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Expert answer:Respond to each of the below questions with a response of at least 200 words.It has been said that the testimony of forensic experts can dominate a trial. Conduct some internet research on a well-documented death investigation trial, focusing on the forensic evidence presentations and experts (for example, the Casey Anthony trial or the Scott Peterson trial). Do you believe each side presented the information as best they could? Do you think the experts maintained their integrity and honesty throughout the testimony? If you simply looked at the physical evidence, would you consider the defendant guilty of the crimes they were charged with? Closely examine Chapter 11 and identify one piece of information that you found the most intriguing regarding the different types of murders and murderers. (Chapter 11 is attached)
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CHAPTER 11 Comparing Women and Men Who Kill
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Jennifer Schwartz
Washington State University
Homicide is a rare occurrence, especially among women. But how rare is it? Are some
women more likely to kill than other women? Have women increased their involvement in
homicide as they have increased their involvement in paid work and other previously male
domains? When women kill, do they go about it differently than men? How does being a
woman, or being a man, shape the ways in which people commit homicide? What accounts
for the large difference in male and female homicide offending? Do women and men kill for
the same reasons or do sources of homicide differ by gender? This chapter reviews the
literature on homicide offending and presents data from the Supplementary Homicide
Reports (SHR) to address these questions about similarities and differences in female and
male homicide offending.
Fewer than 1% of all crimes committed last year were homicide offenses. Even so, this crime
is the focus of much attention from the media and from criminologists who systematically
study crime, in part because of the severity of the offense. Criminologists also study
homicide because it is the most accurately measured offense and the offense for which the
most statistical data are available at the national level. Moreover, the characteristics of
homicide events are very similar to those for aggravated assault and other forms of violence.
Therefore, studying homicide offending yields lessons about the causes and contexts of
violence more generally. By exploring female and male homicide patterns, criminologists
develop a more holistic picture of violent offending and get a sense of how similar or
different the behaviors of the two sexes are. It should be noted, however, that gender
differences are more apparent for offenses that are more serious in nature; gender
similarities are greatest for minor sorts of violence, such as simple assault.
The Supplementary Homicide Reports are official, police-recorded statistics on almost all
murders and non-negligent manslaughter incidents in the United States. Police record
information on a voluntary basis on over 90% of the homicides of which they are aware. The
FBI has accurately and consistently compiled these reports since the late 1970s. The SHR
include demographic characteristics of the victims and offenders, their relationship to one
another, and the situational features of the homicide incident, such as weapon used,
motives, or circumstances. Because the SHR data include information on homicides still
under investigation, information is incomplete for approximately 25% of the cases.
Therefore, the involvement of young males is probably understated because they are more
typically the perpetrators in the more difficult-to-solve stranger homicide cases. Using
advanced statistical procedures to gain precision allows us to “guess” the characteristics of
offenders based on their victims, minimizing the missing data problem (Fox, 2004).
Therefore, SHR data present a fairly detailed nationwide portrait of homicide incidents,
offenders, and victims. These data also allow researchers to describe changes in homicide
offending over time.
In this chapter, the SHR data are used to detail the extent of female and male homicide
offending. Then, in tandem with more detailed case analyses, we generate a portrait of the
female and male homicide offenders.
EXTENT OF FEMALE AND MALE HOMICIDE
OFFENDING
Of the 16,667 homicide victims identified in the United States in 2005, 3545 (21%) were
women. Male and female victimization rates per 100,000 population were 8.7 and 2.4,
respectively. As demonstrated by these statistics, homicide is a rare phenomenon. In comparison,
deaths resulting from heart disease, accidents, and pneumonia are all far more common, but in all
of these scenarios—including homicide—the death rate for men far exceeds the death rate for
women. This gender disparity is even larger for homicide offending. In 2005, police were able to
identify 19,127 homicide offenders, 17,301 of whom were men and 1826 of whom were women.
Homicide offending rates for 2005 were 11.9 per 100,000 men and 1.2 per 100,000 women.
Females represent only 9.5% of homicide offenders. Thus the large majority of perpetrators and
victims of homicide are men.
Among both female and male homicide offenders, young adults (ages 18 to 24) have the highest
rates of offending. Classified by gender and race, black males have higher homicide rates than
white males, and black females have higher homicide rates than white females. Taken together,
the offending rates of adolescent white girls (ages 14 to 17) are exceptionally low—0.7 per
100,000 is arrested for homicide. Black males aged 18 to 24 have the highest homicide offending
rates (203.3 per 100,000). In between the two extremes are homicide rates of white males,
followed by rates of black females. Within race groups, women make up a similar proportion of
all homicide offenders—11% of white homicide offenders and 8% of black homicide offenders
are women.
Homicide offending in the United States peaked in the early 1990s, but has since declined so that
current rates are lower than those in the early 1980s (Fox & Zawitz, 2011). Rates of offending by
black males dropped sharply in the mid-1990s and continue to decline, albeit at a slower pace.
The trends of white males mirrored those of black males, but the declines were not as steep and
seem to have leveled off by the early 2000s. The homicide rates of black and white females
match one another and are characterized by steady declines since the 1980s. Driving the
downward trend is a large drop in women’s rates of intimate-partner homicide (trends in various
sorts of homicide are discussed in more detail later in this chapter). The homicide rates of 14- to
17-year-olds were slightly elevated in the early 1990s; adolescent rates are less driven by
intimate-partner homicide, in part because of these youths’ lower exposure to intimate partners
and lesser access to guns compared to other subgroups.
Generally, female trends in homicide mirror male trends in homicide, although women’s
involvement has been and remains very low in comparison to men. In fact, female representation
among homicide offenders is somewhat lower today than it was almost 25 years ago
(approximately 13% in 1980 compared to approximately 11% today). This consistency holds
across age groups. Female representation dropped most sharply in the early 1990s when male
rates were rapidly increasing, but the continued lower representation of females indicates female
rates moved in tandem with male rates. The gender gap for 14- to 17-year-olds temporarily
narrowed in the late 1990s and early 2000 because female declines were not as dramatic as male
declines in that age group. The main conclusion, however, is that the gender gap in homicide
has widened somewhat since the 1980s for all age and race groups.
The gender gap was declining even when effects of the women’s movement might have been
strongest in the 1980s and when women’s arrest rates for assault were rising in the early 1990s.
This stability in the gender gap is at odds with the widely held perception that women are
becoming more violent, as suggested by the narrowing gender gap in arrests for assault offenses
(Steffensmeier, Schwartz, Zhong, & Ackerman, 2005). Some commentators have interpreted
increases in women’s assault arrests as the ill effects of changing gender roles that have made
female behaviors more masculine, but overall trends in homicide suggest otherwise.
In this chapter, we further explore the idea that changing gender roles might have altered the
context of women’s offending. On the one hand, if this is the case, we would expect women to
increasingly kill strangers in felony-related homicides—in the past, a distinctly male scenario.
Alternatively, perhaps female–female violence would be more likely as women start to interact
with one another more like men do, including using violence to solve problems. On the other
hand, if gender roles have not changed, or if they have not changed in a way that affects
homicide and violent crime, stability in the context of women’s and men’s offending would be
expected.
To examine these issues, we generate and examine statistics that indicate whether the extent and
type of homicide committed by women and men have changed from 1980 to the present. Aside
from addressing the theoretical debate regarding the effects of social change on women’s
homicide offending patterns, there are other good reasons to study female homicide, despite its
statistical rarity.
WHY STUDY FEMALE HOMICIDE?
Some might question why the study of female homicide is warranted. A number of reasons can
be cited for why such study is necessary.
First, despite its low incidence, women’s homicide offending may have wider-reaching
consequences for future crime trends than male offending because women are typically the
primary caregivers for children in U.S. society. Incarcerated female homicide offenders are more
likely to leave children behind, both compared to other types of female offenders and compared
to male offenders of all types. Although obviously it is not desirable for children to have
homicidal mothers, female offenders tend to direct their aggression against abusive partners
rather than their children, and most do not have any prior arrests.
Second, no other violent crime is measured as accurately and precisely as homicide offending,
making homicide a good barometer for violent offending in general, despite homicide’s
comparatively low frequency. Indeed, many criminologists consider homicide to be an overly
successful assault. Therefore, similar distributional patterns in victim–offender relationship,
motive, and so forth likely hold for assault offending. Note, however, that the gender gap
systematically narrows as less serious violence is considered, so that women are far more
involved in simple assault (accounting for approximately 25% of arrests), which includes minor
harm such as scratching or shoving, versus aggravated assault (20%) or homicide (10%).
Third, studying female homicide offending, and comparative research more generally, can help
clarify our current understanding of causes of violent offending. If women’s homicide patterns
do not fit with dominant theories of crime, these discrepancies should challenge criminologists to
refine their explanations of criminal offending. Moreover, studying female homicide offending is
useful in and of itself for better understanding and demonstrating the pervasive influence of
gender on behavior, even in extreme actions such as taking the life of another. Men and women
kill in ways that reflect their gender roles. We now explore patterns of female and male homicide
to demonstrate this point.
WOMEN’S AND MEN’S OFFENDING PATTERNS: A
QUANTITATIVE COMPARISON
Criminologists may characterize female and male homicide offending as either very similar or
very different depending on the lens they use to view homicide offending. Many approaches to
studying gender differences in homicide offending are possible, ranging from interviews with
convicted offenders, to in-depth analyses of legal documents generated in the criminal justice
system, to secondary data analysis of police records. Each methodology produces a slightly
different picture of gender and homicide, making it important to look at multiple sources of
evidence. No matter which methodology is used, the findings must be interpreted, and the
researcher’s theoretical orientation to gender differences—whether women and men are viewed
as fundamentally alike or essentially different—is likely to color this interpretation. The truth
probably lies somewhere in the middle: There are both gender similarities and differences in
homicide offending.
Consider the following prototypical examples of a male homicide versus a female homicide:
• The offender, Stephen, and the victim, Mark, have each spent the evening drinking in bars with
friends before happening to go to the same nightclub. By this time, about 1 A.M., both men were
drunk. Stephen and Mark had seen each other around before, but didn’t really know each other.
For reasons that are not obvious, Mark, with his friends watching nearby, makes repeated
derogatory comments to Stephen. Mark had a reputation for getting into fights. Stephen, with his
friends looking on, tells Mark to “[expletive] off” and, on a subsequent occasion, warns him he’ll
hit him if Mark provokes him again. Stephen has been arrested before, but has not served time for
a violent offense. Mark makes a verbal threat, Stephen lands one solid blow to Mark’s face, and
Mark falls to the floor unconscious. Mark dies of a brain hemorrhage (Brookman, 2005, p. 128).
During five years of marriage, both the offender and her husband drank heavily. Things were OK
until the last year of marriage, when he would drink and become violent. He would beat her,
sometimes to the point of where she had to go to the emergency room of a local hospital…. One
night, after he had been drinking to excess, he heard her talking on the telephone. He thought it
was another man and became enraged. He began to strangle her with the telephone cord. She
freed herself and ran into the kitchen. He started to strangle her with his hands. She reached into
the sink where she found a knife that she used to stab him to death (Brownstein et al., 1994, p.
105).
Based on these two cases, how alike or different are these two homicide cases? The two events
are similar in that neither homicide was planned but rather resulted from an argument, spurred in
part by the use of alcohol, which escalated into physical violence. Both incidents took place late
at night, probably on a weekend. Both victims were male and, to some extent, provoked their
attack.
The circumstances surrounding these two deaths, however, might also be characterized as very
different. The male’s victim was a casual acquaintance or stranger, whereas the female offender
was married to her victim. Although the female offender could claim self-defense and had no
prior record, the male offender was not protecting himself, and both he and the victim had
previous involvements with the law. Finally, the location of the two events differed—the female
offender killed at home, and the male offender in public at a bar. We more systematically explore
these differences in delineating a portrait of male and female homicide offenders, by drawing on
the Supplementary Homicide Reports.
Victim-Offender Relationship
Perhaps the most crucial gender difference in homicide offending relates to who women and men
kill. Overwhelmingly, females kill family members. In fact, almost 60% of female homicide
offenders kill an intimate partner, child, or other family member. Men, in comparison, kill a
family member approximately 20% of the time. In almost one-third of female homicides, her
victim is a boyfriend, husband, or former partner. Children are the next most common targets of
women’s homicide (19%). In comparison, approximately 13% of men’s homicides are directed
against intimates and 3% against children. Consequently, the large majority of women’s victims,
roughly 75%, are men. Likewise, 75% of males’ victims are men, but male offenders’ targets are
acquaintances approximately half the time. Men kill strangers (29%) more often than they kill
family members (22%). In contrast, women rarely kill strangers (10%) and only sometimes kill
acquaintances (33%).
Importantly, there is no marked shift among women in the relational aspects of their homicide
offending profile. If gender roles were shifting in ways that affected homicide offending patterns,
one might expect to see a shift toward stranger homicide or, perhaps, acquaintance homicide. In
fact, no such shift is evident. The distribution of women’s victims has remained essentially the
same over the past 25 or so years—approximately 60% family, 30% acquaintances, and 10%
strangers. One notable change, however, is the decrease in the percentage of victims who are
intimate partners (from 49% of women’s victims to 29%).
Women’s rates of intimate-partner homicide have dropped precipitously since 1980; by
comparison, women’s intimate-partner homicide rates in 1980 were four times higher than
current rates. Men’s rates of intimate-partner violence have dropped as well, but not as much as
women’s rates (men’s rates in 1980 were roughly twice as high as present rates). In fact,
women’s rates of homicide are down since 1980 for every victim–offender relationship category
and family subcategory, though by far the greatest decline is in intimate-partner homicide.
Declines in male acquaintance and stranger homicides are also notable: Rates of each have
dropped by more than half since 1990; 1990 rates were marginally higher than rates in 1980.
Since 1990, the declines in male rates of stranger and acquaintance homicide outpaced female
declines.
The gender gap in homicide offending is greatest for stranger homicides. Females have
consistently accounted for only 5% to 7% of those individuals identified as perpetrators of a
stranger homicide. Women’s representation in homicides against acquaintances is also low and
unchanged: Between 1980 and the present, 7% to 10% of these offenders were women. The
gender gap is narrowest for homicides against family members (including intimates). More than
25% of homicides against family are now committed by female offenders, which represents quite
a drop from the 40% rate noted in 1980. Notably, women are still underrepresented as offenders,
given that they make up half the population.
Women are not underrepresented as homicide offenders in terms of those individuals who
victimized young children (ages 0 to 12). Women account for almost half of all offenders
arrested for child homicide. Female involvement in child homicide declines with victim age,
however, so that the gender gap is 50% for infanticides, 33% for toddlers, and 21% for older
children. These gender gap percentages are nearly identical to those identified in 1980 and 1990.
In terms of victim selection, women more often offend against infants (37% of child victims),
whereas males offend against older children (27% of child victims). Toddlers are the most
vulnerable age group, accounting for roughly half of both women’s and men’s non-adult victims.
Motives and Circumstances
The immediate motivation for the majority of both women’s and men’s homicides are arguments
and fights. Nearly half of all homicides, committed by men or women, occur because of some
sort of argument or fight, such as a conflict over money or property, anger over one partner
cheating on the other, severe punishment of a child or abuse of a partner, retaliation for an earlier
dispute, or a drunken fight over an insult or other affront. In addition, qualitative analyses
(discussed in more depth later in this chapter) show that many female homicides that result from
an argument are often directed against the violence or abuse of a partner and may be viewed as
“extra-legal” self-help, or even self-defense. Incidents of severe child abuse are also categorized
as arguments however. Less common are arguments with friends, neighbors, or acquaintances
that end in homicide (Jurik & Winn, 1990).
The second most common male homicide circumstance is felony related (Wilbanks, 1983).
Approximately 25% of men’s homicides, compared to 15% of women’s homicides, occur within
the context of committing another felony. Almost half the time these sorts of homicides are
related to a robbery. Other felony-related homicides are related to drug dealing (one in five
felony homicides for men; one in eight for women) or, less commonly, burglary, arson, sex
offenses, or theft. Of note, female …
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