Why are almost all criminals men? Part IV

The power of evolutionary psychological imagination

In my last post, I present Campbell’s “staying alive” theory of female criminality, which contends, among other things, that women steal less, and less frequently, than men do, because women only steal what they need to survive, whereas men steal partly to show off and impress women with their increased resources. Something happened to me five years ago which perfectly illustrates this point.

I moved to the London School of Economics and Political Science in July 2003. Within a month of my arrival in London, someone broke into my new office and stole two blank checks, by carefully lifting two nonconsecutive checks in the middle of my new checkbook. When I learned from the bank that the two checks had been cashed for £700 each, I made the (statistically very unlikely to be true) prediction that the thief must have been a woman. According to the Interpol statistics, 96% of all thieves in England and Wales in 1990 were male, so it is statistically very unlikely that any thief in London will turn out to be female.

As it turns out, however, it was two women who stole my checks. I later found out their full names from the bank, when the thieves cashed the checks by making them out to themselves, in their real names, perhaps illustrating another consistent finding in criminology that criminals are less intelligent than the general population. (In their defense, however, I should point out that the thieves were constrained by the insane UK banking laws, which do not allow individuals to cash checks at all; all personal checks in the United Kingdom must be deposited directly into bank accounts. So they could not have made my checks out to “cash.")

Having read Campbell’s work before this incident in 2003, it was immediately obvious to me that the thieves must have been women, because it seemed to me that £700 was rent money, not the kind of money to show off or to attract women. It is the kind of money one needs, not the kind of money one wants. I felt that a male thief would have made out the check for £700,000 instead of £700. Of course, I don’t have that kind of money (nor, I presume, does any of my LSE colleagues). However, from the thief’s point of view, if there is at least one in 1,000 chances (.001%) that the check clears for that amount, then he would still come out ahead by gambling on £700,000 rather than making it out for a safe £700. Given men’s much higher propensity toward risk-taking, I think a male thief might have taken that chance. Such is the power of evolutionary psychological imagination; it allows you to know who might have stolen your money even before the police do.

The work of evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Anne Campbell explains why men are so much more violent and criminal than women are, and why this sex difference is culturally universal. I should point out, however, that, according to the Interpol data, there is one exception to this rule in the world. A significant minority or even majority of offenders of all serious felonies in Syria year after year are women. I am frankly baffled by these statistics; however, it is very difficult for me (or any evolutionary psychologist) to believe that Syrian women, alone in the whole world, are genuinely more criminal than women elsewhere.

I strongly suspect that either these statistics reflect some clerical error (for example, “male” and “female” were wrongly labeled when the Interpol form was first translated into Arabic many years ago, and the same mislabeled forms are photocopied and used every year) or there are some cultural or institutional reasons (for example, women may routinely take the fall for crime committed by their husbands, brothers, or fathers). I have asked several Syrian experts for a possible explanation since I first noticed the statistical anomaly in 1997, but have not found a satisfactory explanation. However, I am certain that Syrian women do not commit the majority of serious crimes in their country. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA and probably the greatest biochemist of the 20th century, always said, “if the facts don’t fit the theory, first question the facts.”