The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

by Richard Wilkinson

  EARLY MATURITY AND ABSENT FATHERS

  The first of these additional reasons was touched on in Chapter 8, where we discussed the impact of inequality on family relationships and stress in early life. Experiences in early childhood may be just as relevant to teenage motherhood as the educational and economic opportunities available to adolescents. In 1991, psychologist Jay Belsky at the University of London and his colleagues proposed a theory, based on evolutionary psychology, in which experiences in early childhood would lead individuals towards either a quantity or a quality reproductive strategy, depending on how stressful their early experiences had been.191 They suggested that people who learned, while growing up, ‘to perceive others as untrustworthy, relationships as opportunistic and self-serving, and resources as scarce and/or unpredictable’ would reach biological maturity earlier, be sexually active earlier, be more likely to form short-term relationships and make less investment in parenting. In contrast, people who grow up learning ‘to perceive others as trustworthy, relationships as enduring and mutually rewarding and resources more or less constantly available’ would mature later, defer sexual activity, be better at forming long-term relationships and invest more heavily in their children’s development.

  In the world in which humans evolved, these different strategies make sense. If you can’t rely on your mate or other people, and you can’t rely on resources, then it may once have made sense to get started early and have lots of children – at least some will survive. But if you can trust your partner and family to be committed to you and to provide for you, it makes sense to have fewer children and to devote more attention and resources to each one.

  Rachel Gold and colleagues found that the relationship between inequality and teenage birth rates in the USA might be acting through the impact of inequality on social capital, which we discussed in Chapter 4.192 Among US states, that is, those with lower levels of social cohesion, civic engagement and mutual trust – exactly the conditions which might favour a quantity strategy – teenage birth rates are higher.

  Several studies have also shown that early conflict and the absence of a father do predict earlier maturation – girls in such a situation become physically mature and start their periods earlier than girls who grow up without those sources of stress.193–194 And reaching puberty earlier increases the likelihood of girls becoming sexually active at an early age and of teenage motherhood.195

  Father absence may be particularly important for teenage pregnancy. In a study of two large samples in the USA and New Zealand, psychologist Bruce Ellis and his colleagues followed girls from early childhood through to adulthood.196 In both countries, the longer a father was absent from the family, the more likely it was that his daughter would have sex at a young age and become a teenage mother – and this strong effect could not be explained away by behavioural problems of the girls, by family stress, parenting style, socio-economic status, or by differences in the neighbourhoods in which the girls grew up. So there may be deep-seated adaptive processes which lead from more stressful and unequal societies – perhaps particularly from low social status – to higher teenage birth rates. Unfortunately, while we can obtain international data on single-parent households, being a single parent means very different things in different countries, and there are no international data that tell us how many fathers are absent from their children’s lives.

  WHAT ABOUT THE DADS?

  Throughout this chapter, we’ve been discussing the problem of teenage parenting exclusively in terms of teenage mothers, but what about the fathers? Let’s return to the story of the three sisters. The father of the 12-year-old girl’s baby left her shortly after his son was born. The boy named by the middle sister as the father of her little girl denied having sex with her and demanded a paternity test. And the 38-year-old father of the oldest sister’s baby already had at least four other children.

  Sociologists Graham and McDermott discuss what has been learned from studies where researchers talk at length to young women about their experiences. What they show is that these sisters’ experiences with their babies’ fathers are typical.190 Motherhood is a way in which young women in deprived circumstances join adult social networks – networks which usually include their own mothers and other relatives, and these supportive networks help them transcend the social stigma of being a teenage mother. According to Graham and McDermott, young women prioritize their relationships with the babies, over their often difficult relationships with the babies’ fathers, because they feel this relationship is a ‘more certain source of intimacy than the heterosexual relationships they had . . . experienced’.

  Young men living in areas of high unemployment and low wages often can’t offer much in the way of stability or support. In communities with high levels of teenage motherhood, young men are themselves trying to cope with the many difficulties that inequality inflicts on their lives, and young fatherhood adds to those stresses.

  10

  Violence: gaining respect

  Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

  Frederick Douglas, Speech on the 24th anniversary

  of emancipation, Washington, DC, 1886

  As we began to write this chapter, violence was in the headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA, an 18-year-old man with a shotgun entered a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, killing five people and wounding four others, apparently at random, before being shot dead by police. In the UK, there was a wave of killings in South London, including the murder of three teenage boys in less than a fortnight. But perhaps the story that best illustrates what this chapter is about occurred in March 2006, in a quiet suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. Charles Martin, a 66-year-old, telephoned the emergency services.197 ‘I just killed a kid,’ he told the operator, ‘I shot him with a goddamn 410 shotgun twice.’ Mr Martin had shot his 15-year-old neighbour. The boy’s crime? He had run across Mr Martin’s lawn. ‘Kid’s just been giving me a bunch of shit, making the other kids harass me and my place.’

  Violence is a real worry in many people’s lives. In the most recent British Crime Surveys, 35 per cent of people said they were very worried or fairly worried about being a victim of mugging, 33 per cent worried about physical attack, 24 per cent worried about rape,

  and 13 per cent worried about racially motivated violence. More than a quarter of the people who responded said they were worried about being insulted or pestered in public.198 Surveys in America and Australia report similar findings – in fact fear of crime and violence may be as big a problem as the actual level of violence. Very few people are victims of violent crime, but fear of violence affects the quality of life of many more. Fear of violence disproportionately affects the vulnerable – the poor, women and minority groups.199 In many places, women feel nervous going out at night or coming home late; old people double-lock their doors and won’t open them to strangers. These are important infringements of basic human freedoms.

  People’s fears of crime, violence and anti-social behaviour don’t always match up with rates and trends in crime and violence. A recent down-swing in homicide rates in America (which has now ended), was not matched by a reduction in people’s fear of violence. We will return to recent trends later. First, let’s turn our attention to differences in rates of actual violence between different societies and look at some of the similarities and the differences between them.

  In some ways patterns of violence are remarkably consistent across time and space. In different places and at different times, violent acts are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, and most of those men are in their teens or early twenties. In her book, The Ant and the Peacock, philosopher and evolutionary psychologist Helena Cronin shows how closely correlated the age and sex characteristics of murderers are in different places.200 We reproduce her graph showing murder rates, com
paring Chicago with England and Wales (Figure 10.1). The age of the perpetrator is shown along the bottom; up the side is the murder rate, and there are separate lines for men and women. It is immediately apparent that murder rates peak in the late teens and early twenties for men, and that rates for women are much lower at all ages. The age and sex distribution is astonishingly similar both in Chicago and in England and Wales. However, what is less obvious is that the scales on the left- and right-hand sides of the graph are very different. On the left-hand side of the graph, the scale shows homicide rates per million people in England and

  Figure 10.1 Homicides by age and sex of perpetrator. England and Wales compared with Chicago.200

  Wales, going from zero to 30. On the right-hand side, the scale shows homicide rates in Chicago, and here the scale runs from zero to 900 murders per million. Despite the striking similarities in the patterns of age and sex distribution, there is something fundamentally different in these places; the city of Chicago had a murder rate 30 times higher than the rate in England and Wales. On top of the biological similarities there are huge environmental differences.

  Violent crimes are almost unknown in some societies. In the USA, a child is killed by a gun every three hours. Despite having a much lower rate than the USA, the UK is a violent society, compared to many other countries: over a million violent crimes were recorded in 2005–2006. And within any society, while it is generally young men who are violent, most young men are not. Just as it is the discouraged and disadvantaged among young women who become teenage mothers, it is poor young men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are most likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence. Why?

  ‘IF YOU AIN’T GOT PRIDE, YOU GOT NOTHING.’201, p. 29

  James Gilligan is a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, where he directs the Center for the Study of Violence, and has worked on violence prevention for more than thirty years. He was in charge of mental health services for the Massachusetts prison system for many years, and for most of his years as a clinical psychiatrist he worked with the most violent of offenders in prisons and prison mental hospitals. In his books, Violence202 and Preventing Violence, 201 he argues that acts of violence are ‘attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable and overwhelming – and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride’. Time after time, when talking to men who had committed violent offences, he discovered that the triggers to violence had involved threats – or perceived threats – to pride, acts that instigated feelings of humiliation or shame. Sometimes the incidents that led to violence seemed incredibly trivial, but they all evoked shame. A young neighbour walking disrespectfully across your immaculate lawn . . . the popular kids in the school harassing you and calling you a faggot . . . being fired from your job . . . your woman leaving you for another man . . . someone looking at you ‘funny’ . . .

  Gilligan goes so far as to say that he has ‘yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated . . . and that did not represent the attempt to . . . undo this “loss of face”’.202, p. 110 And we can all recognize these feelings, even if we would never go so far as to act on them. We recognize the stomach-clenching feelings of shame and embarrassment, the mortification that we feel burning us up when we make ourselves look foolish in the eyes of others. We know how important it is to feel liked, respected, and valued.203 But if all of us feel these things, why is it predominantly among young men that those feelings escalate into violent acts?

  Here the work of evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly helps to make sense of these patterns of violence. In their 1988 book Homicide204 and a wealth of books, chapters and articles since, they use statistical, anthropological and historical data to show how young men have strong incentives to achieve and maintain as high a social status as they can – because their success in sexual competition depends on status.77,205–208 While looks and physical attractiveness are more important for women, it is status that matters most for sexual success among men. Psychologist David Buss found that women value the financial status of prospective partners roughly twice as much as men do.209 So while women try to enhance their sexual attractiveness with clothes and make-up, men compete for status. This explains not only why feeling put down, disrespected and humiliated are the most common trigger for violence; it also explains why most violence is between men – men have more to win or lose from having (or failing to gain) status. Reckless, even violent behaviour comes from young men at the bottom of society, deprived of all the markers of status, who must struggle to maintain face and what little status they have, often reacting explosively when it is threatened.

  But while it seems clear that the propensity for violence among young men lies partially in evolved psychological adaptations related to sexual competition, most men are not violent. So what factors explain why some societies seem better than others at preventing or controlling these impulses to violence?

  INEQUALITY IS ‘STRUCTURAL’ VIOLENCE

  The simple answer is that increased inequality ups the stakes in the competition for status: status matters even more. The impact of inequality on violence is even better established and accepted than the other effects of inequality that we discuss in this book.203 In this chapter we show relationships between violence and inequality for the same countries and the same time period as we use in other chapters. Many similar graphs have been published by other researchers, for other time periods or sets of countries, including one covering more than fifty countries between 1970 and 1994 from researchers at the World Bank.207,210 A large body of evidence shows a clear relationship between greater inequality and higher homicide rates. As early as 1993, criminologists Hsieh and Pugh wrote a review which included thirty-five analyses of income inequality and violent crime.211 All but one found a positive link between the two – as inequality increased so did violent crime. Homicides and assaults were most closely associated with income inequality, and robbery and rape less so. We have found the same relationships when looking at more recently published studies.10 Homicides are more common in the more unequal areas in cities ranging from Manhattan to Rio de Janeiro, and in the more unequal American states and cities and Canadian provinces.

  Figure 10.2 shows that international homicide rates from the United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems212 are related to income inequality, and Figure 10.3 shows the same relationship for the USA, using homicide rates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.213 The differences between some countries in the first graph are very large. The USA is once again at the top of the league table of the rich countries. Its murder rate is 64 per million, more than four times higher than the UK (15 per million) and more than twelve times higher than Japan, which has a rate of only 5.2 per million. Two countries take rather unusual positions in this graph, compared to where they sit in many of our other chapters: Singapore has a much lower homicide rate than we might expect, and Finland has a higher rate. Interestingly, although international relationships between gun ownership and violent crime are complicated (for instance, gun ownership is linked to murders involving female victims but not male victims),214 in the United Nations International Study on Firearm Regulation, Finland had the highest proportion of households with guns, and Singapore had the lowest rate of gun ownership.215 Despite these exceptions, the trend for more unequal countries to have higher homicide rates is well established.

  Figure 10.2 Homicides are more common in more unequal countries.

  Figure 10.3 Homicides are more common in more unequal US states.

  In the USA, although no data were available for Wyoming, the relationship between inequality and homicides is still significant and the differences between states are almost as great as the differences between countries. Louisiana has a murder rate of 107 per million, more than seven times higher than that of New Hampshire and Iowa, which are bott
om of the league table with murder rates of 15 per million. The homicide rate in Alaska is much higher than we would expect, given its relatively low inequality, and rates in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts are lower. In the United States, two out of every three murders are committed with guns, and homicide rates are higher in states where more people own guns.216 Among the states on our graph, Alaska has the highest rate of gun ownership of all, and New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts are among the lowest.217 If we allow for gun ownership, we find a slightly stronger relationship between inequality and homicides.

  HAVENS IN A HEARTLESS WORLD

  We have already seen some features of more unequal societies that help to tie violence to inequality – family life counts, schools and neighbourhoods are important, and status competition matters.

  In Chapter 8 we mentioned a study which found that divorce rates are higher in more unequal American counties. In his book, Life Without Father, sociologist David Popenoe describes how 60 per cent of America’s rapists, 72 per cent of juvenile murderers and 70 per cent of long-term prisoners grew up in fatherless homes.218 The effect of fatherlessness on delinquency and violence is only partly explained by these families being poorer. Why do fathers matter so much?

  One researcher has described the behaviour of boys and young men who grow up without fathers as ‘hypermasculine’, with boys engaging in ‘rigidly overcompensatory masculine behaviors’219, pp. 1–2 – crimes against property and people, aggression and exploitation and short-term sexual conquests. This could be seen as the male version of the quantity versus quality strategy in human relationships that we described in relation to teenage mothers in Chapter 9. The absence of a father may predispose some boys to a different reproductive strategy: shifting the balance away from long-term relationships and putting more emphasis on status competition.