To be insanely fucking angry at this reporting...

[WankingMonkey]

www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/truth-female-sex-offenders/

Articles about record number of female criminals, lead with a picture of a transwoman. Rises in reported 'female' crime...ignoring that figures will be screwed from this day on given MALE crimes are logged as by females. And so on.

I am actually fucking raging about this and cannot vent anywhere except here as I would be deleted.

Surely noone actually thinks this is right?!

[NotYoda]

I have a BAGA level 1 (forward rolls a speciality)

[PoochSmooch]

M0stly, glad you called into the thread, because it was your explanation about d-values ages ago that made it click for me! Thank you for explaining it clearly in manageable words to a lowly MA*

*(hons)

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

I agree that female offending is almost certainly under-reported to an even greater degree than male offending (the stats from Childline give some indication), and I'm sorry to read about your terrible experiences Wobbly. I wish you could get closure, and it would be nice to think the perpetrators would face justice. And thank you for your bravery in talking about it.

I think you're absolutely right though - it would still be a stretch of the imagination to think the discrepancy in reporting is of the order of a factor of 50 to 100 - which is what would be required to bring female sex offending up to level with male sex offending. And reporting crimes wrongly only muddies the waters still further and makes it impossible to investigate the issues properly. For instance, I would guess that most female sex abusers abuse within the family (of course a majority of male sex offenders do too, but the female ones to an even greater degree I would guess - just because it's hard to think a woman would be particularly successful at dragging a stranger down a dark alley). And throwing transwomen like Hauxwell and Brannen into the statistics for women makes it even harder to get a proper picture of the MO of female sex offenders.

[DianaMemorialJam]

Damnit yoda I only got 6,5,4 and 3. Total fail.

I have paediatric first aid? I'm basically mother Theresa and Marie curie all wrapped into one

[VestalVirgin]

Just out of interest, is the low number of violent crimes committed by women due to the centuries of stereotyping women as placid, passive types who don't speak up, aren't violent coupled with a society that actively teaches girls some of the ways of being diplomatic and how to deal with situations (rather than 'oh, that's just boys' when boys handle a situation violently when a toddler rather than explaining to them why it's not ok) - and yes, massive generalising in order to be concise - rather than a natural way for women to be? Is it the same in all societies, even where patriarchy not such a big part of things (is there a place?)?

We don't know for sure, simply because there is no place where patriarchy does not rule.

It is known that male (mammal) animals of at least some species are more agressive, though.
Male pets are commonly castrated to reduce their tendency to fight.

I am fine with the assumption that male humans can control their behaviour and therefore fully deserve to be locked up forever if they rape or are otherwise violent.
However, it must be acknowledged that males are more likely to be violent, for whatever reason, and therefore, we need safe spaces where they have no access.


So WebSocket has a Phd and the author of the article is writing a Phd, anyone else feeling that Phds have just been drastically devaluated?

Eh, who cares, I can just identify as having a Phd.

[Pawpainting]

Just out of interest, is the low number of violent crimes committed by women due to the centuries of stereotyping women as placid, passive types who don't speak up, aren't violent coupled with a society that actively teaches girls some of the ways of being diplomatic and how to deal with situations (rather than 'oh, that's just boys' when boys handle a situation violently when a toddler rather than explaining to them why it's not ok) - and yes, massive generalising in order to be concise - rather than a natural way for women to be?

The large study which found that transwomen commit crimes at the same rate as men also found that trans men had an increased crime rate over women (but not as much as males). So that would suggest that testosterone plays some role in aggression?

[DianaMemorialJam]

Wobbly

[NotYoda]

Wobbley

Sorry that my silly post came straight after your heartfelt one. Insensitive of me

[DianaMemorialJam]

Eh, who cares, I can just identify
as having a Phd

Nailed it!

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

Bows in awe to Yoda. I was crap at gymnastics. Gave up after a particularly unpleasant incident involving a vaulting horse and my chin making contact with my knee on landing.

[DianaMemorialJam]

Yoda I realised that too
Right we need to behave now or web will come back and tell us more about his/her PhD and shit.

[ErrolTheDragon]

Gender critical feminists usually prefer to put Dr before their names rather than PhD after it, nice neutral non-marital status proclaiming title. The training in scientific research was pure bonus.

[DianaMemorialJam]

M0stly if you were better educated that wouldn't have happened. Throw your PhD certificate* in the bin please

*i literally don't know if they give out certificates for PhDs, I never even finished my degree!

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

Does anyone remember when Ben Goldacre bought his (deceased) cat a "PhD" from the same "web college" which had awarded Gillian McKeith her PhD? She was forced to remove the word "Dr" from her product range shortly afterwards, by the Advertising Standards people.

[FlyingElbows]

You get a certificate and magic powers and special badge to sew on your cardi.

[WobblyLegs5]

If testosterone played a role wouldn't there be higher numbers of females with pcos in prisions?? Don't think that makes sense.

And there are a few matriarchail societies out their vestal, have no idea of crime stats though. Or the stats of the links of tribes where there is neither female or male dominance or western gender roles. And imagine other factors would influence crime stats in these societies.

M0stly I just replied to you on the other thread. I do have closure imo. But through therapy never had the chance to prosecute any of my abusers. And I should have had that. As any victim should have. I think the stats show around 10-15% of peadophiles are female from these few studies, but there are so few studies it's hard to take much from it and their maybe biases invloved either way that clouds the results. And csa figures don't necessarily correlate to other sex offenses, as you say it's less likely a woman would target strangers in the same way (that's not to say it never happens, women force sex on men, attack other women- a group of teenage girls I worked with sexually assaulted another girl with a lightbulb) but there are differences in offender patterns between males and females and we need research into actual female offenders not trans women fucking up the figures (and in terms of sexual offenses I would have thought they should have their own category as again offender patterns maybe different from men also). And yes from what I understand female sex offenders are most commonly mothers, step mothers or siblings.

[DianaMemorialJam]

Fuck it Flying I knew I should have stayed at uni. I rock a badge so well. Maybe I could crochet one to make myself feel better

[WobblyLegs5]

No problem yoda all a long time and alot of therapy ago

[DianaMemorialJam]

Gillian McKieth scares the life out of me

She looks like the crypt keeper

[DianaMemorialJam]

Shit wobbly I've xposted with you again, sorry

[WobblyLegs5]

Don't need to say sorry

[VestalVirgin]

The large study which found that transwomen commit crimes at the same rate as men also found that trans men had an increased crime rate over women (but not as much as males). So that would suggest that testosterone plays some role in aggression?

If so, it must be an one way street, as the MtT retain a male level of offending, which if I remember correctly is independent of castration via reassignment surgery.

I think either the testosterone causes irreversible changes in aggression level, or the FtT are just self-selecting for increased aggression level, and/or become more aggressive because they feel that is expected.

Or possibly both.

Some FtT are very misogynist, which would lead to more violence against women, and some might get it into their heads that they are "actually male" because they have anger issues and aren't able to conform to the feminine ideal of being peaceful and submissive.

Once transitioned, someone questioning their masculinity is a danger to their very lives (as they could be found out to be actually female) so it is entirely possible they feel they have to react with violence in situations where (they think) an actual man would.

Would be interesting to know what kinds of violence are more common - I think just trying to match the expectations for average male violence would just lead to an increase in participation in bar brawls and the like.

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

Vestal, I think the factors predisposing people to violence are a very complicated mixture. The anthropologist Kate Fox (who's studied football violence extensively) makes the point that male football fans and male racegoers (not the ones in the posh enclosures, the ones standing by the rail in the cheap bits) are largely drawn from the same demographic, in fact there's considerable overlap - but they kick off at football matches (sorry, bad pun), not at race courses. There are social factors that amplify violence or put the brakes on it.

Wobbly, I had a long conversation about matriarchies with a friend who's an anthropologist (I was roughing out the plot outline for a fantasy novel in which I had a female warrior caste, and wanted to make it plausible). She reckons there are no documented cases of matriarchies (where women have more political power than men), though there are of course matrilineal societies (where inheritance passes down the female line). Interestingly while I would naively have thought "rigidly demarcated sex roles" = "women get a really raw deal", it isn't as simple as that. There are societies where women have wielded fairly equal political power, but have had very rigidly demarcated gender roles in the social scientist's sense of gender as socially sanction roles and behaviour assigned to a given sex. (The Iroquois would be an example of this - women even had the power to veto decisions to go to war with neighbouring tribes - or encourage the men to go to war - they certainly weren't peace loving!)

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

Actually (sorry, musing a bit more on the really interesting conversations with my anthropologist friend), she talked a bit about differential rates of domestic violence and its social context. Where societies face an external threat (neighbouring war like tribe) they tend to create a warrior caste, and rates of DV go up too - because (to use her analogy) violence is like a cocked and loaded gun - you don't quite know which direction it's going to go off in.

It makes me wonder (my speculation now) what part internet culture plays in creating a toxic culture of hypermasculinity: closed networks men cut off from social interaction with women, or more moderate men, egging each other on to become ever more misogynistic. (Ditto racial violence and Islamophobia, and also radicalised responses to racism in the form of young men being groomed to join ISIL for instance). You've got to wonder whether this is also spilling over into real life (and the "burn all TERFs/rape them with my lady dick" rhetoric on some extreme transactivist sites is just a subset of this general social trend).

[Lessthanaballpark]

Hedgehog that's very interesting and thanks to your clever friend I do remember reading that women's status in some Native American tribes declined as trade and conflict with colonising Europeans (a "neighbouring war like tribe" if ever there was one!) increased.