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Why do YOU think men commit more crime than women? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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Its an objective fact among every country that publishes crime statistics. These countries all vary widely in every other metric you can imagine (social, economic, political etcetera). But, crime being disproportionately commited by men is a universal constant. Nobody has an objectively correct answer to this question, it's just a prompt for discussion. Share your opinion, whatever it may be. However, please don't be a dick to other commenters. Disagreement, good faith, many view points and discussion is the goal here.

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[–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

By mentioning racial bias, I was making the wider point of how the statistics rely on data that is inherently biased due to how it was collected; Inequality in policing and the judicial system leads to different outcomes.

A concrete example from the UK is that in the year ending March 2024, under the "stop and search" procedures, "there were 59,549 searches of women, [...] and 447,952 searches of men [...]" (Elided parts of the quote are because the article compares stats to the year prior, which isn't relevant to our discussion)

That's a ratio of men and women being searched of around 15:2 . I'm going to treat that as if it were 7:1, because I want to set up a hypothetical. Now obviously this doesn't include any of the downstream stuff like rates of actually getting arrested, or later found guilty, because that would be far too complex to consider here. Let's treat stop and search rates as a proxy for crime rates, and consider two different scenarios that could explain these data.

In scenario 1, we would assume that for each gender, the number of people stopped and searched is proportional to the number of people who commit crimes, I.e. that:

the gendered ratio of stop and search (7:1) ≈ the gendered ratio of crimes committed (7:1)

Now for scenarios 2, let's assume that this isn't the case, and that actual ratio of crimes committed is 𝒳 :1, where 𝒳 is unknown; although my belief is that 𝒳 lies somewhere between 1 and 7 (i.e. that women commit more crimes than is recorded in the stats, but likely not significantly more than men do), 𝒳 could even be larger than 7.

There's a lot of possible reasons why we might find that 𝒳 ≠ 7. Police may actually use stop and search as a tactic to harass women (depressingly common based on what we've seen of police abusing their power against women), leading to women being over counted in the stats compared to their actual crime rates; or maybe police are less likely to stop and search women because they've found that to find contraband like drugs, a more invasive search would be necessary (I, and many women I have known have occasionally hid small, secret items in their bras, and I imagine many criminals would have had the same idea); or maybe police officers are worried about being accused of abusing their power to harass women, so their personal sense of professional risk leads them to be less likely to stop women. I'm not trying to make the case for any of these in particular, merely assert that there are many plausible reasons why the ratio of stop and searches might be different to the ratio of crimes committed.

In both scenario 1 and 2, our data shows us the same thing: that men commit more crimes than women at a roughly 7:1 ratio. However, in scenario 2, this conclusion is an incorrect one, due to bias in how the data was collected. The crux of my point is that we don't know whether reality is closer to scenario 1 or 2, and we don't have a way of knowing because we have no way of counting true rates of crime; anything that tries to study crime is inevitably going to have a heckton of false negatives — that is, criminals who get away with it. And every innocent person who has been imprisoned is a false positive. False positives and false negatives are a problem in any statistical study, but I am arguing that this is especially significant in this case due to well documented inequalities in policing, affecting multiple axes of oppression. That's why I brought up racial bias — to highlight the many flaws of policing as a method of data collection.

Often when we run into the problems of false positives and false negatives in statistics, we are able to estimate how accurate our proxy measurements are by comparing them to a reference gold standard. During COVID, for instance, when Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs) were being tested, we were able to test them against PCR tests, which were known to be extremely accurate. We have no such reference standard when it comes to crime stats — all we have is the proxy. What I am advocating for is that we keep this in mind, and take any crime statistics with a hefty dose of salt

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Your reply here I pretty much agree with completely but you have moved the goal posts quite a bit from your initial comment.

    What I'm gathering from your comment here is that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself. Totlally agree with that.

    But your original point that we just don't know if women actually commit less crime than men is not supported here as I don't believe it was in your original comment. Virtually all the data I have seen (and I admit I'm nowhere near a subject expert on this) suggests men commit more crime then women. This goes beyond police searches, convictions, etc. Its everything. It is extremely unlikely that there is enough types of bias across the entire dataset of crime stats across the world to make it so women commit roughly the same amount of crime as men (or even more crazy MORE crime).

    Now one of the big issues with this is that "crime" is a squishy definition, if we count speeding of 1mph over the limit than just the number of miles driven per gender would be enough to sway the stats. Cause everyone speeds all the time pretty much which is a "crime"

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    I'm using this:

    "that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself."

    to argue that the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it'd be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats.

    I mean, I'm a scientist, and so my whole thing is about grappling with the fact that statistics are just a proxy for the thing we actually care about. But the thing that makes statistics useful in science is being able to estimate how uncertain we are in our data — if we don't have sufficient understanding of the data and how much it's affected by bias, then it's pointless to rely on it in our analyses. Less than pointless, actually, because it'll lead us to a false sense of confidence where we think we somewhat understand some phenomena, but in reality we're digging in the completely wrong areas.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it'd be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats

    This right here is what I'm arguing against. I'd go so far as to say applying this at a macro level is dangerous and destructive (and let me be clear I am not accusing you of doing anything dangerous or destructive, this has been a lovely conversation and I hope I carry no offense. A politician saying this would scare me, but talking about this in a small setting is interesting and productive).

    What I have seen from your argument is the possibility for bias at a few different levels of hypothetical data. Now again I'll caveat that this is not my area of expertise and I'm probably not doing a great job representing the body of literature, but let's examine a few studies to hopefully demonstrate what I mean. In this study accessing women's arrest rate for violent crime there are some interesting charts that help illustrate my point (which is largely unrelated to the focus of the paper). They came up with this set of graphs:

    I'll grant that these partially illustrate your point (the part I said I agreed with), the arrest rate for a crime is not necessarily tied to the act of doing the crime itself, and it does so by comparing victim reports of crime with arrest records as a victim report has nothing to do with if an arrest is made or not. Now you could also say that maybe it is less likely that a victim of a woman committing assault is less likely to report they were victimized along with them less likely being arrested. Sure I could even get behind that, but does that account for the 10-20 fold difference in both of them? That would be wild.

    For an ever clearer example of this let's look at another citation (shared author as before) looking at gender differences in drunk driving. In this analysis it was found that 30% of self-reported drunk drivers are women, 25% of DUI arrests are women, and 18% of legally intoxicated drivers in fatal crashes are women. Here we would need to come up with an explanation that up to triples the "real" counts of DUI driving for all three of these stats. We'd have to say well women are 2x less likely to self report than men (why?), they are 2x less likely to be pulled over for DUI (maybe because cops don't target them as much?) , and that they are 3x less likely to cause accidents that result in death (I guess they are just better drunk drivers by a massive margin).

    Even if there are potential for bias in the data you can then account for it with other studies, for the last point the cleanest way would be to ask "are women better at driving under the influence than men?" and a study that tried to tackle exactly that found that "women displayed greater impairment than men on all behavioral tests and also reported higher levels of subjective intoxication compared with men."

    Sure we could poke and prod at hypothetical biases in this data but just because you can generate a plausible explanation for bias doesn't mean you should "largely disregard the stats". The reason I claim this is dangerous at the macro level is because this is how you get climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, smoking and lung cancer deniers, and on and on. There are times where it is appropriate to raise eyebrows at statistical findings, but with something as clear cut as violent crime with men vs women it is not it.

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