Women and crime - An evolutionary approach

We argue that resource scarcity drives both property and violent offending in women. Property offenses reflect women's attempts to provision themselves while violence reflects female-female competition for provisioning males. Evolutionary pressure (the critical importance of maternal survival to females' reproductive success) resulted in females' lower threshold for fear, relative to males, when faced with the same level of objective physical danger. This adaptation inhibits women's involvement in crime, makes them more likely to be involved in property rather than violent crimes and, when direct confrontation is inevitable, causes them to use low-risk or indirect tactics. We discuss the compatibility of our proposal with mainstream theories of sex differences in crime. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.