend and test their claim using data from a southeastern middle school. Their findings show that females are more likely than males to experience anger and depression concomitantly and that the interaction between anger and depression is important for understanding the gender gap in delinquency. This is not because depression alleviates the impact of anger on delinquency among females, as suggested by gendered strain theory. Instead, depression exacerbates the effect of anger on delinquency among males. This article concludes that the key to understanding links between gender, emotions, and delinquency resides in gendered expressions of emotional responses to stress rather than in gendered experiences of emotions.