Costs of masculine crime

Mar 11, 2013 Editorial

Now that we have observed International Women’s Day and spoken out against violence against women, it might be time to look at the other side of the coin, so to speak. In “Open Democracy”, Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley showed that, “Men are, by a huge margin, the sex responsible for violent, sexual and other serious crime.
The economic cost of this ‘masculine excess’ in delinquency is staggering – to say nothing of its emotional toll.” They asked, “Why is the social shaping of masculinity not an urgent policy issue?”
Why indeed. While the statistics they cite are drawn from Britain, just as with other statistics on specific crimes such as rape, our newspaper reports indicate that Guyana falls right in line. That fact alone is pregnant with import. What follows are excerpts from the report and are intended to stimulate discussion and hopefully, a policy response.
“Anti-social acts that harm wellbeing – from speed driving to calculated murder – are overwhelmingly performed by men. The human and emotional costs of what we will call this ‘masculine excess’ in criminality are very great. But some of the economic and social costs to society can be estimated.
Government statistics and reports on crime pay much attention to the type of offence and to the victim of crime. One has to dig deep among the many tables to find figures disaggregated to show sex of offender – yet when uncovered, the figures are startling. Take simple ‘criminality’: 85% found guilty of an indictable offence in the 12 months ending June 2012 were men. The more violent the crime, the more men predominate. Males were 88% of those found guilty of violence against the person, and more than 98% of those committing sexual offences.
Scale down to the mundane level of non-violent wrong-doing and the gender pattern, while less extreme, persists. Take ‘theft and handling stolen goods’, a crime commonly attributed to women: men still predominate as 79% of offenders. Of the 21,645 ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) issued in 2011, 86% went to males. And the gendering of indiscipline is already there in school, where boys are four out of five of pupils receiving exclusion orders.
The Ministry of Justice estimates the average cost to society of handling incidents in the various different categories of crime. Up in the violent stratosphere where men are in the ninety-percents, a homicide case is said to incur a cost of £1.7 million; a sexual offence £36,952; a serious wounding £25,747. Down there in ‘theft’ (where women do their shop-lifting) the cost to society is a mere £763 per packet of panty-hose. (The Guyanese costs should be proportionately equivalent.) There are then the disparate costs of incarceration to be considered.
Year after year, we fail to connect the huge burden of masculine anti-social behaviour with the social and economic system of which it is part. Where is the search for reasons and remedies? Instead of joining the dots, and drawing a conclusion, we treat every piece of breaking news as a shocking new scandal; a special case.
We need to probe more deeply into why and how our culture produces men and boys with a propensity for anti-social and violent behaviour. It can’t be blamed on the Y chromosome. Genes have little effect unless and until they are activated by the growing individual’s social environment.
And our environment is an unhealthy, unequal society which not only allows a violence-prone masculinity to flourish but positively fosters it, in upbringing, schooling, sport, entertainment and media – to say nothing of military training. The male body is knowingly developed as a force of coercion. The ideal man is shaped as a character in whom the softer emotions are repressed, in favour of combativeness, risk-taking and a readiness for violence.
Femininity is produced in a complementary mode, contrasted with masculinity, but compliant in a system ruled by qualities and values deemed masculine. Everyone has a human interest in a radical transformation of gender relations. And now.”

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Costs of masculine crime

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