WASHINGTON -- Three-quarters of the 2.1 million violent crimes committed by women each year in this country are simple assaults on other women, while men commit many more crimes and more violent ones, the Justice Department says.
By comparison, men commit about 13 million violent crimes each year. Just over half of them are simple assaults, and 70 percent of their victims were males, the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Sunday. The figures were based on annual averages for the years 1993-97 as measured in the annual National Crime Victimization Survey of about 100,000 people.The remainder of the violent offenses by both sexes were more serious: aggravated assaults, robberies, rapes and murders.
"Women's criminal behavior is unlikely to ever catch up with that of men," said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology who directs the Brudnick Center for Violence at Northeastern University in Boston.
"This report shows that women are where men were during the 1960s and 1970s, using their fists when they commit violent assaults," he said. "The men have graduated into aggravated assaults and murder. The women haven't followed."
Women comprise nearly 52 percent of the U.S. population, and the totals mean that there is one violent male offender for every nine men and boys age 10 or older, compared with one violent female offender for every 56 women and girls age 10 or older, the statistics bureau said.
The violent-offense rate per person has been declining among both men and women since peak rates in 1994. Between 1994 and 1997, the violence rate has fallen by 29 percent among men and 25 percent among women, the report said.
The rate per capita at which women commit murder has been falling since 1980. In 1998, it hit its lowest rate since 1976, the bureau said, citing FBI figures based on police reports. Murder is the crime most fully reported to police.
The 1998 murder rate was one female murderer for every 77,000 women, 40 percent below the peak rate in 1976. For males in 1998, the rate was one murderer for every 8,700 men, a decline from one for every 4,800 at the peak in 1991.
For murder, "the gender gap hasn't closed" significantly, Levin said.
"The reduced level of criminal behavior in this country has affected both men and women," he added. "It's unlikely that women will graduate into the more dangerous violent offenses like murder and aggravated assault."
One of the biggest differences between male and female violence was in the offender's relationship to the victim.
An estimated 62 percent of female offenders committed violence against someone they had a prior relationship with, such as an intimate, a relative or acquaintance.
Among men, however, only 36 percent of offenders attacked intimates, relatives or acquaintances.
Between 1976 and 1997, parents and stepparents murdered nearly 11,000 of their children.
About half of these crimes were committed by mothers and half by fathers, but male and female parents chose somewhat different victims.
Sons and stepsons accounted for 52 percent of the children killed by mothers and stepmothers but were 57 percent of the victims of fathers and stepfathers. Mothers killed a higher share of children who were infants; fathers were more likely to have been the murderers of children age 8 or older.