One Risk Factor for Hate Crimes: A Shortage of Women
Researchers find more anti-immigrant violence in areas where dating competition is tough. It’s a challenge for integration plans.
She’s handing out aid, not her phone number.
Photographer: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty ImagesOne often hears from people with far-right views that immigrants are a threat to “our women.” Now, there’s empirical confirmation that perceived competition for female attention is a key factor behind anti-immigrant hate crime.
Rafaela Dancygier, Naoki Egami and Amaney Jamal from Princeton University and Ramona Rischke from Humboldt University in Berlin have published a paper in which they mapped German hate crime statistics onto the country’s mating market. They found the incidence of hate crime was higher in municipalities with a relative shortage of women, especially in those where there’s a surplus of low-earning men, who face the toughest competition for women. (As elsewhere, German women choose mates from at least the same social group as themselves, but preferably a higher one.)