Female bias crime suspects are more likely than men to target friends & family members, to target other women, & more frequently commit crimes based on race/ethnicity/national origin than on religion or sexual orientation

Stotzer, R., Godinet, M.T. and Davidson, J.T., 2020. Unique Characteristics of Bias Crimes Committed by Males or Females in the United States. Journal of Hate Studies, 16(1), pp.35–47. http://doi.org/10.33972/jhs.153

Rolf Degen's bias: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1345240406884298753

Abstract: Despite increased research on women’s criminal offending patterns, research on women’s involvement in bias crimes is almost nonexistent. This study examines bias crime incidences that are considered crimes against persons (e.g., assault, murder, robbery, sexual assault) collected in the National Incidence-based Reporting System from 2009–2012 to determine what features characterize crimes committed by men or women. Results indicate that female bias crime suspects choose different victims than male suspects; female suspects are more likely than men to target friends and family members, more likely to target other women, and more frequently commit crimes based on race/ethnicity/national origin than religion or sexual orientation-based bias crimes, and were less likely to use a firearm. Men and women were similar in their suspect characteristics (such as using alcohol/drugs before the crime) and the overall incident characteristics (such as causing injury). These results suggest that we need to more critically examine current models of bias crime commission, and to include bias crimes as another avenue to help uncover differences in male and female offending.

Keywords: Bias crimes, Hate Crimes, Females, Perpetrators, Victims, Gender differences

Conclusions and Discussion

The results of this study of NIBRS data from 2009-2012 show that crimes against persons involving males and females who are suspects in bias crimes share many similar characteristics, but there are also important differences that deserve attention. Females demonstrated the greatest differences in their victim selection, being more likely than males to victimize their friends and family members, to victimize other women or a group of victims that include women, and were more likely to be motivated by a victim’s race/ethnicity/national origin than other bias types. However, incidents involving male and female offenders had similar suspect characteristics and incident characteristics outside of the use of weapons, suggesting the greatest difference between male and female bias crime offenders is how they select their victims.

While males and females demonstrated differences at the bivariate level in regard to the use of alcohol or other drugs before the commission of the crime and being in groups of suspects rather than acting alone, these differences did not retain statistical significance in the logistic regression. In regard to characteristics of the crime itself, bivariate statistics suggested women were more likely than men to commit their crimes in residences rather than public spaces. However, this difference in location was not significant in the logistic regression. While injury severity was statistically significant at the bivariate level, neither was significant in the logistic regression, but weapons use was significant with women being less likely than men to use a firearm.

Many of these differences reflect the differences between men and women who commit non-bias crimes. For example, men are more likely to use firearms in non-bias crimes than women, which held true among these bias crimes as well. Similar to the pattern of offending among non-bias crimes, women were more likely to victimize people they knew, particularly intimates, while men targeted strangers in a higher percentage. Also similar to non-bias crimes, female bias crime suspects victimized other women in higher percentages while men predominantly victimized other men.

New information uncovered in this analysis was the fact that women were overrepresented among bias crimes based on a victim’s race/ethnicity and underrepresented among bias crimes based on sexual orientation or religion. In these ways men and women may differ in their bias crime violence in ways that are similar to the ways that men and women differ in perpetrating non-bias crimes. And, too, women may also be exhibiting patterns that align with theories around multiple marginality, that gender, race, and class all intersect to shape the social space within which women commit crime (Chesney-Lind, 2006). These data cannot be used to explain why female bias crime offenders were more likely to commit crimes in residences, against individuals they knew, and without weapons. However, the general pattern of female offender restrictions within patriarchal structures would suggest that limited opportunities restrict their ability to commit bias crimes as well. In other words, gender roles and socialization may very well restrict the opportunities to commit both bias and non-bias crimes, so crimes are closer to home and without the benefit of weapons. A pathways perspective would also suggest that female bias crime offenders are more relational in their crime choices (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006).

A pathways perspective is useful in the interpretation of the important differences that emerged when comparing these results among bias crimes to the pattern of male and female offending in non-bias crimes. Female suspects were more likely to target victims in residences among non-bias crimes, and while that relationship held true among bias crimes at the bivariate level, this relationship did not emerge as significant in the regression analysis. Male suspects have also been found to cause more serious injury than female suspects in non-bias crimes, and again, this was found among non-bias crimes at the bivariate level, but not in the regression analysis. In these ways, male and female suspects may be more similar, and gender less of a predictive factor, when committing bias crime than when committing non-bias crimes.

While much more needs to be discovered in the area of gender and the commission of bias crimes, these findings are nonetheless interesting in light of the pathways approach to understand female offending, arguably the most prevalent model of analyzing and thinking about female crimes today. The pathways model, in the main, explains how histories of victimization often precede female offending, and how crimes are often linked to survival, physical or emotional (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006). In this light, non-bias crime offending for women can be thought of as a reaction to circumstances. Bias crimes are different, though. There is not always a tangible gain from the commission of a bias crime. These crimes are about motivation, and it is unclear whether, if at all, the traditional pathways approach can apply to bias crime offending. The nature of bias crimes makes it unlikely that crimes of this type are related to survival. Also unclear is whether female bias crime offenders might fit into one of the multiple pathways to crime as presented by Brennan, Breitenbach, Dieterich, Salisbury, and von Voorhis (2012) as they relate to the feminist pathways approach. Or, as Pezzella (2017) questions, perhaps additional categories need to be added to the McDevitt, Levin, and Bennet (2002) typology of bias offenders. The research in this area is too sparse, and new, to make that determination at this time.

While these results do not conclusively create a model for female’s participation in bias crimes, nor were they intended to, they nonetheless offer an important lens on the examination of bias crime, and offers avenues for future research to build theories for the gendered nature of bias crime involvement. Current theories around the gendered nature of bias crime has centered around men, both as victims and as offenders, these results highlight that bias crimes are not inherently the domain of men. Prior research into sexual orientation-based bias crimes has found that bias crimes are deeply intersectional (Meyer, 2008; 2010; Stotzer, 2010), and that race, class, and gender are often intertwined. Rather than looking at gender alone, this finding demonstrates a need to look more closely at how gender interacts with other factors in order to better explain why women target women and men target men during bias crime incidents.

While this study offers a preliminary glimpse into the differences between men and women’s pattern of bias crime offending, there are significant limitations to the study. First, a significant proportion of bias crimes are not reported to officials (Harlow, 2005), suggesting an initial bias in any official reports, including NIBRS, that may not capture the entire spectrum of bias crime. Second, while NIBRS is a significant improvement in data collection across the United States, it is not representative. Because of the laborious nature of processing incident-level reporting to the federal government, densely populated cities and states have not traditionally provided data to NIBRS. Thus, these findings might be generalizable to less dense jurisdictions rather than bias crimes that have been committed in dense urban locations. Third, the categorical nature of the data collection in NIBRS means that significant nuance in motives and crime characteristics have been lost. While some inferences can be drawn from the patterns in bias crime characteristics, additional research that can directly provide explanatory information are sorely needed. Fourth, as is typical with most large-scale, voluntary data collection efforts, missing data are a significant concern for generalizability. In particular, the variables related to weapons use and injury severity had the largest percentage of missing data compared to other variables in the analysis and limited the sample size. Fifth, the study was limited to crimes against persons since those crimes are more frequently able to identify a suspect compared to property crimes, such as vandalism, which are often discovered after the act has been completed. Given the large portion of bias crimes that are against property, particularly anti-Semitic bias crimes, this study cannot be generalized to bias crimes overall, only to those that are considered crimes against person. Last, while this study examined the unique characteristics of males and females, incidents that involved mixed gender groups of suspects were excluded. Future studies should examine to what degree these mixed gender groups share, or diverge from, the characteristics of men’s and women’s offending.

Taken together, these analyses suggest that current characterizations of bias crimes as occurring in public between strangers may have some viability for characterizing men’s participation in bias crimes, but does not adequately match the pattern of women’s offending. Similar to studies of non-bias crimes and the pattern of male and female offending, this study can directly identify how male and female offenders are similar or different, but can only indirectly offer possible explanations for why these differences exist. This research fills a current gap by informing what the nature of gendered bias crimes looks like. But, further research into female bias crime offenders can inform the current bias crime literature by expanding the understanding of offenders and their (gendered) motives. The sex differences in victim selection, rather than incident or offender characteristics, can also prove a fruitful area of additional research to further explore the differences between male and female offenders overall. However, there were also many similarities between men and women in the characteristics of their crime, and future research should begin isolating what factors may be driving these differences and what rewards and reinforces men’s and women’s bias crime offending.

Future research should employ a decidedly feminist approach, ensuring that female bias crime offenders are an intentional component of research, and that their voices are heard. Qualitative data of this nature are needed in order to inform the patterns demonstrated from this study. These types of data, merged with the quantitative data presented in this study, can create a foundation around which theory can begin to be built as well as an understanding of how, if at all, females ‘do gender’ in the commission of bias crimes.