"Since then, increasing attention has been paid to the applicability of male theories of crime to women and girls, the male as predator/female as victim dichotomy maintained by patriarchy, and gender discrimination and disparity in the criminal justice system. Meda Chesney-Lind, author of The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime (1997) and numerous other books and articles, has been referred to as the “Mother of feminist criminology” (Belknap, 2004) and is one of the most prolific writers and outspoken voices on feminist criminology. Her work highlights the contextual features of the lives of girls and women that influence their involvement in crime as offenders and victims and the disparate and discriminatory practices in the criminal justice system. Feminist criminology raised issues regarding not only the applicability of male theories of crime to female offenders, but also the gendered nature of crime. In his important work, Masculinities and Crime, Messerschmidt (1993) called for attention to the masculinity-crime connection, arguing that criminology has ignored the most central predictor of crime. According to Meserschmidt,“Crime by men is a form of social practice invoked as a resource, when other resources are unavailable, for accomplishing masculinity” (p.85). In Feminism and Criminology, Naffine (1996) offered a critical analysis of the impact of masculinity and feminimity on criminal behavior and the discipline of criminology, arguing that the gendered nature of crime is perpetuated by “a desperate desire to preserve men from associations with the feminine and its supposed weakness and subordination” (p. 148). Gerbner (1994) and Jhally (1999) have highlighted the role of mass media technology in shaping and solidifying the masculinity-crime/feminimity-victim ideology, giving attention to the ways in which media images pit the male aggressor against the female victim and make it virtually impossible for males or females to break out of these culturally designated roles. This research suggests that there is still a lot of work to be done to unravel the gendered nature of criminal behavior. Katz (2006) argues that violence against women is a men’s issue and men need to take action and personal responsibility for the problem of crime. Others such as Naffine (1996) emphasize the need to address the gendered nature of criminology as a discipline more centrally: The most pressing intellectual and ethical obligation of those of us who wish to persist with the study of crime, its meaning and reasons, is to bring women (and other exiles) in from the cold. In order to know more about who we are as criminologists, about the very nature of our enterprise and whether it is worth pursuing at all, we need to open up the conventional borders of the discipline. (Naffine, 1996, p 153) This important work in the area of feminist criminology an gender and crime has set the theoretical foundation for future research that may begin to explain the masculinity-crime link and gender differences and similarities in offending patterns."