In the spirit of this thread, can anyone provide biological evidence for the observation that white males are more likely to rape and/or sexually assault children and white women? Indeed, according to the U.S government, “imprisoned violent sex offenders were more likely to have been male and white than other violent offenders.” Furthermore, in the category of sexual assault, whites made up nearly 75% of all offenders imprisoned for sexual assault vs. 23% for blacks and 3% for other races. The U.S government also found that 52% vs 44% of sexual offenders were white and black, respectively.
More striking are the victim statistics: over 75% of sexual assault victims were white women, compared to 20% for black women and 3% for other races. Further, when the government examined the rate in which sexual assault victims are killed, the report concluded that “compared to all murder victims, those who died as a consequence of a sexual assault were substantially more likely to be female and white”. This coupled with the aforementioned paragraph indicate that if a white male is the rapist, the victim is statistically more likely to be white and killed during the crime.
When the U.S government examined abuse of minors, they found that from nearly 300,000 children abused in 2000 over 60% of those abused children/victims were little white girls and boys. Curiously, black children were less likely to be molested and most likely to report the crime to the authorities than their white counterparts.In 2010, the Justice Department reported a disturbing trend where “American child sex tourists typically are Caucasian males aged 40 or older. Such predators may be either situational or preferential child sex tourists. . . Some organizations estimate that U.S. citizens account for 25 percent of child sex tourists worldwide, and as high as 80 percent in Latin America.”
In this peer-reviewed paper, Pinessi et al. found that R177H mutation in the PGRN gene is correlated with “abnormal sexual behavior”. Since PGRN is expressed in neurons, this data point may represent a “genes-to-behavior” in white males. In another study, Blanchard et al. found that low IQ and left-handedness is correlated with paedophilia. Finally, Sartorious et al. reported that activation of the the region of the brain responsible for fear is reversed in patients with paedophilia. The persistence of paedophilia and sexual abuse of children/women to middle-aged by white males suggests there are neural and genetic that correlates with these abnormal, illegal behaviors.
Topic for Debate: Could the putative persistence of paedophilia and sexual assault in white males compared to other SIRE* groups be explained by genes? Could genetic screening for PGRN be used as an indicator to predict the development of deviant sexual behavior? What about left-handedness and low IQ? Also, could there be a genetic component as to why black children are less likely to be molested and more likely to report the crime to their parents? Discuss.
Not sure if this is a joke thread or what, but off the top of my head I’d actually expect the percentage to be higher, since ‘white’ people make up nearly 80% of the population in the US. ‘Black’ people, on the other hand, only make up like 12-15%, so you’d expect them to be lower both as victims and as those committing the crimes. Right?
Well, this points out a huge problem with the above:
“White” is a social term. It has meaning only as a social description. But there’s not a lot of genetic consistency within that group. Irish, Sicilians, and Poles are all “White”, but they’re not very much alike.
Agreed. What the numbers say to me is that motivations for sexual crimes are different from other violent crimes, and thus don’t reflect the same racial correlation.
You would think, but according to this, there were 1,511,000 victims from 1973 to 1982. Of those, 1,228,000 were white women vs. 265,000 were blacks. That’s statistically significant. Unfortunately, this paper doesn’t explore race of the perpetrator but if we extrapolate from the data collected in the 90’s, we can surmise that about 70% of that 1,511,000 number were raped/assaulted by white men. That’s huge (no pun intended). You can’t hand-wave these statistics as whites being the majority, if that were the case, you can do that when every conceivable crime under the sun.
I’m more interested, however, in discussing the biological differences between blacks and whites that could predicate the observed behavior.
This statement is fascinating to me: So you’re saying sexual crimes is NOT a violent crime? I’m not a woman but I think a fleshy phallic object penetrating a vagina that’s not ready for coitus could be potentially painful and physically traumatic.
Not to hijack my own thread but I have a question for you. If the thread was titled, “Most high school dropouts are minorities. Genetic component?” Would you still call it a joke thread? Or is it just this one specifically?
Eh? “motivations for sexual crimes are different from other violent crimes, and thus don’t reflect the same racial correlation.”
In case that’s still unclear, what I’m saying is that the factors that lead someone to commit armed robbery, assault, murder, and other violent crimes, may well be entirely different from the factors that lead someone to commit rape or child molestation. If so, then the racial breakdown of the robbery/assault/murder group could well differ from the racial breakdown of the rape/sexual assault/child molestation group.
Not if all crimes aren’t the same, which they aren’t. I doubt the same racial correlation exists between theft and securities fraud, for instance.
Violence is a description of the outcome and a statement of social preference. It is not useful for parsing motivations. A shooting at a bank is violent, but a shooting at a bank by a robber trying to escape is probably best described as instrumental aggression while a shooting at a bank by a disgruntled employee is probably best described as hostile aggression.
Rape/sexual assault is generally violent, but sometimes the violent outcome is instrumental in nature (use of force to obtain coitus) while sometimes it is hostile in nature (use of force to punish the victim).
Anyway, I really just signed in to say that as a former behavior geneticist, I really enjoy your approach in the OP and wish somebody had thought of it sooner. Many people like to abuse behavior genetics for their pseudoscientific racist b.s.
[ul]
[li]Men are bigger and stronger, so it’s simply easier for men to pull off a rape; that’s genetic. Women can and have raped men, but it’s just not as easy for a woman to rape a man as it is the other way around, due to that and the relative difficultly of forcing an erection (yes, it can be done).[/li]
[li]Men are naturally more risk-taking than women, while women are more cautious; and attacking someone who is probably more than twice as strong as you is firmly in the “risky” category.[/li]
[li]With humans, the male usually initiates sex, consensual and otherwise. Many women find it emotionally difficult to initiate consensual sex, much less whip out a weapon and try to coerce it out of someone.[/li]
[li]Men pretty clearly have a significantly stronger sex drive; no one is going to bother to commit rape if they aren’t interested.[/li]
[li]There’s a Darwinian advantage to rape for men, but none for women.[/li][/ul]
Yes, this. Thanks for phrasing it better than I could.
Rape and sexual assault are violent crimes, but they aren’t necessarily committed by the same types of people that commit other violent crimes. Thus, a difference in demographics is unsurprising.
Firstly, I imagine criminal behavior does have some genetic component, at least for some criminals. It also almost certainly has a development, social, etc component as well.
But for the specifics of this thread, doesn’t it strike the OP as strange that 75% of jailed sex offenders are white, which is roughly what the U.S. white population was just a few years ago (and more than 10 years ago, it was 80%…remember many of those sex offenders would have gone into prison more than 10 years ago), but 23% of jailed sex offenders are black? That’s far higher than the black percentage of the U.S. population.
Then this statistic:
Is pretty troubling, because blacks are only like 11% of the U.S. population, so 44% is massively higher than their percentage of the population.
I get when you said “would this be a joke thread if it was about minorities” tells that maybe you aren’t sincere with your OP. I almost wonder if you’ve posted these statistics, which actually show disproportionate sex criminality among blacks, hoping a poster would notice that so you could then suggest some sort of institutional bias or racism in that we jump on that part of the statistics? I don’t know, but your mash of statistics makes no sense.
I don’t think looking at the proportion of jailed offenders is instructive anyway, since white offenders are less likely to receive custodial sentences.
So if a demographic makes X% of the population, you assume they will make up X% of the reported crimes? That doesn’t make sense to me. If 70% of the male populace in 1973-82 was white, how does one figure that they will automatically commit 70% of the crimes?
No, I don’t assume that - but your point is that if a demographic is over-represented among criminals, they must be criminally inclined. There are two ways to refute that theory: either demonstrate that the correlation is not causative, or that the demographic is not actually over-represented.
For what it’s worth, there is an interesting discussion to be had about why specific types of criminal are overwhelmingly white males. “Spree killers” are among those types, and since spree killers are frequently sexually motivated it does suggest there is a genetic component to whatever abnormal brain development leads to rape.
