This is a bit of a random thought experiment / ramble on something I have been pondering recently. Not to be taken too seriously.
I’ll also say the reason for my interest in this subject is down to a genuine curiosity about the interplay of social vs biological differences between the sexes and nature vs nurture when it comes to issues around crime.
The thought is this. Statistics show that overwhelmingly crime is carried out by men. Is it possible that this actually understates the amount of crime being carried out by women because the women just don’t get caught?
Bear with me here…
So we know testosterone does make men more prone to rash decision making. So if we think about murder rates, lots of those are fights, muggings etc. It makes logical sense this group would mostly exclude women. Crimes of circumstance (like needing money to feed an addiction) men might do robbery where women can sadly turn to other, less criminalised ways of making money. I am not making a moral judgement. Just thinking through the gap in the data.
But when we think about pre-meditated acts of murder or cruelty, again the stats are these crimes are overwhelmingly men. And this is where I have pause for thought. As I don’t really understand how men are just more evil than women to such a statistical degree. (Note: i differentiate ‘evil’ from ‘violence’. By evil I mean pre-meditated harm). I look at my sweet little sons and I wonder how can it be that some men are just evil? If no one is born evil, perhaps many evil people have become that way because of how they have been treated. But of course many girls and women are abused… do some of them also become evil?
I’ll say upfront this may well be the case that evil women just don’t exist other than the vanishingly small numbers who are convicted and we are aware of.
But what if it wasn’t and there were in fact, more ‘evil’ women than is recognised?
I say with a high degree of certainty that if my aunty mildred got sick of her husband (she is not a real person btw) she could put a pillow over his face whilst he was sleeping, call the police in the morning and say he died in his sleep and he would just be another statistic of a bloke who had a heart attack. Autopsies are only done where there is suspicion… surely no one would suspect sweet Mildred who bakes cakes for church? She could get away with it easily. How many people who die of natural causes could actually have been offed by the women around them thereby never featuring in murder statistics?
Another thought. If we still keep to the track that there may be a higher number of evil women out there. We know that in times gone by, bad men were attracted to certain lines of work, like boarding schools or young offenders institutions where they could have unchecked power and access to people to abuse.
If we had evil women amongst us, what professions would attract them? My guess is probably care homes working with dementia patients? Harold Shipman went undetected for years because he was seen as naturally above suspicion because he was a doctor. In the end he was discovered as the numbers were irrefutable. But what if instead of a man he’d been a sweet lady? What if he’d have been more careful? I think it’s entirely possible that a woman with a proclivity for evil could exist undiscovered in various care roles in perpetuity. Especially in certain parts of elder care where controls are lax.
I’m not saying they do. Just that it’s possible.
Or maybe we will literally discover one day that there is a real biological reason why women don’t seem to be as prone to evil?