Is Domestic Homicide a "Gender Thing"?

I'm not sure this is a gender thing. I mean, there are plenty of examples of women engaging in unconscionable violence against the family – Andrea Yates, Susan Smith, that doctor from Illinois (I can’t remember her name). The interesting thing is that many of these and other women who murder their children are found NGRI. It must be insanity, we reason, for a woman to kill her children. I can’t think of a single case where a man who killed his kids was found NGRI. To be sure, this is a bit of a separate issue, because ABP is talking about IPV – not killing of kids. But I’m sure there are plenty of examples of women killing their partners (anyone know the data on this?). When a man kills a women in any context it is not a good thing – but it is especially vituperative when it is done in the company of the child. My point is that we have cases where women act in violent ways that don’t make sense to us, just like these men have done. It doesn’t make sense for a father to kill the mother of his children in front of the children. It just doesn’t. If we could figure out the cause or how to prevent it – now that would be something to be thankful for…
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Thanks to Patch for raising these questions, and for providing me with an opportunity to offer some information about the role of gender in domestic homicide -- that is, intimate partner homicide as well as filicide, or the murder of one's own child(ren).

So, is domestic homicide a "gender thing"? This is a good question. There are a couple of issues that are important to address in order to answer this question.

First, a good way to determine whether gender plays a role in intimate partner homicide is to examine patterns in national data. According to a recent BJS report on intimate homicide trends, since 1975 the number of women killed by an intimate partner has outpaced the number of men killed by an intimate partner. While the margin of difference was relatively small in 1975 (roughly 1.2 female victims for every male victim), by 2005 male intimate homicides (but not female intimate homicides) had declined drastically, putting the ratio at roughly 3.6 female victims for every male victim:


In addition, female murder victims are ten times more likely than male murder victims to have been killed by an intimate partner (3% of all male murders are committed by intimate partners, compared to about one third of all female murders). So, speaking in general terms, intimate partner homicide is a gendered crime to the extent that women are victimized much more frequently than men.

Beyond that is the issue of women's versus men's use of lethal violence in intimate relationships. As Patch pointed out, women do kill their intimate partners. However, there is substantial evidence -- and not in just feminist scholarship, by the way, but also in "mainstream" criminological scholarship -- that most women who kill their intimate partners had experienced a history of violent victimization by that partner. According to Dugan, Nagin, & Rosenfeld (1999), one of the "consistent findings" of IPV research is that "victim precipitation is common in cases of women killing their partner, whereas it is unusual in cases of men killing their partner" (p. 190). As with IPV more generally, there is NOT gender symmetry in intimate partner homicide; while women do kill their intimate partners, they do so for different reasons and with far less frequency.

Specifically, while women tend to kill their intimate partners in response to prolonged (and often extremely injurious) abuse, men tend to kill their intimate partners in response to women's attempts to separate or end the relationship. This finding has been supported by both empiricial research (see, for example, Stout & Brown, 1999) as well as anecodtal evidence like the news articles I linked to in my original post. In fact, increased violence following a period of separation or attempted separation is so common that it has its own term: “separation assault” (Mahoney, 1991). It is widely recognized that perhaps the most dangerous period of time for a female IPV victim is immediately after she moves out, files for divorce, or otherwise makes an effort to leave her partner, as this critical time is when lethal violence is particularly likely to occur. Of course there are always exceptions, but in general women kill intimate partners who beat them, while men kill intimate partners who leave them.

Further evidence of the role gender plays in domestic homicide is the frequency with which men commit "familicide," or the murder of one's spouse and children. As Wilson, Daly, & Daniele (1995) point out, women almost never are responsible for crimes in which both their intimate partner and their children are murdered -- this crime is almost exclusively male-perpetrated. Then there is the related issue of suicide. Very few of the women who kill their intimate partners commit suicide afterward, while by some estimates as many as half of male-to-female intimate partner homicides end with the perpetrator committing suicide. Together these findings lend credence to the idea that men's use of lethal violence against their intimate partners is rooted in power, control, and domination. In societies like ours in which gender is power, we can safely assume that intimate partner homicide is a gendered event.

Finally, there is evidence to suggest that filicide -- the murder of one's child(ren) -- follows similar patterns. A recent Journal of Family Violence study examined filicides in Quebec by sex of and presence of self-destructive behaviors in the perpetrator (Leveillee, Marleau, & Dube, 2007). The authors note that men who kill their children often do so within the context of IPV, while this tends not to be the case for women. In addition, depressive disorders are more common among filicidal women than men who exhibit no self-destructive behaviors:

"[M]en compared to women are more likely to commit spousal homicide, to kill a higher number of victims, to be going through a conjugal separation, to have committed conjugal violence, to have threatened suicide, and to have threatened to kill their spouse. For the group of individuals who commit no self-destructive acts, women are more likely to present with a depressive disorder, whereas men are more likely to [have] maltreated their children. Men who do not commit a self-destructive act are characterized by a significantly higher likelihood of maltreatment against their children and of tyrannical discipline, whereas men who commit a self-destructive act perpetrate filicide as a means of reprisal against their spouse. Results underscore the importance of considering the different groups of individuals who commit filicide as a function of sex as well as presence or absence of self-destructive behaviour" (p. 287).

One last thing about NGRI verdicts for women who kill their children. Yes it is true that women who kill their children sometimes are found NGRI. While I am not as familiar with this literature as I am with the domestic homicide literature, I do know that these verdicts often are returned in cases in which the mother suffered from a diagnosed and documented mental illness. In Andrea Yates' case it was postpartum psychosis. She had been institutionalized several times, had attempted suicide more than once, and by all accounts was in exceedingly fragile mental health at the time she killed her children. Similarly, Regina Moss Monroe (who threw her three children to their deaths off a bridge because she believed that God had instructed her to do so) also had a diagnosed mental illness. Does this mean that all women who kill their kids are insane? No. Do some women kill their kids simply out of convenience, or poor anger management skills, or neglect? Of course. Does it make the deaths of the children any less tragic when the mother is declared insane? By no means. But it is important to note that, especially in some of the most well-publicized cases, filicidal mothers often have a history of, well, insanity. This may be less true for filicidal fathers because these murders tend to happen in the context of intimate partner homicide, as I mentioned above. (For more on issues of gender and mental illness in cases of maternal filicide, see West & Lichtenstein, 2006).

Gendered patterns in intimate partner homicide (as well as filicide and familicide) attest to major differences in men's and women's use of and motivations for committing lethal violence against intimate partners. Sadly, men's use of lethal violence often boils down to "if I can't have you, no-one can," even (and sometimes especially) if that means killing the children (and/or themselves) to emphasize the point. While there may be isolated cases of women killing their partners for similar reasons, the totality of the evidence demonstrates that domestic homicide is indeed a "gender thing".

1. Dugan, L., Nagin, D., & Rosenfeld, R. (1999). Explaining the decline in intimate partner homicide: The effects of changing domesticity, women's status, and domestic violence resources. Homicide Studies, 3(3), 187-214.
   
2. Mahoney, M. R. (1991). Legal images of battered women: Redefining the issue of separation. Michigan Law Review, 90, 1-94.
3. Stout, K. & Brown, P. (1995). Legal and social differences between men and women who kill intimate partners. Affilia, 10, 194-205.
   
4. West, D. & Lichtenstein, B. (2006). Andrea Yates and the criminalization of the filicidal maternal body. Feminist Criminology, 1(3), 173-187).
5. Wilson, M., Daly, M., & Dainele, A. (1995). Familicide: the killing of spouse and children. Aggressive Behavior, 21(4), 275-291.