Violent Crime and Gender: Are We Approaching Equality?

Another interesting chart from the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

(You can see the numbers broken down by type of crime here.)

What intrigues me is that the once-enourmous difference between the sexes, in terms of which sex is more often the victim of violent crime, has gone down to a fairly narrow difference.

(And the difference would be even narrower if rape and intimate partner violence – two mostly-female-victim areas the BJS stats badly undercount – were fully accounted for.)

It’s good news that violent crime is down. Except, perhaps, for men’s rights advocates – for whom one of the principle proofs of male victimhood is that men are used to be vastly more likely to be victims of violent crime.

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10 Responses to Violent Crime and Gender: Are We Approaching Equality?

  1. Lisa A says:

    Nah, the MRAs will just say “Look! Women and men suffer equal rates of violence, so women must be just as violent, so focusing on male violence is OMGunfair!!!”

  2. Glaivester says:

    I think you might want to alter the title of your post to “Violent Crime Victimhood.”

    The first impression I get when I look at the title is that men and women are approaching parity in the commission of crimes, not in being victimized.

    Which sounds like something that an MRA might say. And which is obviously not what you are actually saying.

  3. Crystal says:

    From the graph, it appears to me that the chances of being a violent crime victim have declined sharply for both men and women since the mid 1990’s. I fail to see how this is anything other than a good thing. The only pity is that the violent crime rate for ALL people isn’t “zero.”

  4. wookie says:

    What does “adjusted” mean?

  5. Ampersand says:

    IIRC, the BJS changed their methodology in 1993. So for comparison’s sake, they now adjust all the pre-1993 data to make it comparable to the post-1993 data.

  6. wookie says:

    I dunno… I still have too many questions, like what is considered a violent crime, does it include intimate and domestic violence, if so does it reflect those numbers accurately, etc. etc. It seems very counter-intuitive to what you see on the news, I would have presumed that violent crime is more prevalent today than ever before.

  7. Robert says:

    It seems very counter-intuitive to what you see on the news

    Yes. Almost as though the news programs weren’t accurately reflecting reality.

    But that’s crazy talk!

  8. Rock says:

    It appears that the numbers of male victims has dropped by a margin of 3-1 over women. In my experience, many women (especially in addiction) NEVER press charges for often repeated assaults. Even talking about restraining orders creates fear in many. The vulnerability combined with dependence on their suppliers/partners is terrifying to them. If we provided safe and swift remedies; shelters, medically supervised detox, rehab, job training, education, child care, aggressive prosecution and rehabilitation for the guys as well, we might see more numbers being reported as folks had confidence that something effective was being done. Blesings.

  9. mousehounde says:

    Yes. Almost as though the news programs weren’t accurately reflecting reality.

    But that’s crazy talk!

    ::snicker::

  10. Rock says:

    E-Gads! The line “for the guys as well” was supposed to be parenthetical. Sorry, (gives it a slightly different meaning.) Blessings

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