southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Well, truth is that nobody knows.
There’s just not enough information available for anyone to have a reliable predictor of what will make someone become a serial. There are definitely the common things among serials, but they aren’t always present, and aren’t present in every serial. You know, the whole animal torture/killing thing, escalating lesser crimes, etc.
So it’s impossible to know why more serials are men since we don’t even know why anyone goes serial in the first place. There’s not even definitive proof that the percentage of women serial killing represents all of them, or just the ones that got caught. For all we know, the numbers could be the same, and women are just better at getting away with it.
So, there’s not really an answer to the question, though there are theories.
The two theories I ran across that were the most convincing are that “triggering” whatever it is that makes people become serials is more likely to occur with men; and that there may be some linkage to the differences in hormones and brain development that go back to the womb. There’s also the idea that it’s both of those in conjunction, which seems more likely that it being only one of them.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I disagree, it’s part of a pattern where men are generally more violent than women.
No this is NOT a possibility, since serial killers are generally caught.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
As far as we know / hope. I bet a lot more get away with it than we’d think, though probably less than ever with modern tech / surveillance etc.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The thing with serial killing, is that it is very difficult to hide.
Some of the hardest cases can be for instance a nurse at a hospital killing in a way that appear natural.
But even that gets detected quicker than you would think, because while 1 killing can be a fluke death, already at 2 killings, it can throw off the statistics and cause an investigation. With 3 it’s almost impossible the incidents can’t be tracked back to the person who did it.
An other situation can be a woman who kill their husband for inheritance, and then does it a second time. That second time is usually enough for alarm bells to sound for families of the deceased. Resulting in more thorough police investigations.
Obviously it can happen they get away with it, but I’m confident by far the most serial killers are caught, because it’s insanely difficult to hide multiple killings.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Which is why serial killers have tended to pick on the lowest members of society. Gay men and prostitutes just going off of Dahlmer and Jack the Ripper come to mind, but it’s a common theme. Less common is something like BTK going after whole families and he nearly got away with it but for a stupid mistake, I think, with metadata on a floppy disk. But we’re in agreement that it’s hard to pull off I just think the numbers would be larger than we’d expect etc etc.