Twenty years ago, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson published their now-classic book Homicide. This book overturned a whole generation of liberal scholarship. It is still a welcome antidote to the kind of nonsense that some liberals, unacquainted with the data, continue to spout today.
For instance, it is not unsual to hear that "with the exception of the police and the military, the family is perhaps the most violent social group, and the home is the most violent social setting in our society. A person is more likely to be hit or killed in his or her home by another family member than anywhere else or by anyone else."
Once this was the conventional academic wisdom. Indeed Daly and Wilson encountered precisely this quotation in a textbook by two leading criminologists in the 1970s. One can see the political purpose to which such conclusions are put. Then, as now, they are used by feminists, homosexual activists and others to justify legal assaults on the nuclear family and to provide justifications for divorce, gay marriage, and other "alternative" family arrangements.
Daly and Wilson are scholars of evolution, and to them this idea that genetically related people pose the greatest social danger to each other's lives made absolutely no sense. So they began to review the data. Indeed they went way beyond what anyone had studied previously, dissecting not only the facts from the United States and other Western countries, but also performing cross-cultural comparisons in some cases going back to ancient times.
Daly and Wilson found that the liberal scholars were simply wrong. In some cases the errors were statistical. For instance, consider the statement that "more people in America are murdered each night in their beds than on the street." This is probably true, and it's because vastly more people are in their beds than on the streets. The statistic in no way shows that the bedroom is a more dangerous venue than the street! When intelligent people make such simple errors the usual reason is that their ideological prejudices are guiding the way they read the data.
But Daly and Wilson made a more startling, and significant, finding. They discovered that the data on homicide typically did not distinguish between blood-related individuals and non-blood-related individuals. For instance, when you separate murders of children committed by their fathers from murders of children by mothers' boyfriends and step-fathers and other unrelated persons, you discover that the latter group poses a far greater danger to children than the former group. Specifically, Daly and Wilson found that infants are 20 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than by a natural parent.
Since Daly and Wilson's book there has been a wealth of data extending their conclusions. The data on child sex abuse, for example, follows the same pattern. Biological parents are much less likely to sexually abuse their children than mothers' boyfriends or step-parents. Here the natural genetic aversion to incest is an obvious explanation, but so is the fact that biological parents tend to be more closely attuned to the welfare of their offspring.
Until Daly and Wilson's book, genetic relatednedss was not considered a relevant factor in measuring infanticide and child abuse. But Daly and Wilson showed that it is the single most important predictive factor. And their pioneering work is now supported by a whole ream of data. The point of course is not that most step-parents pose a danger to children but that children face a greater risk of violence from step-parents than they do from natural parents.
These facts of course fit perfectly with common sense. And even though the cultural left will continue to make excuses, the facts also makes biological sense.No wonder that increasing divorce rates in society have produced a dramatic increase in violence against children. And if these biological and historical patterns hold, a further increase in the legitimation of "alternative lifestyles" can only be expected to produce more victims.