Gender-Specific Homicide Offending in Rural Areas

• Author: Matthew R. Lee,Ginger D. Stevenson
• Date: 01 February 2006
• DOI: 10.1177/1088767905283640
• Published date: 01 February 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/1088767905283640Homicide StudiesLee, Stevenson / Gender-Specific Homicide Offending

Gender-Specific Homicide

Offending in Rural Areas

Matthew R. Lee

Ginger D. Stevenson

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

This analysis departs from prior macro-level homicide research by focusing on gender-

specific homicide rates in rural areas, a completely neglected topic. Drawing on the

resource deprivation and gender inequality perspectives, the authors analyze gender-

disaggregated homicide offending rates in 1,678 rural counties. Negative binomial

regression models provide evidence of the following: Gender-specific measures of

unemployment and poverty and a measure of female-headed households exhibit no rela-

tionship with female homicide offending, whereas all three measures are associated with

elevated levelsof male homicide offending. Further,measures of both absolute and rela-

tive gender inequality haveno association with female or male homicide offending in the

rural context. Overall, female homicide offending in rural areas is strongly drivenby lev-

els of male offending, which are explained by many of the same factors typically cited in

the literature on urban crime.

Keywords: gender; homicide; rural

With few exceptions, prior macro-level research on homicide offending has

focused on explaining variation across urban areas in total or race-

disaggregated rates of homicide (for a good review, see Land, McCall, & Cohen,

1990; Parker, McCall, & Land, 1999). Recently, however, greater attention has been

given to the factors explaining crime patterns in rural America (Lee, Maume, &

Ousey,2003; Lee & Ousey, 2001; Osgood & Chambers, 2000) and to gender-specific

offending patterns (Jensen, 2001; Steffensmeier & Haynie, 2000a, 2000b). Two main

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Homicide Studies

Volume 10 Number 1

February 2006 55-73

© 2006 Sage Publications

10.1177/1088767905283640

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Authors’Note: Partial funding for thisarticle wasprovided by Grants SES0237968 from theNational Sci-

ence Foundationand 4 D1A RH 00005B01B01 from the Office of Rural Health Policy of the Department of

Health and Human Services throughthe Rural Health Safetyand Security Institute, Social Science Research

Center,Mississippi State University to the first author.Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors

and do not necessarily represent the officialviews of the National Science Foundation or the Office of Rural

HealthPolicy. A previous draft of this article was presented at the 53rd annual meeting of the American Soci-

ety of Criminology in Atlanta in November 2001.We thank Bill Bankston, the editors, and several anony-

mous reviewersfor helpful comments on previous drafts of the article. Correspondence concerning this arti-

cle should be addressed to Matthew R. Lee, Department of Sociology, 126 Stubbs Hall, Louisiana State

University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803; e-mail: mlee@lsu.edu.

concerns account for this recent shift. First, standard theoretical explanations of

macro-level crime rates (e.g., social disorganization theory) are drawn from observa-

tions of the social, economic, cultural, and spatial organization of urban areas (see

Shaw,McKay, Zorbaugh, & Cottrell, 1929). In the interest of assessing their explana-

tory efficacy,scholars have explored the scope of conditions under which such theo-

ries hold by carrying out parallel analyses on samples of rural communities (see

Osgood & Chambers, 2000; Petee & Kowalski, 1993). Second, failing to disaggregate

crime rates into meaningful subgroups can be problematic when the numerator of the

rate is heavily weighted by the overrepresentation of a particularly active demo-

graphic subgroup (Steffensmeier & Haynie, 2000a). Given the massive disparities

between men and women in criminal offending, rates that are not disaggregated by

gender are heavily weighted by male participation in homicide. This unintentional

weighting of the datamay mask potentiallyimportant variationsin the effectsof explan-

atory variables on male versus female crime rates, an issue with serious theoretical

implications.

Although a few recent studies have examined one or the other of these issues,

we are aware of no research to date that systematically investigates the covariates of

gender-specific homicide offending in rural areas. This oversight is problematic for at

least two reasons. First, the spatial and social distribution of resource deprivation in

rural communities differs somewhat from that found in urban areas (see Cotter, 2002).

For example, rural America, on average, has higher rates of poverty than does urban

America, the profile of those living in poverty is somewhat different from the urban

context, and there is some evidence (despite the rarity of typical neighborhood-like

spatial configurations) that standard demographic measures of the spatial concentra-

tion of poverty yield higher estimates for rural than for urban areas (see Lee et al.,

2003). Moreover, recent research suggests that the effects of resource deprivation on

serious crime may be weaker in the rural context than in urban areas (Lee &

Bartkowksi, 2004; Lee et al., 2003; Osgood & Chambers, 2000).

Second, mounting evidence indicates that the social organization and meaning of

both gender and gender inequality in rural areas departs significantly from that found

in urban areas. For example, women in nonmetropolitan areas typically marry earlier,

are more likely to be poor, and gain less from poverty relief strategies than do urban

women (see Brown & Lichter, 2004; Snyder & McLaughlin, 2004). Furthermore, the

employment options availableto them, in both the formal and informal economies, are

more limited than for males and tend to be more gendered than in the urban milieu (see

Leckie, 1996; Little & Panelli, 2003; Nelson, 1999; Yodanis, 2000). And although

there is considerable theory relating gender inequality to female crime, it typically has

not taken into account the different context that “rurality” provides for gender and

inequality to play themselves out. Furthermore, much like the research on socioeco-

nomic disadvantage and crime in rural areas, recent evidence indicates that structural

conditions have a weaker effect on female crime rates than on male crime rates—rates

for homicide in particular (Jensen, 2001; Steffensmeier & Haynie, 2000a; Whaley &

Messner, 2002). When resource deprivation and gender inequality are tied to rurality,

56 Homicide Studies