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[–]womenopausal 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Personally, I think hormones do have a role to play, although I am not sure how. It is absolutely true that men commit more crimes, throughout history, for all societies, for all groups, and for nearly every crime category. And particularly when it comes violent crime. The reason I suspect hormones are involved because of the age of criminals: they tend to be young as well as males. A huge amount of crime is committed by male teenagers. It's not necessarily severe crime, often more of a nuisance. It's not always the type that even makes headlines in your local paper unless it's a really slow newsday. But it is often the bulk of crime that goes into making up the statistics.

I would say that after sex (meaning maleness), age (meaning youth) is the greatest predictor of criminality. It would be easy to say young men & male teenagers have the most testosterone (true) but I'm not clear that this takes us to a simple reason why young men commit the most crime. Young women and female teenagers are also more likely to be involved in crime than older women. About 20% youth crime is by girls (UK stats: I am British and there's a lot I don't like about my country but I'm very proud of the way we collate crime stats.) And although in every category more boys commit more crimes than girls, girls are far more likely to commit a violent crime than they are to commit a burglary.

So testosterone might play a role, but I think we would also want to think about the reasons that those girls are involved in crime too. We'd want to look big picture. Chances are, they are likely to have similar profiles to the boys. So testosterone may well be a factor around the fact that boys/male teenagers commit 80% of youth crime and girls/female teenagers 20%, but it can only be one factor amongst many, and it might have complicated relationships with stuff like socialisation and other variables.