Gender differences in crime and pondering the reasons

[MyKindHiker]

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?

I think you have to take testosterone out of it to get to the correct answer. Regular shoplifters aren't making impulsive decisions they have a business model to make money to buy drugs. I assume
It's a decision they have made in how to live their lives. If women don't do this as much you have to wonder why especially if that would mean selling their body instead, which is a lot worse

Don't questions like these often come down to this fact about statistics - there is more variance in the male distribution of traits compared to the female distribution - therefore a relatively modest difference between the median male and median female exists with a much larger difference at the extremes of the tails.

You can’t take testosterone out of it. Testosterone doesn’t only impact behaviour, it also impacts physiology - men are stronger than women and this has enabled them to take and hold power across society. Women are also more vulnerable by virtue of being the sex that gets pregnant.

Well quite.

But what about properly evil people? Do you think there are just very few evil women? Or that there are evil women who just don’t get caught

It actually strikes me as similar to how we don't see many female drug dealers

So yes. And that would explain more violent crime (stabbings, beatings) being done by men.

But where we have crime where the underlying root is a desire to control or hurt (ie: being ‘evil’) - a man’s physicality doesn’t explain that. He had the impulse first and used his strength as a tool to act on it.

Do women just not have these impulses? Based on men and women I know, women can be just as capable of callousness or cruelty. But they don’t use their physical strength, they use other means.

So in crimes could it be possible women are using other means than phsysical violence to for example kill people

That IS interesting.

You miss the point about physicality enable men to acquire and hold power across society. Men’s actions take place within the context of holding power.

Ooooooh ok sorry I get you now.

So to follow that through it’s basically patriarchy.

but does patriarchy make evil men evil OR does it allow evil men to behave evilly and somehow prevents evil women from acting on their evil impulses?

I know this is slightly off topic, but we can look to other cultures to see how men behave. In China, the West's increasingly toxic version of masculinity is less prevalent. Yes, they have the macho man ideal, but equally valid and valued by women (and their culture in general) is the intellectual man, which red-pill culture would denigrate as sissy, homosexual or beta. The two types of masculinity there are called 'wen and wu'.

Consequently, there is much less cultural obsession with men as dominant, strong, macho. It is also a much bigger focus on the family and men as part of the family. Also there are parts of China where women are more dominant and the culture also presents women as equal to men in a way we haven't met yet.

Obviously, it is hard to correlate crime with that, because in a society where extreme behaviour is punished extremely, execution by firing squad, there consequently is less crime. But I think it's probably true that Chinese men are not deficient in testosterone, therefore the differences in crime rates MUST be due to socialisation. Meaning we create men this way in the west. Rather than their having a biological imperative.

whilst no statistics are perfect the use of gender vs sex adds an additional complexity. The anomaly of criminality appears to align to sex not presentation/gender based on currently available statistics

Could be men are better at selling things, be it stolen goods or drugs ?

It means they have more power to act - so more ability to both be evil and act more evilly. Testosterone also comes back into play directly in its influence on behaviour. Women are constrained by the lack of power and also the need to survive under patriarchy, which includes managing the possibility of pregnancy, being pregnant and the dependence of offspring.

Massively generalising....

men are more likely to take risks such as burglaries and drug dealing I think partly because they are physically stronger and better able to protect themselves. Once you start crossing boundaries and taking risks and getting away with it the boundaries and scale of crime will get pushed further out. Also a lot of male crimes are opportunistic. Eg. They broke in the burgle not rape but found a young woman home alone.

In terms of socialisation, criminal behaviour has to start somewhere. Flashers who go on to rape and murder, people who hurt and kill animals and go on to harm people. Domestic violence perps who commit terror attacks. Joan Smith's book Home Grown is very good on the latter. The responses and consequences (or lack of) at early stages have an impact on how they proceed.

Crimes such as rape obviously aren't likely to be committed by women.

I wonder if getting started in drug dealing is also really time consuming and women just literally don't have the time? I imagine there's a fair amount of travel and hanging about and antisocial hours. Being out in the dark and meeting shady people. Likewise selling stolen things.

Women are more like to hurt themselves than others, including in mental ill health. For example EUPD, which seems to overwhelmingly be something they diagnose women with, the women harm themselves the men smash stuff up and punch others. With the outlier being male suicide stats.

The fact there are so few women's prisons compared to men's and the type of offences they are in for is very telling. I do not believe women are better at not getting caught, and my understanding is that if caught women are actually more likely to go to prison or get a harsher sentance for lesser offences than men. Possibly because society holds them to different standards.

Things such as paedophilia - the effort it goes to to become a priest / gymnastics coach / scout leader so they have the power and access is just sickening. Women dominate workplaces such as nurseries so have much greater access but on the rare occasions they commit these crimes there is usually a man involved behind the scenes.

That’s a funny idea! But why would men choose to sell coke rather than the Avon catalogue?

@Coatsoff42 I don't know, when I did Avon I just posted the catalogue through the letterbox and collected it from the step the next week then delivered the items. I wasn't actually doing any sales

I think it’s more likely that you need a more physically powerful presence to avoid having the drugs stolen from you by addicts or forcing people to pay up

I agree that there will be a certain proportion of crimes that require strength or a feeling that they have the strength to carry out. Violence and sexual offences.

If a female person doesn’t have the strength to do it or feels they would be overpowered, what are the chances she would even attempt it.

Thanks everyone for responses. I think it’s such an interesting topic

So you dont think its possible that there could be perverted women working in nurseries and just never being caught because parents literally would be looking for the wrong thing, ie: semen?

I mean I hope it isn’t true. But I don’t know i have the evidence to write it off as not possible?

When my ex started taking testosterone for body building, he changed mentally - he became colder and crueler.

You can't take testosterone out of it. It doesn't just have physical affects (BTW, I doubt your Aunty Mildred could suffocate her husband with a pillow - unless he's already decrepit - men maintain a significant strength advantage over women into old age)

By the same token, you can't take size out of it - men can't imaging being in a world where 50% of the adults around them are 1/5th larger, and capable of killing them with their bare hands - whereas that's the world that women live in, so of course it has an effect on behaviour.

Yes there is that I guess

Interesting AI rabbit hole I have gone down

In humans, the link between testosterone and outward physical aggression is much weaker in women than in men. Dominance vs. Aggression: Research suggests that in women, high testosterone is more closely linked to dominance (the drive for status) than to aggression (the intent to harm). A study from the University of Chicago found that women with higher testosterone were significantly more likely to choose "high-stakes" careers in finance, not because they were violent, but because they had a higher appetite for financial risk.The "Pro-social" Effect: Surprisingly, some studies (like those from the University of Lübeck) have shown that administering testosterone to women can actually make them more fair in bargaining games. It seems to heighten the desire for status; if the "best" way to get status in a group is to be seen as fair and competent, testosterone can actually promote pro-social behavior. The Provocation Factor: Testosterone doesn't usually create aggression out of thin air. Instead, it acts as a potentiator. If a woman is provoked or her status is threatened, higher testosterone can lead to a more intense "counter-strike" response, but it rarely triggers unprovoked violence.

Combat Sports and Athletics
In the world of professional sports, some female athletes have historically used testosterone (or its precursors) not just for the muscle-building properties, but for the "killer instinct"—the psychological drive to dominate an opponent.

Agree with scout and also claws on the effects of being the stronger sex in our patriarchal society.

I would add that a further influence linked to both the above is developmental. Also a generalisation, but as mammals, we are doomed to raise the children suited to our environments. When our environments are brutal, our children will grow up ready to continue the fight/ perpetuate the cruelty/ be emotionally cut off in order to endure the pain. Examples of brutal environments could be growing up in a war zone, growing up in poverty, or attending a private school with a bullying culture. The responses (again, massively generalised) to these environments are necessarily going to be different for the two sexes because underneath the complexity of our lives we are also still mammals engaged in sexual reproduction and continuation of our species.

I think a lot of it is socialisation. Criminal behaviour often starts in childhood or teen years (although not necessarily criminal at that stage) and then a parent excuses it as “boys will be boys”. That tells them that there are limited consequences for their shit behaviour and gives them no reason to stop.

Even in childhood more is expected of girls, at home and in school. Boys have later curfews because it’s expected (wrongly) that they’re safer after dark.