Better families lead to less crime    The News Story: We’re Safer Than Ever Before, and It’s All Thanks to Technology In a series called “The WIRED World in 2017,” the UK branch of WIRED makes the bold claim that “Dramatic reductions in crime rates over the last 20 years” aren’t due “to policy reforms–they're because technology has made it harder to commit crimes.”
With claims that many developed nations have seen their crime rates “halved” over the past 20 years, WIRED credits much of this to technological advances that make it harder to commit crimes undetected. From more sophisticated car alarms right down to “‘predictive policing,” technology has made life more difficult for the less sophisticated criminal. The magazine does admit that “technology-enabled crimes” are a problem, citing online pornography specifically. (Perhaps a reference to online terror networking might have been apt here as well?) But rest assured that “[s]teps are being taken to manage new risks.”
While there surely is truth in the claim that technological advances have made crimes harder to commit undetected and easier to predict, what this—and similar media analyses of crime rates—fail to mention is the role of marriage in preventing men and women from walking down the path of evil to begin with. Sources: Tom Gash, “We’re Safer Than Ever Before, and It’s all Thanks to Technology,” WIRED, December 27, 2016.

The New Research: The Moderating Marriage

It has long been noted that marriage serves to “civilize” both men and women—to make them more productive, happier, healthier, and to suppress negative behaviors, especially those related to delinquency and violence. Now three scholars from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seek to study further exactly how marriage manages to change previously criminal behaviors. What they find is that marriage actually interacts with a person’s genetic makeup to suppress violent and delinquent behavior.

The researchers begin by highlighting the need for their research. While previous studies into gene-environment interaction (G X E) have limited their focus to one or a few genes, their study examines “a large number of genetic variants.” They explain, “Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health . . . we examined whether marriage moderates the collective influence of 580 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 64 genes on delinquency and violence.” This broadened scope is necessary, the researchers claim, because “[a]ntisocial behavior . . . is influenced by a large number of genes.” Their study method “estimates a heritability parameter: the proportion of variance in the phenotype that is jointly explained by the SNPs. We examined the Gene X Marriage interaction by comparing the proportion of variance in antisocial behavior explained by 580 SNPs among married and unmarried individuals.”

For their measures, the researchers used “delinquency and violence,” including theft, selling drugs, breaking and entering, physical fighting, and use of weapons, among other indicators. A second measure was “desistence,” the process through which delinquent individuals gave up their delinquent or violent behaviors. The researchers controlled for a number of variables, including “age, gender, race, education, churchgoing frequency, household size, verbal IQ . . . score, parental education, closeness to parents, and bio-ancestry scores.” First, they examined the moderating effect of marriage in a generalized estimating equation. Next, they extended the model to estimate “the proportion of phenotypic variance that is accounted for by the linear, additive effects of the SNPs.”

The researchers discovered that marriage does indeed suppress genetic influences towards antisocial behavior: “Overall, the percentage of variance [in antisocial behavior] explained was significantly smaller in married individuals than in unmarried individuals, suggesting that marriage may suppress the collective influence of the genes.” Aware that selection, age, and population heterogeneity (defined as “individuals’ different propensity to engage in deviant behavior”) may all confound the effects of their findings, the researchers ran separate analyses. For all three, the marriage effect remained.

In closing, the researchers discuss the implications of their findings: “Past inquiries about the effect of marriage on antisocial behavior have primarily focused on the social, behavioral, and psychological aspects. . . . We found that marriage could work through a biological pathway—the modification of genetic effects—to deter delinquency and violence.” They highlight that though many other studies have made it seem as though environment has little effect on biology, theirs actually shows the opposite: “The effect of genes was conditional on the environment.”

So powerful is the effect of marriage, in other words, that it even alters the expression of biology. Policymakers should take such findings into account when discussing how best to curb violence and crime.

Source: Bryce Christensen and Nicole King, “New Research,” The Family in America 29.4, 2015. Study: Yi Li, Hexuan Liu, and Guang Guo, “Does Marriage Moderate Genetic Effects on Delinquency and Violence?” Journal of Marriage and Family 77 [October 2015]: 1,217-33. DOI: 10.1111/jomp.12208.   

Republished from The Family in America with permission.