Women and Crime: The Gender Gap in Victims, Offenders, and Incarceration

Women as Victims: A Different Kind of Violence

In 2023, 3,538 women were murdered in the United States, according to the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports. That's 22.4% of all 15,795 homicide victims. While men face a far higher overall murder rate, women's homicide victimization follows starkly different patterns:

• Intimate partner violence: Over 40% of female murder victims are killed by a current or former intimate partner. For men, this figure is approximately 6%.
• Location: Women are far more likely to be killed at home. Men are more often killed on streets, in parking lots, and in other public spaces.
• Weapon: While firearms dominate both genders, women are more likely to be killed by strangulation, blunt force, or stabbing — methods associated with domestic violence.
• Relationship to offender: Women are much more likely to know their killer. Stranger-on-stranger homicide is predominantly a male phenomenon.

This means that the policy solutions for female homicide are fundamentally different from those for male homicide. Reducing female murder requires addressing domestic violence, strengthening protective orders, and supporting victims who try to leave abusive relationships — the most dangerous moment is often the attempt to leave.

Female Murder Victims by Race

White women account for the largest share of female homicide victims at 55.2%, followed by Black women at 38.3%. While Black women are murdered at a lower rate than Black men, they are still approximately 2.5 times more likely to be murdered than white women — a disparity rooted in the same socioeconomic factors that drive the overall racial disparities in homicide.

Beyond Homicide: Crimes That Disproportionately Affect Women

Homicide is the most extreme form of violence, but women bear disproportionate burdens across several crime categories:

• Domestic violence: Women are 76% of domestic violence victims. An estimated 1 in 4 women will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime. See our full analysis.
• Sexual assault: Women are approximately 90% of rape and sexual assault victims. The NCVS estimates 459,310 rapes/sexual assaults against women annually, though reporting rates remain below 25%.
• Stalking: 78% of stalking victims are female. An estimated 7.5 million women are stalked annually.
• Human trafficking: 96% of sex trafficking victims identified by the National Human Trafficking Hotline are female.
• Workplace harassment: 81% of women report experiencing some form of sexual harassment.

These crimes are systematically underrepresented in UCR/NIBRS data because they are dramatically underreported to police. The gap between victimization surveys (like NCVS) and police reports is largest for crimes that disproportionately affect women.

Women as Offenders: The Minority in the System

Women account for approximately 22% of all arrests in the United States — a figure that has been steadily rising from about 15% in the 1980s. In homicide specifically, only 1,902 women were identified as offenders in 2023 (12.4% of known offenders).

The crimes women commit look different from men's crimes:

The pattern is clear: women's offending concentrates in property crime, fraud, and survival-related offenses. Violent crime by women is relatively rare and, when it occurs, is often in the context of domestic relationships or self-defense. Studies consistently find that 60–80% of incarcerated women have histories of physical or sexual abuse — suggesting that for many, crime is the downstream consequence of victimization.

The Rise of Female Incarceration

While women remain a small share of the prison population, their incarceration rate has grown faster than men's:

• 1980: ~13,000 women in state and federal prisons
• 2000: ~85,000 women incarcerated
• 2019 (pre-COVID peak): ~110,000 women incarcerated
• 2023: ~97,000 women (down from peak but still a 475% increase from 1980)

Several factors drove this explosion:

1. War on Drugs: Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses swept in many women who were low-level participants — often girlfriends or partners of male dealers who were charged as co-conspirators.
2. Changing arrest practices: Domestic violence mandatory arrest policies, while well-intentioned, led to increased dual arrests where women defending themselves were also arrested.
3. Poverty: Women living in poverty are more likely to shoplift, commit benefit fraud, or engage in survival sex work — all crimes heavily policed in low-income areas.
4. Net-widening: As the criminal justice system expanded, women who would previously have received warnings or diversions were formally processed.

The Impact on Families

Female incarceration has cascading effects on families that male incarceration, while devastating, often does not replicate:

• 80% of incarcerated women are mothers. The majority were primary caregivers before incarceration.
• Children of incarcerated mothers are 5x more likely to be placed in foster care than children of incarcerated fathers.
• Intergenerational impact: Children of incarcerated parents are 6x more likely to be incarcerated themselves.
• Housing: Women are more likely than men to lose housing during incarceration, making reentry more difficult.

The connection to crime rates is cyclical: incarcerating mothers destabilizes families, increases foster care placement, raises the risk of child behavioral problems, and ultimately increases the probability that those children will enter the criminal justice system. The recidivism crisis is partly perpetuated through this intergenerational mechanism.

Domestic Violence: Where Victimization and Offending Intersect

For women, the categories of "victim" and "offender" frequently overlap. Research on incarcerated women consistently finds:

• 60–80% report histories of physical or sexual abuse
• 30–40% of women convicted of killing a partner had documented histories of being abused by that partner
• Many women's property and drug crimes are committed under coercion or duress from male partners
• Trafficking victims are sometimes arrested for the very crimes they were forced to commit

This intersection challenges the clean victim/offender binary that crime statistics present. The domestic violence data on this site shows the scale of the problem, but it cannot capture these blurred lines between victimization and criminal behavior.

Policy Implications

The gender gap in crime has concrete policy implications:

1. Gender-responsive programming: Prisons and reentry programs designed for men don't work well for women. Women need trauma-informed care, parenting support, and domestic violence services.
2. Alternatives to incarceration: For non-violent property and drug offenses, community-based programs are cheaper and more effective than prison — especially for women with children.
3. Protective order enforcement: Better enforcement of domestic violence protective orders could prevent a significant share of female homicides.
4. Addressing the reporting gap: Crimes that disproportionately affect women (sexual assault, stalking, DV) are the most underreported. This means resources are misallocated because the data understates the problem.
5. Coercive control legislation: Recognizing that many women's criminal behavior occurs under duress from abusive partners.

The Bottom Line

The gender gap in crime is one of the most robust findings in criminology: men commit the vast majority of crime, particularly violent crime. But within that gap lies a complex story. Women are disproportionately affected by intimate partner violence, sexual assault, stalking, and trafficking. When women do offend, it is often in the context of poverty, addiction, and prior victimization.

The 3,538 women murdered in 2023 are a reminder that gender-specific approaches to violence prevention are essential. The 1,902 female offenders are a reminder that the criminal justice system needs to understand the pathways that lead women to crime — pathways that frequently begin with being victimized themselves.

Related Analysis

• Domestic Violence in America
• Who Are the Victims?
• Homicide Demographics
• Arrest Demographics
• Homicide in America
• The Recidivism Crisis