A (pre)history of violence

Understand the roots of male aggression. Give women the power to counter it.

Men can be crazy, bad, dangerous? So can women. So said criminologist Freda Adler in her 1975 Pulitzer-nominated book Sisters in Crime. Women’s liberation, she explained, gave a new “virilized” sisterhood access to “illegitimate” opportunities, including “violence-oriented” crimes. But women’s liberation did not lead to female criminality, traditionally associated with poverty and blocked opportunity. If freer, smarter, better-off women had become deviants en masse, crime would no longer be an all-male club.

Except for prostitution, men are the leaders in all criminal categories, including property-related and white-collar crime. But violent crime is their stronghold: armed robbery, organized crime, sexual assault, murder. Women are mostly violent in self-defense: worldwide, approximately 736 million people have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. If men make up 81% of murder victims, male intimate partners or family members kill more than five women/girls every hour.

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