NCJ Number
205955
Journal
Homicide Studies Volume: 8 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2004 Pages: 96-122
Date Published
May 2004
Length
27 pages
Annotation
This study examined the social-level influences on the spousal sex ratio of killing (SROK), i.e., the ratio of females to males who kill an intimate partner.
Abstract
The development of the study was guided in a heuristic manner by Black's (1983) theory of crime as social control. Black noted that a great deal of homicide in modern societies is a response to what the offender regards as deviance by the victim. The killing of the victim thus becomes in the motivation of the perpetrator a form of "self-help" social control. Self-help social control is most likely to occur when formal legal intervention is relatively unavailable, which is often the case for intimate-partner conflicts. The motivation to exercise such social control in an intimate relationship vary by gender. Individual-level studies have shown that the typical situational motives associated with intimate partner homicide are different for men and women. Lethal self-help social control exercised by women on men is often precipitated by the victim in some abusive or threatening conflict. Killings by men, on the other hand, are generally related to efforts to dominate or control women and exhibit a sexual proprietariness and concern with fidelity that is seldom found to the same degree in women. In the current study the theoretical logic used in identifying predictive variables was premised on conceptualizing intimate partner homicide as a form of self-help social control with gender-specific motivations in its exercise. The focus was on identifying legal, compositional, and cultural characteristics of domestic life that could be expected to influence males and females differently. This should provide some explanation of the extraordinarily high SROK and variation in it across social units. Applied to cities in the United States with populations of 100,000 or more, the model predicted a significant proportion of variance in the rates of female and male killers (1984-1996) and in the SROK. The data used to construct the dependent variables -- male/female spouse killer rates, boyfriend/girlfriend killer rates, and their respective SROK's -- were made available through the FBI's (1984-1996) Supplementary Homicide Report Division. Most of the variables included in the model are significantly related to the rate of both male and female killers of domestic intimates. The study found that for the most part variables in the study that significantly changed the SROK across communities did so by lowering the ratio through reducing the female rate of participation relative to men or by increasing the male rate relative to women. If measures are ineffective in deterring men from abusing women in intimate relationships and the women have no effective means of escaping the abuse, then the probability of self-help social control by women through homicide increases. American cultural values generally and subcultural influences among American Blacks in particular apparently contribute to a high SROK in America. The contemporary structural and/or cultural consequences of social experiences in the United States as they impact domestic relationships are where an important part of the answer to the sociological question of who kills whom in spousal homicides seems to lie. 4 tables and 59 references