Flickr / Keirsten Marie If you're even remotely interested in true crime, boy, have the last couple years been good to you.

First, there was the mega-hit podcast Serial, which launched in October 2014. Several months later, HBO released "The Jinx," a six-episode documentary investigating multi-millionaire Robert Durst. And just a few months ago, Netflix threw its hat in the ring with "Making A Murderer."

As captivating as these programs were for the general public, one group in particular has become particularly enthusiastic about the genre: young women.

Take the fast-rising true crime podcast "Sword and Scale" as the most recent example.

"Most of my fans are female," Michael Boudet, the show's host, told Mashable last month. "70% of my fans are female between the ages of 25-45." And so it goes for television and books as well.

According to Dr. Howard Forman, forensic psychiatrist at Montefiore Medical Center, the trend is rooted in empathy.

"By the time you get to adulthood, women are able to empathize to a greater degree than men, on average," Forman tells Tech Insider. "That may lead to true crime being more interesting to women than men, simply because if you empathize more with the victim, it may be more relevant to you and more gripping."

Empathy doesn't tell the whole story, though.

It'd be one thing if women watched significantly more TV than men, but the difference tips in women's favor only slightly. Forman suspects there's actually something unique about the genre of true crime itself that speaks to women in ways it doesn't for men.

He points to a handful of factors:

Historically, society has been exposed to death only through men dying, so we have developed a certain numbness toward it. We may still be sensitive to women dying (something that true crime stories aren't afraid to show), which plays into the larger sense of empathy.

Women haven't been given the same latitude, socially, to be aggressive like men have. True crime may let women tap into something darker than they'd normally express in daily life.

On-screen victims let female viewers temporarily live through the victim they're watching. Forman calls this a "sublimation process."

Amanda Vicary, assistant professor of psychology at Illinois Wesleyan University, offers yet another explanation: True crime serves as a kind of guidebook for women, offering useful tips for staying safe.

That's the conclusion she and her colleague R. Chris Fraley came to in their 2010 study of women and true crime. According to their report, women often reported finding "potential life-saving knowledge" from the novels they read.

"One of the reasons women may enjoy crime books and television shows more than men is because women fear being crime victims a lot more than men do," Vicary tells Tech Insider, "even though men are statistically much more likely to be murdered."

By a similar token, fictional shows like "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" attract audiences dominated by women, fueled in part perhaps by a morbid sense of "What if?".

"Though I cannot watch a person get sliced and diced in a movie, I will read about serial killers on Wikipedia all day," Jezebel's Lindy West wrote in 2012. "And I will watch any police procedural about any kind of murder or terror or menace. I can't get enough."

That obsession is likely only to get more pronounced as time goes on and more podcasts, TV shows, movies, and books cater to the women who rabidly consume them. Vicary would just like to offer a word of caution.

"All this focus on crime may be resulting in a vicious cycle for women," she says. "They fear being a victim of a crime, so they may subconsciously turn to crime books or television shows to learn ways to prevent being a victim. This in turn exposes them to even more crime, perhaps increasing their worry even more."