Walsh, Anthony. Sexuality and Crime: A Neo-Darwinian Perspective. Routledge, 2023.
There was a time when criminals knew the meaning of fear. They feared the noose. They feared the prospect of being put in chains and shipped off to a distant colony. They feared the shopkeeper who kept a revolver beneath the counter and who would use it without hesitation. That time is gone. The respectable people of today—those who work, who build, who obey the law—have been disarmed, both literally and philosophically. We are not only forbidden to resist crime; we are encouraged to make excuses for it.
Anthony Walsh’s Sexuality and Crime: A Neo-Darwinian Perspective is a book that refuses to make those excuses. His argument is simple but devastating: criminality is not just a product of environment. It is a genetic predisposition, an evolutionary strategy that has been rewarded by modern welfare policies and an increasingly limp-wristed justice system. If this seems shocking, it is only because we have spent the past sixty years pretending that every thief and murderer is merely the victim of a deprived childhood.
Walsh, however, takes us back to reality. Criminals are not like the rest of us. They have lower impulse control, higher aggression, and diminished ability to foresee consequences. These traits are not learned; they are hardwired. A child born to violent criminals is more likely to grow up violent, even if raised in a different household. A child born to honest, industrious parents is unlikely to develop a compulsion for robbery or murder. In any other species, this would not be controversial. No one argues that a wolf raised by rabbits will become a vegetarian. But say the same about humans, and you are a dangerous reactionary.
A few hundred years ago, a violent man who could not control himself met one of three fates if caught. He was hanged. He was transported. Or he was shot in the course of committing his crimes. He was removed from society, permanently. He did not reproduce. He did not pass on his violent tendencies to another generation.
Contrast this with today. A young thug, instead of being hanged, is placed in a prison where he receives free food, free shelter, and free legal aid to challenge his sentence. If he manages to avoid prison, he is rewarded with state benefits, housing allowances, and—if he is sufficiently prolific—a respectable income simply by impregnating enough equally useless women. The result is predictable. The criminal classes have not been reduced; they have expanded. Where once they were a regrettable but contained part of society, they now breed without limit, subsidised by the taxes of the people they prey upon.
Walsh’s research makes it clear that criminality is highly heritable. This means that policies that allow criminals to reproduce at will, while discouraging the respectable from having children, are not merely foolish—they are suicidal. The welfare state, far from being an instrument of compassion, has become a mechanism for preserving and expanding the classes that once would have been pruned by the natural forces of justice.
The answer to this problem is as obvious as it is unpopular. If crime is genetic, then crime must be removed at the source. We must find a way to ensure that those predisposed to criminality do not become a growing percentage of the population. We must stop funding their endless reproduction. And, above all, we must restore the fear of punishment.
This means bringing back the death penalty for the most serious crimes. No more twenty-year appeals processes, no more lavish defence teams ensuring that a man who has beaten an old woman to death will spend the rest of his life watching television at taxpayer expense. A trial, a conviction, and a swift execution.
It also means an end to the ludicrous restrictions on self-defence. A man’s home should be his castle, and a shopkeeper should not have to hesitate before pulling a gun on a looter. There was a time when criminals feared armed homeowners. Now it is the other way around. The respectable fear prosecution for defending themselves, while the criminal carries on without concern.
If Walsh’s book has a flaw, it is that it does not go far enough. He lays out the biological case for crime, but he is too restrained in discussing solutions. It is not enough to acknowledge that criminals are born rather than made. We must ask: what do we do with that knowledge? The answer is obvious. We must return to what worked.
There was a time when crime was less common than it has become, not because men were more moral, but because the consequences of crime were real. A man who stole might lose a hand. A man who killed might swing from a rope. The modern liberal recoils from such things, insisting that they are barbaric. But what, then, is civilisation? A society where honest men fear to walk the streets is not civilised. A society where the law punishes the defender more harshly than the attacker is not civilised.
We must look hard at the policies of recent generations. We must see them for what they are: a colossal, unforgivable mistake. We must end the policies that encourage the reproduction of the criminal classes. We must restore the right of the respectable to defend themselves. We must make criminals fear the consequences of their actions once again.
Walsh’s Sexuality and Crime is an important book, but it is not enough to read it and nod sagely. The facts are known. The only question is whether we will have the courage to act on them.
