Masculinities, Crime and Criminology, Richard Collier

Table of Contents

Last Updated on September 8, 2024 by Karl Thompson

Collier (1998) is critical of Messerschmidt’s work on masculinity and crime.

Collier argues the concept of hegemonic masculinity is limited.

For collier this is simply a list of traits which are not common to men. Women can also express the traits of what Messerschmidt calls ‘hegemonic masculinity’.

Messerschmidt uses the concept of hegemonic masculinity to explain too many types of crime. He uses it to explain everything from sexual abuse to traffic offences, from burglary to corporate crime.

Messerschmidt’s’ concept of hegemonic masculinity isn’t really sociological. It is based on stereotypical ideas about what a typical traditional man should be, drawn from popular ideologies.

Collier’s Postmodernist Approach

Collier argues a postmodernist approach is needed to understand the relationship between masculinity and crime. Such an approach would address the complexity of the multi-layered nature of the social subject. Stereotypes and images of masculinity are important, because they do affect people’s understanding of what it means to be masculine.

However, they are always interpreted in particular contexts. For Collier, men do not simply try to ‘accomplish masculinity’, because masculinity is multifaceted and where crimes are perceived as related to masculinity emerges in the discourses that surround crime.

There is uncertainty around what it means to be masculine because of the changing configurations of childhood, family and fatherhood, and of heterosexual social practices and sexed subjects.

Collier believes it is preferable to examine the subjective expression of masculinity by individuals or groups of men through crime rather than generalise about hegemonic masculinity.

Generalisations are dangerous because male identities are precarious and never fixed.

The Dunblane Massacre

Collier’s approach can be demonstrated by his case study of Thomas Hamilton, the guy who carried out the Dunblane Massacre.

On 13 March 1996 Thomas Hamilton shot and killed 16 primary school children and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland. He then committed suicide by shooting himself.

Hamilton was a local man who was 43 and single. He lived alone but kept in frequent contact with his mother, who was local.

He had been a scoutmaster but had been forced to leave because of ‘inappropriate behaviour’. He had failed, despite a number of attempts, to be reinstated.

Collier argued the media portrayed Hamilton as a monster. It was implied he was a repressed homosexual, because he was single, had never married and had an interest in male children.

The media saw him as an inadequate nobody, a man who had failed to express any kind of masculine success: not financially, socially, sexually, academically in sport or at work. Hence why he went on to express his masculinity in a violent way.

However Collier argues that failed masculinity doesn’t offer a full explanation of Hamiltons’ extreme violence.

He argues we need to take account of the multifaceted nature of his masculinity and the interface between the contexts in which Hamilton lived at the level of social structure and the specifics of his own life history.

Based on the evidence Collier argues there was no evidence that Hamilton was a predatory paedophile, it is more likely he felt a need to control and direct young boys in order to direct their development.

Hamilton was regarded as a paedophile because he went against the norm: it is mainly women who care for children and men who take on the role are automatically regarded with more suspicion.

Thwarted in his attempts to express his masculinity as a Scout Leader, Hamilton sought to express it through an interest in guns. This allowed him to draw on images of hypermasculine toughness. By attacking the school he was asserting male authority and turning it on the feminised world of primary education.

His act of violence wasn’t one of losing control, it was one of him taking control.