Is marriage a turning point in criminal behaviour?

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the SPS Departmental Seminar Series features a presentation by Eva Jaspers, Professor of Empirical and Theoretical Sociology at Utrecht University.

Research on the 'marriage effect' in life‐course criminology argues that committed partnerships reduce criminal behaviour by increasing social control and shifting individuals’ routine activities toward family settings. However, existing evidence is almost entirely based on different-sex couples and overwhelmingly on men, who are more likely to offend.

A major review of 58 studies found that nearly all focused solely on male samples and none included people in same-sex relationships. While studies including women show mixed marriage effects – ranging from weaker to equally strong or stronger than men – the broader literature assumes gendered dynamics of social control and caregiving by a spouse. As a result, current theories overlook how marriage may operate in same-sex couples, as well as for women in heterosexual marriages. Using Dutch longitudinal register data, we examine – for the first time – whether cohabitation and marriage reduce crime only for heterosexual men, who are the group most likely to cohabit with a partner less criminal than themselves. We employ Fixed Effects and Fixed Effects Individual Slopes models to analyse 15 years of data containing both partnership histories and suspicions of (serious) offenses.

The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.