Development levels or divergent cultural age-graded norms? A comparative analysis of age-homicide distributions in China and the United States

Background

Age is a pivotal social marker. While Hirschi & Gottfredson (1983 & 2019) advocate for a universal age-crime curve, others highlight significant variation across societies and by crime type. Whether the age-crime distribution is primarily driven by development or age-related cultural norms remains a subject of debate. Most studies have focused on developed societies, whereas research in less developed contexts and rigorous cross-cultural comparisons remain scarce due to limited data availability.

Methods

Through innovative data mining techniques, we systematically analyzed homicide data from China Judgments Online and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, comparing age-crime patterns of China against both U.S. empirical distributions and the inverted J-shaped curve predicted by HG. The analysis further incorporates urban-rural comparisons and examines four distinct homicide typologies within the Chinese context.

Results

The findings demonstrate that China's age-homicide patterns deviate markedly from both U.S. empirical distributions and the inverted J-shaped relationship, with a peak age of 30 and over 50 % of offenders beyond their late 30s. This distinctive pattern, characterized by a more symmetric distribution and a secondary peak around the early 50s, persists across China's diverse development landscape (including both urban and rural contexts) and appears particularly pronounced in terms of economic-driven homicide.

Conclusions

These findings provide strong evidence against the universality of the age-crime relationship, revealing distinctly different age patterns in Chinese homicides that persist across urban-rural divisions and vary by homicide type. These results project a more important role of sociocultural contexts in shaping age-crime relationships compared to the effects of development levels.