I’m not talking about one traumatic experience as a child, I’m talking about a lifetime of working with domestic animals – and reading, and talking to people who work with domestic animals. That may or may not be a different thing to you.
Quite a few female mammals will eat their newborn young if they are in some way under stress, or the young are defective. Herbivores won’t eat them but they will abandon defective or weak newborns. It’s evolutionarily advantageous, plainly.
Unless you can point to a gene or other unambiguous unquestionably physical or physiognomic cause, I don’t believe you can conclusively find innate differences in human behavior.
Humans are being socialized from the moment of birth. So unless you are studying humans who have never had contact with other humans or perhaps you are literally studying fœtuses, how can you control for socialization?
It’s a worthy question that I am sure people have done their very best to address. I was only impressed that of all the observed differences between male and female humans, aggression was the only one which showed up in every study across cultures, ages, etc. The only one.
Nitpick: The other obvious difference between how male and female humans act is their sexual behavior. Most women only have sex with men and vice versa. I think other differences are also extremely robust, like the fact that the vast majority of the clients of sex workers are and have been men, or that rape is much rarer even when it comes to female perpetrators of violence compared to their male counterparts. I also believe things like number of (ideal) lifetime sex partners and the frequency of sex, masturbation and viewing porn are also quite different, although maybe not as robust.
Oh, well, yeah. That difference is certainly tied to male violence of course; it is only men (okay, there are rare exceptions!) who use violence to gratify their sexual urges.
Nitpick: I also work in women’s prisons. While the rate of committing sexual violence is MUCH higher for men than for women, it is certainly not rare for women to commit physical sexual violence. Far less common. Less physically violent. Also under-reported. Not rare.
In US Medicine, a condition/disease is considered rare if it affects less than 200,000 americans. So it needs to affect fewer than 0.0006% of the US population to be considered rare.
Some fairly credible studies report that perpetration of physical sexual violence by women probably affect 2-3% of the US population. That’s 6 to 9 million people.
That’s a small fraction of the people harmed by male sexual violence (which exceeds 40% in many studies) but sadly not a small number.
end nitpick.
I think your percentage has two too many zeroes: I think it should be 0.06% (since 330 million times 0.06%=198,000). Otherwise, your point stands.
Edit: although I wonder: your percentages are folks who are affected by female-perpetrated sexual violence. Since it’s likely that most perpetrators perpetrate their offenses on multiple victims, do we know the numbers of perpetrators? Ulfreida was talking about the perps, not the survivors, when she talked about rarity.
Damn, I even checked my math. but you’re right. And with multiple victims, the numbers could be higher.
Overall numbers are slippery anyway. But what data we have that’s reliable shows it’s not rare. In female prisons in the US, the perpetrator of sexual violence on a female inmate is far more likely to be another female inmate than it is to be male staff. Granted, prison systems are crucibles for forging and concentrating bad behavior, but they are microcosms of our society.
Oh, this is interesting.
Those numbers are pretty surprising to me. I certainly can’t vouch for the robustness of this analysis, nor am I clear on what qualifies as a “sexual offense”–does it include things like public indecency at Mardi Gras?–but it’s an interesting data point anyway.
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