Violent Crime: Women with Low Offender, Equal Victim Share

Out of more than 809,000 violent crime incidents and 951,270 offenses connected to said incidents recorded in the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for the year 2022, 18 percent of perpetrators and 48 percent of victims were women. This data covers 76 percent of the U.S. population, and even while the previous five years had a spottier coverage ranging between 46 percent for 2019 and 70 percent for 2021, these percentages have stayed the same.

Looking at the prevalence of specific violent crimes, the Crime Data Explorer (CDE) shows that aggravated assaults and robberies declined between 2020 and 2022. Homicides reported via the NIBRS hovered between 21,156 and 22,536 for the same period, while reported rapes ranged from 126,430 to 140,902. The FBI points out that these comparisons are to be closely scrutinized since some agencies hadn't fully transitioned to the new NIBRS system yet in the respective reporting periods.

The most recent figures from the Quarterly Uniform Crime Report for the first quarter of 2024 show that violent crime was down 15 percent on a national level year-over-year. Murder and rape offenses dropped by 26 percent in the U.S., followed by robbery (down 18 percent) and aggravated assault (down 12 percent). As with all data sourced from the CDE, the coverage is not seamless. Out of 19,268 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., figures were reported by 13,719. The trends, however, are clear: Men are more likely to committing violent crimes, while the share of victims is roughly equally divided between the sexes.