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 themselve s while violence reflects female-female competition for provisioning males. Evolutionary pressure (the critical importance of maternal survival to fem ales' reproductive success) resulted in females' lower threshold for fear, relative to males, when faced with the same level of objective physical dan ger. This adaptation inhibits women's involvement in crime, makes them more likely to be involved in property rather than violent crimes and, when dir ect confrontation is inevitable, causes them to use low-risk or indirect ta ctics. We discuss the compatibility of our proposal with mainstream theorie s of sex differences in crime. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights re served.