Nature, nurture, the "criminal gene" - what makes men violent?

ANOTHER news bulletin, another woman murdered. The death of women in violent circumstances has become almost routine, part of everyday life. And for every woman killed, there's a killer: almost invariably it's a man. So is murder a gender issue?

Men have a near monopoly on crimes of violence. Between 90 and 95 per cent of crime in the Republic the UK and elsewhere is committed by males. If the non violent crime in which women engage is factored out, for instance prostitution, shoplifting and forgery, then men dominate virtually 100 per cent of all crime.

It seems obvious that to understand and so prevent violent crime, we need to understand the male mind. Yet authorities in criminology, sociology and psychology have failed even to, approach such understanding. Instead, they have focused on sociological explanations such as poverty and urban deprivation for men's behaviour.

But "if men are driven to commit crime by the educational system and unemployment, why doesn't this affect females?" asks Dr Art O'Connor, author of Inside the Criminal Mind and a psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin.

Mr Ciaran McCullagh, lecturer in sociology at University College Cork, writes in his new publication, Crime in Ireland A Sociological Introduction, that the issue of "low participation rates" of women in crime has "largely been ignored in criminology".

The idea that sociology should focus on women's "low participation rates" exposes the prejudice of the experts. They have also been wrong.

Most explanations rest on the notion that culture socialises women into passivity and nurturing, restricting achievement in crime as in other areas. But as women have moved towards equality, their crime rate has not increased proportionately. Any increase there has been might be attributed to strengthening gender equality and male police being less likely to let criminals off because they are female.

"Sex difference in crime has been so clear and bright that most studies have been blind to it. The literature on delinquency and crime frequently refers to the fact that boys alone were studied as there were too few girls in the sample to be statistically significant. They do not stop to ask why," say Anne Moir and David Jessel in their book A Mind to Crime.

Nine out of 10 crimes were committed by women, the academic establishment would surely have explained why by now. It might have held hormones responsible. And hormones are precisely the issue, male hormones.

For instance, testosterone causes aggressive behaviour in men and mice. Detecting the levels can help predict whether a man will act violently.

Another clue to the reasons for male violence is that the neurotransmitters which control impulsive behaviour are found at much lower levels in the male brain. Thus men are less likely to assess the consequences of their actions.

Perhaps this explains why psychological testing has shown young male offenders to be more unafraid, aggressive, extrovert and poorly socialised.

In the first 19 weeks of 1996, 18 people have died violently in the Republic. Of these, eight women were killed in violent circumstances compared to five women in the whole of 1995.

In 1994 the overall murder rate for women and men was 25. In 1995, the final count is 41, according to the Minister for Justice.

The drugs war is partly to blame. "The contract killing, the passionless assassination where a man goes in with a gun and kills and walks out again for money is an increasing phenomenon here which coincides with the downgrading of paramilitary work in Northern Ireland and the increasing availability of guns," says Dr O'Connor.

But many of this year's murders have been in another category: the murder of women either by men they know intimately or don't know at all.

It can be difficult for the academic to understand why women are so disturbed by this. Our annual murder rate, after all, is comparable to a slow weekend in a major US city. Women are safer here than virtually anywhere in the world.

Yet many women wonder about these killers. Do they hate women? Do they watch too much violent pornography? Is this the beginning of a trend?

Mr Fred Lowe, senior clinical psychologist with the Eastern Health Board, has interviewed many young violent males. He has detected a pattern of mature women in their late 20s and 30s being murdered by less mature young men. He recalls one man saying: "I go for the sort of woman who would not have me."

It is all about the "hunter instinct" gone wrong, says Mr Lowe. Young men rape and sometimes kill women as if they were "collecting trophies". Violating an older, mores sexually mature woman confers greater status than violating, a younger woman. These killings are probably preceded by stalking, "a courtship disturbance" in which the male goes "hunting for a mate" but the process goes wrong, Mr Lowe suggests.

"The kind of behaviour which leads to assault and which recently has led to killings is this kind of prowling youngster who forms an obsession, watches the woman, takes her underwear from the line and makes nuisance phone calls. It's far too common," says Mr Lowe.

Persistent nuisance phone calls are a strong indication of mental instability. Recipients of such calls should report them to the Garda, says Mr Lowe. He also suggests that women ask male relatives or friends to record the voice greeting on their answering machines.

The young obsessed loner tends to be a misfit with no place in an overcrowded society, Mr Lowe believes. Fifty years ago, half the Irish population was rural. This lifestyle has collapsed and left many youths, ill prepared for the modern world.

Similarly, Dr O'Connor has noticed the trend of teenagers killing women in their late 20s and early 30s, although he adds that most women murdered in Ireland are killed by husbands or lovers. As in the rest of the Western world, Irish women tend to know their killers intimately, or not at all.

"Some of these murders are kind of random. This woman just happens to be the one the guy came across at that point," Dr O'Connor says.

All authorities agree, that only time will tell if the increase in women being killed is "an artificial blip" or a continuing trend.

"It doesn't feel like a blip," says Dr O'Connor, and many women agree. Some feminists have considered that the empowerment of women threatens men and so their behaviour towards them tends to be more violent. "I don't think it's as deep as that," says Dr O'Connor. "For the average killer it's sex and the thrill of the killing... There isn't any deep seated philosophical thing."

He also dismisses the influence of video violence and pornography. Pornography users do so because they are already obsessed with sex and violence, not because videos have made them so.

But television news might influence behaviour, he believes: "This strange, odd person thinks about finding an older, more sexually mature woman and killing her and then he sees it happening a few times and may allow his fantasy world to become reality because he's seen it on the news so frequently."

But why is this young male so prone to violence in the first place? "It is undeniably true that genes are involved," writes Steve Jones in In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny. This publication is linked to the forthcoming BBC television series which Jones will present.

The notion of a "criminal gene" has already been used in the US by the legal team of a convicted murderer, Stephen Mobley, who is on death row in a Georgia prison.

After he was sentenced to death, his lawyers won an appeal. They argued that he was not acting on the basis of "free will" but due to a genetic predilection. Virtually his entire family, they said, were violent.

In the US legal teams have argued that a killer has an innate tendency towards unacceptable behaviour. This, they hope, will reduce the blame attaching to the crime. One woman who received a life sentence for killing her mother was released by another judge when it was discovered that she was suffering from inherited Huntington's Disease, a progressive degeneration of the nervous system, one of the first signs of which is mental instability.

Is this a compassionate reprieve or an excuse for killing? At present, Irish society is profoundly uneasy at the prospect of murderers previously deemed "insane" being released when they are found "sane". To establish a genetic link to crime is to give the ultimate excuse. If gene or drug therapy were discovered, presumably murderers could then be treated and released.

And it doesn't end there. "Why should there be evil?" asks Steve Jones. "If a man is born sinful, how should he be forgiven? The issue strikes at the very core of belief and of society. The idea of a `gene for crime' in fact poses a theological question.

"If certain people are born with a nature that makes it inevitable that they will offend, how can they be blamed, or judged? How can there be equality before God or the law if one group - how large, nobody knows - can claim lifelong immunity from its full rigours, with evidence written into DNA?"

There's another obvious question: if there is a criminal gene and if men have that gene, should we excuse them when they behave violently?

Even Jones acknowledges that genes are an insufficient explanation for a male criminality. Nurture is at least as important as nature. Which brings us to the ultimate question: are we, as a society, finally prepared to take seriously the question of educating boys to be gentle and socially adaptable?