You claim that being male is a huge red flag towards violence. It’s simply not. The vast majority of men are just as peaceful as the vast majority of women. Perpetrators of violence themselves are very rare. Being male is not the red flag you seem to think it is. As already mentioned, religion is better at predicting violence than gender is, so you can put that red flag of yours down.

You see, you’re approaching violence from the wrong direction. You’re trying to blame the actions of a few on an entire group of people unrelated to the perpetrators.

You’re starting at “I have a problem, who can I blame?”

However, to solve a problem, you don’t start with blame, you start with the problem.

So, for violence, 100% of violence is caused, unsuprisingly, by people who commit violence. This is the only group that deserves blame, period.

After that point, we break things down to see what they share in common.

So, I’m looking up that right now as I’m writing this.

…

And as often is the case, it turns out the truth is somewhere inbetween.

So I just looked up their most shared traits. The answer I found was in “The Archives of General Psychology” 51 1

The most predictive trait for violence is a combination of the following:

Impulsivness & Alocholism & antisocialism & low levels of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid in cerebral fluid.

This combination can happen in either gender. To be fair, the combination is more common in men (5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid regulates free testosterone in both men and women, women, having lower testosterone production simply take longer for low 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid levels to catch up with them), but being male just increases the risk, it doesn’t guarantee it. And due to cultural reasons, men are more likely to become alcoholics, and women are more likely to shun men than vice-versa which increases male’s risk of being forced into anti-socialism. Impulsiveness, however, is more often traditionally considered a feminine trait, although I’ve never seen research to support or contradict it.

So men are at higher risk, but only marginally.

And since we can’t see low levels of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, what you really want to watch out for are impulsive antisocial drinkers. So regardless, any stranger following you alone out of a bar, regardless of gender, has already met all three visible critera.