Or dare I say it, non-existent? My best friend who is a woman was shopping at the supermarket on the weekend and someone tried to open her rear car door. She said that it was a teenage boy. He got scared and closed the door.
Now that didn’t surprise me at all. What I find weird is why in most cases muggers, thieves, and burglars are almost always men.
I know that testosterone greatly influences risk-taking and men have 10 to 20 times the amount that women do. Also women are much weaker and less likely to engage in physical altercations with men because they’d be certain to come out with injuries.
But when it comes to mugging/burglary/ especially of women, I don’t get why more females desperate for cash don’t resort to it. They are after all of equal strength.
Came to Italy (big cities) and see how many women make it everyday to live. They are often Gipsy people, less often drug addicts.
How exactly do you know what you said about testosterone?
Women can also use sex to get money, that’s not an option for most men. But there are plenty of stories about female hookers stealing money from people but it’s usually not through direct violence. I believe instrumental violence is more common among sociopaths and such and sociopathy is more common in men.
There are plenty of female sociopaths, they simply specialise in other forms of crime that can also cause untold emotional and psychological damage to their victims.
Smaller, less fit and less physically confident men are also poorly suited to crimes that require intimidating physical strength.
So they go for confidence tricks, fraud, sneak theft and they can be quite prolific.
I’m sure the top tier female UFC fighter can kick most guys assess on here including mine but on average they are not. That’s just biology, not sexism.
I’m not sure the OP is clear about the distinction between muggers and burglars.
Muggers are criminals who take money directly from their victims by violence or the threat of violence. Women would probably have a more difficult time working as a mugger because I feel many of their victims would refuse to take their threats seriously. This would mean that a female mugger would have to either break off the crime or resort to actual violence. Even if the female mugger is successful in using violence, the results are going to make the legal system devote more resources into stopping her.
Burglary, on the other hand, is not intended as a confrontational crime. Burglars are people who break into a business or residence to steal things. (Technically, burglary is any crime where you break into a place to do something illegal but theft is overwhelmingly the most common illegal act that’s committed.) So there’s no reason I see why men and women can’t commit burglary on an equal footing. I’ve heard of female burglars so there are definitely women doing this.
I think there all kinds of reasons honestly, women are probably less likely to put themselves in danger being alone at night in the kinds of areas where muggings and such happen. A female mugger could be stopped by pretty much any average guy that happened to come along.
A woman out looking to mug another woman may herself become a victim of a male mugger or rapist that comes along.
Guns are kind of an equalizer for physicality but you still don’t see as many females committing armed robberies and such, they just don’t have aggressiveness or hostility all things being equal that men do.
I would say more intelligent men (and women) would go for tricks, fraud, etc. Even if you were physically superior, fraud and heists tend to be lower risk as you aren’t engaging with your mark in direct physical confrontation. You never know if the target is armed, an undercover cop, off duty Navy SEAL Krav Maga instructor or if there are police nearby. Fraud usually presumes some ability to conceal the fraud or be somewhere else when it is discovered.
I wouldn’t say women committing fraud is uncommon.
I don’t want to mug someone of equal strength. I want to mug someone I can easily overpower. Uh…hypothetically.
Fraud has another advantage, it generally attracts a lower prison term than violence against the person, and its likely to make more money.
Look at the prison population of almost any nation and you’ll find women are at least 4 times less likely to be imprisoned, and the more serious the crime, the greater the difference.
In addition to the points made by others, women are more likely to be able to support themselves to sustenance level via social safety net programs and/or support from male breadwinners (who may themselves be burglars or muggers).
Evolution plays a part in it, because due to evolution men have been basically forced to take risks to prove they are worth procreating with, while women do not. A man may ‘have’ to rob, join gangs and fight for status to prove he is valuable as a mating partner, while women do not.
But regarding aggression, I don’t think its that cut and dried. My understanding is women are almost if not as likely to abuse their spouses and children as men are. Women are far less likely to engage in violence against society at large (less likely to murder, commit armed robbery, engage in gang violence, etc), but when it comes to violence at home with family it was my understanding women are pretty close to being as violent as men.
These are FBI statistics from Wikipedia. As I understand the FBI definitions, mugging as the OP uses the term is classified as robbery whereas stealing from someone (which some might call robbery) is classified as larceny-theft.
For burglary, 85% are male. Robbery is 87.9% male.
The percentages are clearly skewed towards males, but female robbers and burglars are far from non-existent.
Larceny-theft is only 57.3% male and embezzlement is only 51.3% male.
If the OP wants some real reading, start here then transition to the see also and references section. This is not an unstudied topic.
This might be informative too, although not about “street crime” = muggings / robberies:
An interesting observation from this last article is that women represent about 1 of 6 serial killers. Yet ref @DemonTree just above, women are roughly 1 in 20 UK convicts, and the first article I cited says in the US women are roughly 1 in 10 convicts yet 1 in 5 of those convicted for violent crimes.
So while women collectively are clearly less criminal and less violently criminal than men, once we cross the line into criminality, the worse the crime, the relatively greater the participation of women. Color me surprised.
At least as convicted, though maybe not as perpetrated. That may represent more leniency by victims, police, or courts on minor offenses by women. Or may just represent a much reduced female propensity for minor crime. As noted above, the ready availability of female prostitution as a means of generating income may be preventing a lot of the shoplifting, breaking into parked cars, and minor drug dealing that the corresponding male lowlifes do to support themselves.
I’m no expert, but I have to suspect a lot of the minor property crimes, vandalism, graffiti, etc., are far more a product of young male mentality than young female mentality.
