Men kill, Women Do Too - Sometimes.
"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" asked Professor Henry Higgins in the Lerner and Lowe 1950's musical, 'My Fair Lady'. Yet if you scan the crime statistics in Canada, maybe you'd reverse the words and ask, "Why can't a man be more like a woman/"
For if men were more like women in committing crimes, a lot more Canadians would be alive.
Let's look at the stats. Men do most of the killing and commit most crimes. In 2013 there were 452 homicides in Canada. Men did 400 of these homicides. And women? Just 52.
In fact men commit most of all crimes. Close to 9 in 10 crimes including, theft, laundering money, breaking and entering and selling illegal drugs are done by men.
Women match men's crimes in prostitution and doing fraud. Yet even in fraud cases, men's gains far outstrip women's share of the proceeds.
Now this doesn't mean that women can't be criminals and that women can't kill. Of course they can. "Women are not necessarily less aggressive," says Wikipedia. "But they tend to show their aggression in more overt and less physical ways."
Anne Campbell is a woman who's studied aggression. She says that females avoid physical aggressiveness and instead use different tactics than men to achieve their goals."Women, says Campbell use "friendship termination, ostracisms," or cutting a person out of their lives, and stigmatizing or labelling people as bad humans.
Professor Montserrat Huguet, a Spanish professor who's studied wars says that women have fought in many wars. yet this fact is often ignored. War is a learned response, says Huguet, and men and women can both learn to kill inwar.
"Gender is irrelevant here."
Men not only do 90 per cent of the murders. In powerful countries like the United States and Russia, they start most of the wars. Women leaders like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had no problems starting a war with Argentina in 1981. Condoleeza Rice was a key foreign policy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush. She was as hawkish as her boss in sending troops to Iraq in 2003.
Still, men do start most of the wars because basically until now they've usually headed up most countries.
Yet in short, men are more violent and far more potentially violent than women.
Why is this? here controversy rages. Some feminists have argued that men are intrinsically violent and women are not. This is close to the title of John Gray's best seller called 'Men are From Mars; Women are From Venus.' Mars was the god of war in ancient Greek mythology; Venus was the goddess of love.
Then a psychologist, a woman I believe, pointed out that women solve conflicts by talking things out and bringing people together. A man's way of resolving conflict is often with his fists. Yet another expert Jesse J. Prinz zeroed in on man's superior strength which gave men an advantage when raising and taming cattle. To-day, men still have more economic power than women and as pointed out already, still rule most countries.
"Violence," writes Prinz, "is a complex problem which no simple biological approach can diagnose or remedy." In short, men's testerone does not cause their violence.
More equality can lower male violence, Prinz believes. the more equal women become to men, the less violence men do. Crime stats in Canada may be used here to back this up. In the 1980's 650 people were killed in Canada every year, mostly by men. In between then and now, men gained power and did things their mothers never could. Many women practised law or medicine, built homes, drove buses and worked as accountants and became politicians. To-day the number of homicides has shrunk to about 450.
At the same times crime rates have fallen too. Of course this does not prove that women's drive for equality does lower crime numbers. As scientist always caution scientific beginners, "Correlation is not causation.' Still, it does seem that Henry Higgins's plea for women to become more like men is way out of date. And that's good for all Canadians. men as well as women.
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