What does the evidence of a 1995 study by Graham and Bowling suggest about male and female offending rates?

The evidence from the 1995 study by Graham and Bowling indicates that the difference in offending rates between genders is indeed smaller than previously reported. Their research utilized self-reported crime data, which highlighted that while traditional statistics often showed men committing more offenses than women at a significant rate, when individuals were asked to report their own criminal behavior, the gap was not as wide. This suggests that societal perceptions and the ways in which crime is recorded and reported may not fully capture the nuances of actual offending behavior among different genders. Therefore, the study challenges the prevailing assumptions about gender differences in criminality and emphasizes the importance of self-reported data in understanding crime rates.