文档介绍：ELSEVIER
A Few Good Men: Evolutionary
Psychology and Female
Adolescent Aggression
Anne Campbell
Durham University, England
Criminologists have drawn attention to the fact that crime peaks in the teens and early
20s and that this pattern shows invariance over culture, history, offense, and sex. Wilson
and Duly (1985) have proposed that among young, disadvantaged mules, the age-crime
curve reflects risky tactics aimed at averting "reproductive death." Though young women's
rate of involvement in violent crime is much lower than men's, they also show a similar
age-violence curve for assault. This paper proposes that this may be the result of aggressive
mate selection among young women and that, under certain specified dgcumstances, women
may engage in low-key intrasexual strategies in addition to epigamic strategies. This pa-
per reviews material on sex differences in violent crime and in mate selection strategies,
and offers predictions about the likely circumstances under which females will use
intrasexual strategies. The scant available data on female adolescent fighting suggest that
female-female assaults are mon than official statistical estimates and that they
are frequently triggered by three key issues related to reproductive fitness: management
of sexual reputation, competition over access to resource-rich young men, and protecting
heterosexual relationships from takeover by rival women.
KEY WORDS: Aggression; Female; Mate selection.
H irschi and Gottfredson (1983) make pelling argument for the
invariance of the age-crime curve. The association between youth and
heightened crime rate, they argue, holds constant regardless of histor-
ical period, country, race, type of crime, and (most relevant for the
present discussion) sex. While males far exceed females in the volume and rate
Received December 15, 1993; revised July 28, 1994.
Address reprint requests and correspondence to: Anne