Bellow there are a couple of links to news of the events today in France (not "our" brightest moment I must say). Apart from the obvious stupidity and violence, what really caught my eye was that there are hardly any women in the images. Everyone we see breaking and burning are men. So it made me wonder what kind of world we would have if women were the ones in power. I'm guessing it wouldn't be all peace and quiet - definitely not quiet! But we probably wouldn't have this kind of incivility either:
PS - Just in case you're wondering, I didn't participate in any of the demonstrations.
I didn't watch the videos, but I don't understand what would necessarily be changed about this particular incident of violence “if women were the ones in power.” Nevertheless, I do believe we would all be much better off and the world would be much less violent if women did have more political and socioeconomic power. And I do believe that the the power structure of the world is slowly--all too slowly--headed in that direction.
Contrary to some of the frankly astounding comments on this thread, I think it is well established that women are generally and significantly less violent than men. I'm flubbered that anyone would suggest anything otherwise or be unwilling to acknowledge this seemingly undeniable fact.
Kimmel, for instance, notes that “men’s rates of violence are about nine times those of women (on rates of violence generally).”
Harer and Langan inform us that “Steffensmeier and Allen (1998) reported that the female arrest rate for homicide in 1995, as computed with data reported by the FBI, was 1.7 per 100,000 women, whereas the male rate was 16.6 per 100,000 men -- nearly 10 times the female rate.” Harer and Langan conducted a study using “data for 24,765 women and 177,767 men newly admitted to federal prisons in 1991 through 1998 to assess the predictive validity of an eight-item risk classification instrument predicting violence-related misconduct in the year following prison admission.” Among their findings were that:
* "the average female rate for violence-related misconduct [was] 54.4% of the average male rate”;
* “the mean female rate for serious violence (100-level violence) [was] only 8.14% of the mean male rate”;
* “[t]he only violent misconduct with near rate parity between the sexes [was] for the relatively non-serious offense of fighting, where the mean female rate [was] 91.7% of the mean male rate,” and
* “only 2.77% of the overall female rate [was] due to more serious 100-level violence, whereas a much larger 18.5% of the overall male rate [was] due to more serious 100-level violence.”
The importance of using data from male and female inmates concerns the fact that, as Kimmel explains above, some studies on intimate-partner violence have shown near-parity in rates of men and women, though this seems to be attributable to women reacting to their partners' violent acts, and, further, is generally much less serious and injurious than the violence that men perpetrate upon women.
