Sex and crime - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

For crimes involving sexuality, see Sex and law or Gender crime
Gender crime
A gender crime is a hate crime committed against a specific gender. Specific gender crimes may include some instances of rape, genital mutilation, forced prostitution, and forced pregnancy. Often purported gender crimes are committed during armed conflict or during times of political upheaval or...

.

Attempts in various fields have tried to explore a possible relation between gender and crime. Such studies may belong to criminology

Criminology

Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...

, sociobiology

Sociobiology

Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...

(which attempts to demonstrate a causal relationship between biological factors, in this case sex

Sex

In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...

, and human behaviors), etc. Despite the difficulty to interpret them, crime statistics

Crime statistics

Crime statistics attempt to provide statistical measures of the crime in societies. Given that crime is usually secretive by nature, measurements of it are likely to be inaccurate....

may provide a way to investigate such a relationship, whose possible existence would be interesting from a gender differences

Gender differences

A sex difference is a distinction of biological and/or physiological characteristics associated with either males or females of a species. These can be of several types, including direct and indirect. Direct being the direct result of differences prescribed by the Y-chromosome, and indirect being...

perspective. An observable difference might be due to social and cultural factors or to biological factors (as sociobiological theories claim). Furthermore, the nature of the crime

Crime

Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...

itself must be considered.

In the United States

In the United States, men are much more likely to be incarcerated than women. Nearly 9 times as many men (5,037,000) as women (581,000) had ever at one time been incarcerated in a State or Federal prison at year end 2001. However, women are the fastest-growing demographic group in prison because women are the largest demographic on the planet. Statistically the ratio of 9 to 1 has not changed making this increase worth study, however, it is nevertheless statistically insignificant. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/piusp01.txt.

In 2004, males were almost 10 times more likely than females to commit murder

Murder

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

. Men are also far more likely than women to be the victims of violent crime, with the exception of rape.http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/gender.cfm

One study showed that women were more likely than men to deem certain behaviors that are criminal or unethical, such as inflating an insurance claim or using "cheap foreign labor", to be less acceptable (Fisher, 1999).

In Canada

According to a Canadian Public Health Agency report, the rate of violent crime doubled among male youth during the late 1980s and 1990s, while it almost tripled among female youth. It rose for the latter from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1988 to a peak of 5.6 per 1,000 in 1996, and began to decline in 1999. Some researchers have suggested that the increase on crime statistics could be partly explained by the stricter approach to schoolyard fights and bullying, leading to a criminalization of behaviours now defined as "assault" behaviours (while they were simply negatively perceived before). The increase in the proportion of female violent crime would thus be explained more by a change in law enforcement policies than by effective behaviour of the population itself. According to the report aforementioned, "Evidence suggests that aggressive and violent behaviour in children is linked to family and social factors, such as social and financial deprivation; harsh and inconsistent parenting; parents’ marital problems; family violence, whether between parents, by parents toward children or between siblings; poor parental mental health; physical and sexual abuse; and alcoholism, drug dependency or other substance misuse by parents or other family members.".

Aggressivity and gender

Males are typically more openly aggressive than females (Coie & Dodge 1997, Maccoby & Jacklin 1974, Buss 2005), which violent crime statistics support. Beth Wilson Some researchers have suggested that females are not necessarily less aggressive, but that they tend to show their aggression in less overt, less physical ways. For example, females may display more verbal and relational aggression, such as social rejection

Social rejection

Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes both interpersonal rejection and romantic rejection. A person can be rejected on an individual basis or by an entire group of people...

. Men do, however, express their aggression with violence more often than women.

Sociobiological and evolutionary psychology perspective

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

has proposed several evolutionary explanations for gender differences in aggressiveness. Males can increase their reproductive success by polygyny

Polygyny

Polygyny is a form of marriage in which a man has two or more wives at the same time. In countries where the practice is illegal, the man is referred to as a bigamist or a polygamist...

which will lead the competition with other males over females. If the mother died this may have had more serious consequences for a child than if the father died in the ancestral environment since there is a tendency for greater parental investment

Parental investment

In evolutionary biology, parental investment is any parental expenditure that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness...

s and caring for children by females than by males. Greater caring for children also leads to difficulty leaving them in order to either fight or flee. Anne Campbell writes that females may thus avoid direct physical aggressiveness and instead use strategies such as "friendship termination, gossiping, ostracism, and stigmatization".

Sociology of Gender and Crime

Considerations of gender in regard to crime have been considered to be largely ignored and pushed aside in criminological and sociological study, until recent years, to the extent of female deviance having been marginalised (Heidensohn, 1995). In the past fifty years of sociological research into crime and deviance sex differences were understood and quite often mentioned within works, such as Merton's theory of anomie, however, they were not critically discussed, and often any mention of female delinquency was only as comparative to males, to explain male behaviour's, or through defining the girl as taking on the role of a boy, namely, conducting their behaviour and appearance as that of a 'tomboy' and by rejecting the female role Gang Violence In The PostIndustrial Era, adopting stereotypical masculine traits.

One key reason contended for this lack of attention to females in crime and deviance is due to the view that female crime has almost exclusively been dealt with by men, from policing through to legislators, and that this has continued through into the theoretical approaches, quite often portraying what could be considered as a one-sided view, as Mannheim suggested Feminism and Criminology In Britain (Heidensohn, 1995).

However, other contentions have been made as explanations for the invisibility of women in regard to theoretical approaches, such as: females have an '...apparently low level of offending' (Heidensohn, 1995); that they pose less of a social threat than their male counterparts; that their 'delinquencies tend to be of a relatively minor kind' Girls In The Youth Justice System(Heidensohn, 1995), but also due to the fear that including women in research could threaten or undermine theories, as Thrasher and Sutherland feared would happen with their research (Heidensohn, 1995).

Further theories have been contended, with many debates surrounding the involvement and ignoring of women within theoretical studies of crime, however, with new approaches and advances in feminist studies and masculinity studies, and the claims of increases in recent years in female crime, especially that of violent crime Girls In The Youth Justice System more attention seems to be becoming of this topic.

External links

Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974-2001
Most victims and perpetrators in homicides are male U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics
Girls In The Youth Justice System
Feminism and Criminology in Britain British Journal Of Criminology. Spring 1988, Vol. 28: No. 2.
Gang Violence In The PostIndustrial Era Crime and Justice Journal. 1998. Vol. 24.

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