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?

My difficulty with the OP's premise is with the concept of evil. I don't think evil has validity outside theological discussions.

I don't think people are intrinsically evil, but some people do truly terrible things.

It's biology. It's always biology. Men have always in all societies in all eras been more violent (which we now call crime). And we are evolving from animals where exactly the same was true -though we think of that as natural. Individuals may buck the trend ( great we should breed with them more often!) but in general, it's going to take fucking for ever for men as a group to become less violent and more cooperative. And tbh society in general rewards testosterone heavy men.

Really interesting data.

Whats curious though is that nothing close to 1 seventh of all pre meditated crimes are by women? So even the female psychopaths not committing crimes?

I tried to be clear that what I was trying to describe was crimes of (to use other terms) callousness. A desire to hurt or be cruel.

violent crimes I understand will correlate to physicality - size and strength. But crimes of cruelty - are men just more cruel than women? I don’t think so based on women i know. Hence wondering if maybe more women do ‘cruel’ crimes (pre meditated murder for example) and just aren’t caught

Biology is everything. Fundamentally, men were designed to impregnate as many females as possible, hunt for food and kill their enemies. Women were designed to carry and bear children and nurture them to maturity. It’s not surprising that men have more violent impulses than women. It’s innate. Of course socialisation has an effect, but many men still exist in a toxic time-warp.

I was really struck by a trip on a boat off the coast of Northumberland a couple of years ago: large seal colony sitting on rocks, sunbathing. The guy doing the commentary (tourist season) said "oh, look at the seals: they are almost all female, those ones sunning themselves. The male ones spend their time fighting each other and killing each other so there are significantly less of them."

The effects of testosterone are not to be underestimated.

No, I very much don't think that's possible. Women are less sexually motivated and that includes the crimes they commit. And children who are being abused would show it in other ways than just physical evidence.

The organisation Make Space For Girls is interesting - details how from a young age boys dominate play areas and the girls get sidelined. Think of games of football taking over the playground.
If you have a sense of entitlement and are surrounded by boys don't cry and boys will be boys attitudes you have less chance to develop resilience and decent coping strategies.

It could be because psychopathy doesn't necessarily result in criminality.

It's possible that female psychopaths might be more inclined to go the 'pro-social' or successful psychopathic route, which is non-criminal. For instance, surgeons, paediatricians and consultants score higher than the average person for psychopathic traits. Their stress immunity means they cope well in that line of work.

I absolutely think men are more actively and severely cruel than women, on a demographic level. Look at the Rape of Nanjing, Dachau, Unit 731, and the way men behave in wars throughout history and today. Women can absolutely be petty and cruel, but for the most part (again, on a demographic level) it's much less extreme. There are exceptions, of course, but they are by definition not the norm.

I don't think women are criminal masterminds, who are less likely to be caught, I just think women commit those kinds of crimes much less often.

Who says the most evil thing a person can do is kill someone.

It might be the most serious crime under the law but that is not the same thing.

There are plenty of narcissistic mothers that destroy their kids lives which is pretty evil.

With some primate social interactions, while males may use violence to assert domination, females use things like isolation, bullying, and ostracising. I think if you were looking to see how evil manifest sin human women that kind of thing might be a good place to start.

Not just the risk of being stabbed, but the risk of being arrested.

I have a good friend who was involved in the drugs trade as a young man. He gave it up in his mid-30s, which is a very common time for men to give up criminal behaviour. Why? Essentially the risks, understood broadly, started to look unfavourable to him. The risk of being stabbed, the risk of going to prison, the risk of his mother finding out, the risk of being cut out from his community, the risk of not seeing his kids.

But testosterone is also really decreasing through those years, and testosterone tends to lead to risk taking behaviour. I think that's one piece of the puzzle with regard to men's tendency to leave behind criminal behaviour in those years. So it would make sense that women would tend to be more risk adverse too.

It might be a bit of a stretch, but if you look at ancient history poison seems to have been a common murder method for powerful women.

Yes, most psychopaths don't engage in criminality.

Early studies of psychopaths included criminality in the diagnosis, so tended to focus on a group that had committed crimes and had been caught. A certain amount of pop culture still woks from that model.

Once you take criminality away as a diagnostic condition it looks a little different.

And less likely to just have them taken off them by other criminals with superior strength?

My view on the whole is that men have a greater capacity for violence and aggression than women. Having said that, I don't know whether it's men in general are more likely to be violent than women in general (in the same way that men in general are taller than women in general) or whether it's just a minority of men who have that propensity. (In the same way that men are more likely than women to be colour-blind - ie, most men aren't colour-blind, and the fact that a minority of men are colour-blind doesn't say anything about the vision of men in general.)

I'm not sure that I've made that distinction clear! I'm willing to have another go if it doesn't make sense.

But then I also wonder if the OP is right. Because if you look at situations where women are given power, then they can behave very badly indeed. Look at the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland for a classic example - the nuns were vicious towards the young women and girls in their charge. Nuns who became teachers and headteachers in girls' schools were often physically violent in the days when that was permitted. Also look at health care - nursing and midwifery are, one suspects, a magnet for any woman who has a desire to harm others undetected. As we have seen in countless cases there is a whole establishment willing to cover up for a health professional who is harming patients.

Yes, I think men's cruelty is more likely to be violent or physical (and thus criminal in our society), whereas women's cruelty is more likely to be verbal and emotional (so non-criminal on the whole).
Women's cruelty takes place in the context of personal relationships, whereas men might be cruel to strangers or those who threaten their 'business' dealings.

As a former female drug dealer I can explain: dealers often carry a lot of drugs and money, they need to be able to defend themselves from attack. If the buyer knows you’re a small female they are more likely to attack you for your money or drugs

I do think it’s entirely plausible Mildred would be effectively above suspicion. No one would suspect foul play so no investigation would ever be done

I think this is the wrong assumption. It's often men who have killed/abused their wives and gotten away with it due to status in society. Women would physically struggle to take a man's life due to the biological differences.

Anyone with teen boys or who grew up with boys learn quickly how dominant young men become physically. This changes how we interact with the world such as learning not to go out solo at night.

Teen boys exhibit higher risk taking which gives them a dopamine hit, which many teen girls don't tend to experience so the paths start to diverge. I know one woman who fits more of the male traits, aggressive at sports, risk taker, non nurturing social happens but it's much rarer