Cross-cultural Perspective

Arguably, this connection between unwed mothers and violent crime may be a (epi)phenomenon that is highly specific to the U.S. mega-tribe. To discover whether the linkage between violent crime and births to unwed mothers was more particularistic to the cultural matrix of the United States, or exemplified a more thematic cultural dynamic, a similar analysis was conducted across cultures, specifically, across nation-states.

A/any/all cross-cultural analyses are hampered by the problems of meaningful and comparable units of analysis. [See Ford (1961) for a discussion on cultural “units”]. Analyses on rates of crime are often problematic because of the lack of consonance among countries in the definitions and reporting of various crimes. However, one “crime”—murder—does seem to be universally accepted as a “crime” with reasonably concordant definitions (Archer and Gartner 1984; Daly and Wilson 1988). One may muse on the high validity of the level of death as a dependent variable. Accordingly, rates of murder in the United States [U.S. Bureau of the Census (1992: 181)] were corre­lated with illegitimacy rates in the United States—across the 50 states—and then were compared to similar figures generated by cross-cultural data (Smith-Morris 1990, United Nations 1992). Note that the United Nations defines “illegitimacy” in the following manner.

“Legitimate refers to persons born of parents who were married at the time of birth in accordance with the laws of the country or area. Illegitimate refers to children of parents, who, according to national law, were not married at the time of birth, regardless of whether these children have been recognized or legitimized after birth” (United Nations, 1992, p. 104).

The United States. The relationship—across the 50 states—between murder rates and illegitimacy rates was significant (r_P =.749; p <.001; 2-tailed). As illegitimacy rates in­creased, so did murder rates. Over half (r_p ² = (.749)² =.561 = 56.1%) of the variance in murder rates can be attributed to differences in illegitimacy rates. See Appendix II for the data by state. If the District of Columbia is included, then the correlation coefficient in­creases to r_p =.8565; p reference to money and to political freedom. Women's relative access to economic and political realms can be indexed by their increased participation in tertiary education,

i. e., education beyond the “high school”/secondary level and by their success in reaching parity (compared to men) in income. Alternative indices could, of course, be developed by different inquiries.