If you check the prison data of most countries around the world and in every culture, you will find that there is a higher chance of a man being involved in violent crime then a woman. In a 2007 study done by the U.S department of justice, they found that 75% of criminal offenders were male and 20% were female. The remaining 5% were in cases where the gender of the perpetrator was not known. The result of the study was the finding that men were more likely to commit crimes.
Even if you want to raise the case that female crimes go unnoticed at times, it still does not account for the huge gap that exists. Why is this the case, are men inherently violent?
This has been a topic of discussion by sociologists and psychologists. Many theories have been put forward for the cause of this. Some people have concluded that men are hardwired to be aggressive. This is what the evolutionary psychologists have put forward as men were adapted to protect women and children for humans to survive. These attributes were passed from one generation to the other over thousands of years.
In opposition to this view by evolutionary psychologists, sociologists tend to think that it has to do with social inequalities that exist in society today. The thought is that if men and women were equal in society today, there would be less violent crime among men and this will balance out the rates. The thought also is that not only will male violence reduce but female violence will increase as the years go by. But this gap went up between 1975 to 1990. This was because the rate of arrest of men shot up during this time.
What are some peculiar features in this argument that have been noted over time?
Fewer men equal more violence
Steven F. Messner and Robert J. Sampson in their analysis of the data gathered on this phenomenon. They hypothesised that if men are more violent than in communities with more men, there should be more violence. But what they found was the exact opposite. The rates of violent crime were higher in populations that had more females. The finding suggests that in this smaller population of men where women were the majority of the population there was a higher chance of finding a violent criminal. How could this be?
They explained that in communities with more women, there was less likelihood of family coherence. Families are formed by one parent and the father is usually absent. Their take was that when a father is not present in the family there was a higher chance of crime in this case.
Also important to note is that some criminal acts are peculiar to each gender. Men are more likely to carry out violent crimes (homicide, and aggravated assault) But women partake more in prostitution which is a nonviolent crime. Biology may be able to explain this reason but it may be due to other factors.
Many top-level experts have tried to analyse the statistics seen to come up with an explanation for the reason there are differences between men and women in crime. Are there things that motivate the genders differently? Could it be that men and women go through life similarly and that society and culture are dictating how we should react?
My Thoughts
My opinion on why men are more likely to commit a crime in a feminocentric society or population might be that there are less men to fight off the men who would do these crimes. It's for the same reasons why the crime rates in the US are lower when compared to the UK simply because people own guns. It’s a matter of mutual destructiveness between the men that keep us away from each other.
In a society where there are fewer men, there are also going to be less of jobs usually done by men, so fewer police, fewer firefighters, and fewer military personnel.
It is a concept Carl Jung (swiss psychologist and psychiatrist) discussed when he spoke of the integration of the shadow, bringing the aggressive tendencies of a man to good use prevents him from using them wrongly.
