When Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he must have stowed a few kegs of trouble! As well as sharing a similar history of colonization from Europe, the countries of the Americas (North, Central, and South) are by far the most violent region of the world in terms of crime (see Murder map).
How violent are the Americas? According to Interpol, which maintains the most extensive national crime data, rape rates are 62 percent higher here compared to the rest of the world. Assaults are 96 percent higher. Murders (that exclude war deaths) are an astonishing 168 percent above average.
Why is our region so hazardous? It is tempting to speculate that the problem relates to drug cartels and organized crime more generally but this would be a mistake because organized crime operates around the world including in many European countries that have relatively low crime rates. The data argue that family structure and sexual relationships are the key to violence in our region.
Family structure matters, but why?
First, a disclaimer is in order. In connecting family structure and crime, one is often accused of blaming single mothers for all the ills of a society. That is not my intention. When it comes to violent crime, the culprits are overwhelmingly men who commit well over 90 percent of the crime in every country. Second, I am not claiming that men of the Americas turn to crime primarily because they are raised by single mothers. How do I know all this?
The first point to make is that family structure does matter - a lot - but not for the socialization of children so much as for the sexual behavior of adult men. If more women are reproducing outside marriage, this means that there is more extramarital sex and increased mating effort by men is rewarded. In more restrained societies, women don't have sex before marriage so that men have less to fight over.
It so happens that countries in the Americas have exceptionally high proportions of children raised by single mothers. Moreover, when the effects of family structure are statistically controlled, the huge differences in violent crime rates between the Americas and the rest of the world disappears (1). If the Americas had the same level of single parenthood as the rest of the world, our violent crime rates would not be higher. So how can we tell whether the boost in crime is due to parenting, or to sexual competition?
Fortunately, there is a convenient way to assess the role of single mothers, as socialization agents. If being raised by single mothers boosts crime, then crime should increase a generation later as kids mature to the peak ages of criminal offending in young adulthood. Surprisingly, it is current single parenthood ratios that predict violent crime, and those a generation ago are almost irrelevant. Current relationships between men and women thus predict crime and parental relationships do not. Extramarital sex in the New World is evidently responsible for our high crime rates.
Why is extramarital sex so strongly implicated in crimes of violence? I will put meat on the bones of that idea in a future post.
1. Barber, N. (2006). Why is violent crime so common in the Americas? Aggressive Behavior, 32, 442-450.
