Introduction
Intimate partner violence is all too common throughout the world and takes many forms. The most serious of these is homicide by an intimate partner. The fear of being killed, in fact, is a major dynamic in male-on-female violence and sometimes in motivating women to kill the perpetrator of abuse out of fear or desperation.
Facts on Domestic Homicide
In the U.S., estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) are that more than three women a day are killed by their intimate partners. Women are killed by intimate partners more often than by another acquaintance of stranger. Most of these murders involved were preceded by physical and psychological abuse.
Outside the domestic realm, males are killed much more often than females; they are killed most often in fights with other men.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, 1,055 women and 287 men were murdered by their intimate partners in 2005. These figures are striking, because in the past, in the 1970s and earlier, the numbers of men and women so victimized were about even. In other words, there has been a significant decline in the numbers of men killed by their partners but not for women.
The number of men who were murdered by intimates dropped by 75% between 1976 and 2005 (BJS). The number of black females murdered in this time has declined but the number of white females murdered has dropped only by 6%. Statistics Canada (1998, 2005), similarly, reveals a sharp decline in the numbers of male domestic homicide victims but not of female victims of homicide.
The reason that women are resorting less to murder of their partners is most likely because many of these women were battered women who felt trapped in a dangerous situation. Today, the presence of violence prevention programming and the availability of shelters are paving the way to other options. The fact that domestic violence services apparently are saving the lives of more men than women is a positive, though unintended consequence of the women’s shelter movement (see van Wormer and Bartollas, 2007).
Situations of Domestic Murder Suicide
The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) is a recently developed state-based surveillance system that includes data from 17 states as of 2007. Now for the first time, a national data base exists that reveals the numbers of homicides that end in suicide. The goal is to collect data on homicide for all 50 states. Results so far reveal that over 90% of the perpetrators of murder-suicide are male. About one third of these male perpetuated homicides end in suicide. (Data available at www.nvdrs.com.)
These results are consistent with those of the Violence Policy Center (VPC). The VPC bases their findings on an Internet search of media accounts of deaths by murder-suicide. VPC reports that a total of 591 murder-suicide deaths took place nationwide in the six months between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2005.
As reported by the Violence Policy Center (2005), the pattern of the murder-suicide is predictable: the pattern involves a male perpetrator, female victim, a decision by the woman to leave the man, and a gun. A handgun was used in 92% of the incidents. The offender was 6.3 years older on average than the victim. Texas had the highest number of cases; the typical Florida pattern involved an elderly male caregiver overwhelmed by his inability to care for an infirmed wife.
Some researchers argue that murder is the primary motive in such cases; others point to the double and multiple killings as a form of extended suicide (van Wormer and Bartollas, 2007). The urge to kill can be described as an urge toward total self-destruction including the destruction of the person who rejected him.
The pattern that emerges in these cases involves intimate partners in the 20 to 35-year-old range: The man is abusive, psychologically and/or physically. Obsessed with the woman to the extent that he feels he can’t live without her, he is fiercely jealous and determined to isolate her.
Characteristically, suicidal murderers have little regard for the lives of other people; they would be considered, in mental health jargon, to be antisocial. Yet they are so emotionally dependent on their wives or girlfriends that they would sooner be dead than to live without them. When the girlfriend/wife makes a move to leave, her partner is absolutely distraught in the belief that he can’t live without her.
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