Policy areas

CRIME & VIOLENCE - Perpetrators and types of crime

 

There are important gender dimensions in criminal behaviour that make it important to study the variations according to the sex and age of the perpetrators of the crimes. Demographic and social characteristics of offenders, such as marital status, family type, economic situation and whether the person is a lone parent, can also help to analyse the crime from a gender perspective. Convicted criminals can further be classified by type of crime in order to analyse the patterns of crimes among women and men.

 

Women comprise a small minority of all convicted criminals, constituting around 15 per cent of convicted criminals in most of the ECE countries according to 1996/1998 figures. While women are more likely to commit non-violent crimes, such as theft and economic crimes (such as cheque forgery and illegal credit card use), or resort to violence in self-defence, men commit the majority of violent crimes, according to the Fourth UN Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1986-1990) referred to in Women and Men in Europe and North America (2000).

 

In most ECE countries, fewer than 1 in 10 assaults are committed by women, as said by the same report. For both women and men in most countries, convictions for assault, i.e. physical attack, comprise less than 20 per cent of all convictions, with few exceptions. The most violent crime, homicide, is one of the rarest crimes committed by both men and women. In general, close to 90 per cent of all homicides are committed by men, with the exception of Canada, Hungary, Latvia and the United States, where women account for between 14 and 23 per cent, according to official figures from 1980, 1990, and 1998.

 

In most ECE countries, rape convictions account for less than 1 per cent of male convictions, with some important exceptions, according to the Fourth UN Survey of Crime Trends from 1986-1990. Interestingly, while unreported incidences of rape are higher than convictions indicate, rape was the most reported crime by countries in the Fifth United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Criminal Justice Systems. Of those countries that returned the questionnaire (91) the number of rapes recorded by the police was provided more often than were statistics for any of the other major crimes of homicide, assault, robbery, theft or drug crimes. While these statistics do not in any way indicate differential processing of offenders for rape, they do suggest that, at least at the international level of crime reporting, there is a growing sensitivity to reporting rape.

 

In addition to looking at the gender differential with regard to who committed the various crimes, looking at the gender of victims gives an interesting picture. According to figures based on crimes committed against a person (assault, homicide, robbery and sexual assault) and recorded by the police, men are usually more likely to be victims of assault and homicide. However, women are much more likely to be victims of sexual assaults, than are men. (See section on Violence against women)