Female Murderers Research Articles

What is the gender motive? A comparison of the main approaches used in feminicide statistics and communication

Despite the widespread use of the term “femicide”, there are no agreed guidelines to define the phenomenon. This has led to frequent statistical contradictions. In recent years, two main approaches have emerged: the broad-range one, in which victims are often defined by the mere fact that the murderer was male, while motives are only auxiliary; in the second, instead, gender motives play the main role, following middle-range theory perspective. The aim will be to provide a new set of indicators to identify victims of femicide more precisely, distinguishing them from other female murders. The use of precise indicators is not limited to the classification of victims, as it can also enable more appropriate prevention programmes and more respectful communication.

(Ir)relevance of gender in judicial decision-making: reflections on treatment of female murderers in India

(Ir)relevance of gender in judicial decision-making: reflections on treatment of female murderers in India

(Ir)relevance of gender in judicial decision-making: reflections on treatment of female murderers in India

(Ir)relevance of gender in judicial decision-making: reflections on treatment of female murderers in India

Femicide and forensic pathology: Proposal for a shared medico-legal methodology

In a previous work, authors have proposed a medico-legal definition of femicide as the murder due to the failure to recognize the right of self-determination of women. The aim of this paper was to apply the proposed definition to a cohort of cases to characterise femicides and female homicides and assess whether femicides can be considered a distinct entity or not. A comparison between female and male homicides was performed to assess common and distinctive features. Femicides were identified and compared to the cohort of non-femicide female murder. Results were compared to those reported in published forensic studies.Significant associations between female and male homicides were found for sex and partner/ex-partner offender, sex and indoor homicide and sex and asphyxia as dynamic of death emerged. A higher prevalence of indoor homicides and asphyxiation and of partner relationships were documented in female homicides. Gunshot, blunt injuries and cut wounds are well represented in both types of homicides. Most affected sites are back and chest in male homicides, and head, breasts, pubis, and limbs in female homicides. When comparing femicides and female homicides, a positive association between strangulation as harmful mean and a negative one between femicides and indoor homicides were found.Male and female homicides can be considered as two distinct victimological phenomena. Focusing on femicide allows to establish injuries and circumstantial patterns, that could represent evidence of a specific murder. More studies with a standardized data collection are needed to corroborate the theory of this paper.

Female Murderers and Stigma: Coping With the "Bad Woman" Label.

Among the stereotypes of female delinquency, the article focuses on "bad women" par excellence, that is to say, those convicted of murder who have not benefited from the possibility of being perceived and portrayed as "victims" because of their unorthodox femininity. The aim of the study was to understand how the label of "bad woman" is incorporated into the narration of identity of five women condemned for murder; to this end, we focus on the narratives implemented in order to cope with the stigma (narrative criminology), tracing them back to their past and the traumatic experiences they lived (psychosocial criminology). Four narratives emerge: the denied stigma, the disregarded stigma, the despairing stigma and the processed stigma. Psychosocial criminology consents to "go beyond" the surface and to find a "fil rouge" that can explain the discrepancies and the contradictions found in the way of coping with the imposed label.

Female murderers who mutilate or dismember their victims: An exploration of patterns and sex differences.

Attributes and behavioral patterns of female homicide offenders have been less explored than those of males, particularly in crimes that involve aggravating factors such as dismemberment and mutilation. This study explored the patterns of female murderers who engage in postmortem dismemberment and/or mutilation of victims, contrasting these with the patterns of males who display these same behaviors. Cases were obtained from Radford-Florida Gulf Coast University Database and public sources, and then analyzed for specific characteristics of the crimes. An informational form was used to derive quantitative parameters. Statistical significance between sex and variables such as motive, dismemberment/mutilation style, and level of organization during the crime were examined. The majority of the cases were consistent with a defensive style. However, 23% of the cases involving females followed an offensive style compared to 33% among males. The nature of prior relationships between offenders and their victims was noteworthy, with the victims of males being largely strangers and the victims of females being primarily known to them. In comparison to males, females were markedly organized. These differences may emphasize aspects of psychological drives and pleasure-seeking that was more commonly seen among men, who often targeted strangers and were motivated by sadism in 25% of the cases. Dismemberment perpetrated by women primarily followed a defensive style that aimed to dispose of evidence, which would be congruent with the assumption that the murder occurred within a prior background of interpersonal partner violence toward the female perpetrator or other family members.

An Exploration of Female Mass Shooters

This research note provides an exploratory examination of female mass shooters in the United States between 1979 and 2019. Specifically, this work provides descriptive statistics of perpetrator, motivation, and incident characteristics. Findings indicate female mass shooters more closely align with male mass shooters than general female homicide and mass murder offenders. The most valuable findings indicate female mass shooters are not motivated by relationship disputes, they often target the workplace, and they are more likely to work in dyads, especially when engaging in ideologically motivated attacks. A discussion of findings provides insight for mass shooting and gender scholars, as well as practitioners seeking to understand female involvement in mass shootings.

True victims: men’s privilege, class, and violence against women in Making a Murderer and The Jinx

ABSTRACT Portrayals of accused men in the true crime television (TV) documentary series Making a Murderer (2015) and The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) mark a key historical moment for voiceless female murder victims. We mark this moment by considering how class politics plays out for Steven Avery and Robert Durst when it is part of the relative storytelling privilege they enjoy. Our study emphasises this privilege as an acute form of entitlement that is assured for men across the intersections of class, gender, and whiteness. To do this, we see Avery and Durst portrayed as underdogs in the American criminal justice system and observe their worlds-apart socioeconomic status coalescing with gendered justice. Our argument extends existing scholarship on the series, and true crime TV about men’s violence against women, by insisting that screen and social agency for accused men is a particular privilege afforded by mediated culture. Its creation of men as symbolic victims risks excusing violence against women by focusing on perpetrating men’s troubled lives as explanations for their crimes.

Sociological Analysis of women’s Violence : A Case Study in Egypt

The importance of the present study stems from the problematic nature of the marital relationships and their societal dimensions that stimulate some wives to murder their husbands with intention in Egypt. Hence, the question of this study runs so: What are the motives and societal dimensions that stimulate the wives to kill their husbands in Egypt? In order to find answers to this main question, the study makes use of the diagnostic and analytical approach with its two aspects: the qualitative and quantitative. That is to realize the aims of the study and to identify the dimensions of wives' violence in the Egyptian society in addition to determining the factors that produce violence in the Egyptian family. The study also adopts the comprehensive investigation and scanning of the statistical crime reports of the public security administration associated with the ministry of internal affairs in Egypt in the period from 1985 to 2008. This helps in counting the rates of the crime, defining its types, classifying it in general and familial, and comparing it with the crimes of 'murder with intention'. The field study is carried out in Al-Qnater Al-Khairia prison for women, taking into consideration this prison as the main prison for female criminals. The study also employs the so-called 'depth interviews' in order to apply the questionnaire as the main tool capable to identify the daily life aspects of the case under study and its familial history. The field of study was carried out in the period from July 2009 to December 2009 in Al-Qnater Al-Khairia prison for women. The writing down of the report took a period of time from January 2010 to July 2010. The study emphasizes that the reason behind the increase in the crime ratios lies in inequality in the distribution of economic resources. Such cause is the main factor in committing both the crimes motivated by money gain and violence. The results of the social surveys reveal that the murdering wife affiliates to the lower social class with the ratio of 83.33% of the total crimes that reach 30 case. 10% of those murderers belong to the upper lower class and 6.67% belong to the middle class. The latter are only two cases. The study arrests that 53.33% of the female murderers do not have a work and 46.67% of them have service works.

Rethinking 'Insanity' Defence in the Light of Kumari Chandra v. State of Rajasthan: Are Female Murderers 'Abnormal'?

This essay is based on the notion that although the criminal justice system is masked by the well-known fiction of neutrality, yet there is no doubt that it does discriminate on grounds of sex. The question of applicability of general legal defences to women offenders has come into limelight yet again with the recent judgment of Rajasthan High Court in Kumari Chandra v. State of Rajasthan whereby the alleged woman offender was acquitted of murder on the ground of insanity triggered by premenstrual stress syndrome. Somehow this decision, along with other decisions of similar nature in the past, reinforces the notion that women don’t commit homicide until they are mentally ill or unstable. This essay intends to critique the insanity defence used by lawyers to defend the acts of women offenders in light of the aforementioned decision and address the long-reverberating debate surrounding the medicalization of female offenders as ‘mentally ill’. While addressing this issue, the author intends to go beyond the standard feminist criticisms and draw upon her own argument, to highlight the need for formulating a female-specific defence which will accommodate the circumstances unique to a woman without syndromising her.

Seeking Sanctuary: Violence Against Women in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

This article identifies the way spaces of violence operate within gendered hierarchies in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. As migration accelerates, gender-related differences become evident. Strong push factors underlined by patriarchal power systems and hypermasculine spaces have normalized violence against women. Using data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and local data from the three countries, this article illustrates how gender inequalities sustain the emigration of women. The study also evaluates how the interweaving of female murders has further ostracized women and forced them to flee their home countries in search of sanctuary.

Building a national case in interwar Egypt: Raya and Sakina's crimes through the pages of al‐Ahrām (Fall 1920)

AbstractIn November 1920, the Alexandria police arrested two sisters, Raya and Sakina, along with their husbands and others, and charged them with the murder of seventeen women. At the end of a trial held in May 1921, the judges sentenced to death six members of the gang, yet it was Raya and Sakina who monopolized public attention as the first women sentenced to death in the Egyptian secular justice system. A century later, they are still alive in the Egyptian collective memory, which has turned them into a long‐lasting criminal myth and remembers them as former prostitutes, madams, and female murderers. Previous studies seem to see the myth as resulting from the supposedly exceptional character of the case. This paper is a first step toward exploring how this exceptionality was constructed and how it took on a national dimension after the announcement of Raya and Sakina's arrest. The focus is on al‐Ahrām, the main national daily newspaper at the time, which covered the issue systematically, providing information on the investigation while building the case in national terms. A micro‐historic approach to al‐Ahrām will enable a deconstruction of exceptionality through comparison with a precedent. An analysis incorporating both the precedent and Raya and Sakina's case will lead to a first hypothesis about the longevity of Raya and Sakina's case and the disappearance of the precedent from the Egyptian collective memory. This perspective offers insight into the connection between the press, public morality, and nation‐building in interwar Egypt, linking textual and extra‐textual realities and shedding light on the local aspects that make the nation. Indeed, the organization of al‐Ahrām in the provinces may be seen as a key factor in revealing what attracts national attention and what remains confined to a local dimension.

(Labouring Under Strong Mental Derangement) the Wretched Woman

Single-sheet, cheap-to-print publications popularized in urban centres in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, broadsides were used to disseminate knowledge and entertainment among the common reading classes of England. Murder broadsides were a particularly common genre during the Victorian period in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, and while the majority of these focused on the downfalls of male criminals, a significant number of publications concerning female murderers survives. Studying how broadsides were produced, read, and shared, especially in London, this paper examines the significance of their representations of female murderers. Ultimately, murder broadsides about women embodied the anxieties of the Victorian age. In the city, social boundaries were pushed, crossed, and blurred relentlessly; broadsides and their representations of women were active expressions of and responses to such anxieties. But while the tendency of broadsides was towards “moral conservativism” which sought to condemn violent crime, promote sexual purity, and sanctify chaste mothers and wives, broadsides also afforded the women they portrayed a certain notoriety and voice, complicating the common reading of the broadside as a prescriptive or even repressive document.

‘A victim, and that’s all’: the construction of Meredith Kercher in the British national newspapers

ABSTRACT What journalistic techniques are employed to construct a newsworthy female murder victim in the age of social media? Focusing on Meredith Kercher’s murder, this article examines how Kercher’s victim persona was fashioned by the British national press before the arrests of Amanda Knox and two others. Contrary to prevailing perspectives, we argue that the newsworthy murder victim is not necessarily an ideal victim. Murder victim status in a news story is a multi-faceted construction, contingent on whatever will magnify newsworthiness. The Kercher case is the first example of British journalists using the murder victim’s Facebook content as the primary news resource, adding “authenticity” to the text and images used, since it originated from the victim herself. The research findings illustrate how Kercher was sexualized through the application of misogynist victim-blaming templates used in the reporting of sex crimes. It was the degradation of her ideal victim status that drove the initial newsworthiness of the murder story.

A gender geography of intentional homicide within and outside of the family: Male and female murders in Europe, the US and Canada (2003–15)

Using the most recent and unpublished international data provided by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, we discuss the geography of male and female homicides in Europe, the US and Canada during the period 2003–15. We observe declining trends in mortality for both male and female homicide in most of these countries. For within-family homicides, geographical differences are much less pronounced compared with those occurring outside the family, especially if the victim is a woman and the perpetrator is the partner or former partner. Only for men is the risk of being the victim of a homicide committed by a family member greater where the risk of being killed by someone outside the family is also higher.

POLICIES AND PREVENTION OF U.S. WOMEN’S VIOLENT DEATH ACROSS AGES

U.S. violent death rates (homicide and suicide) are the highest in the developed world. Of all female murders (femicide), the majority are male perpetrated, intimate partner violence (IPV- 55-63%). Men are more often killed and by other male acquaintances, with only 2.8% IPV. Proportionally, older women (50+) have the top homicide victim rate (26%) among women. The baby boom cohort has been suicidal and aging has exacerbated the problem. Women are less likely to kill themselves, and the methods differ. We ask are mid and later life women’s lethal victimization similar to younger women? What are policy implications for prevention? Our research uses national level data from news surveillance of 728 intimate partner homicide suicide (IPHS) events and the State Firearm Law Database (SFLD) to improve our understanding of violent cause mortality by sex, age, method and location. IPHS patterns show 90% of events used firearm and 90% were male perpetrated. Results of multivariate analyses show young women had greater awareness and fear before IPHS. Evidence finds older men sometimes decided to kill their IP as part of their own suicide, without a history of known domestic violence. Older women have disproportionately low use of shelters, police and protective orders. SFLD shows population adjusted states with more DV firearms laws have significantly fewer IPHS events. Firearm culture has restricted research, blocked law enforcement and has done little to reduce gun access in households with vulnerable populations (e.g., suicidal husbands). Lethality Assessment Protocols could be modified for elder women’s unique situation.

Psychopathy in Italian female murderers.

Over the years, the number of homicides in Italy has progressively decreased, ultimately becoming one of the lowest rates in Europe (357 = 0.7 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, according to ISTAT). The number of homicides committed by women was about 9% of the total number of homicides during our study period. The percentage has increased in recent years because the total number of homicides has decreased without a proportionate decrease in the number of female homicides. Indeed, murder is an unusual type of crime for a woman and is often associated with a mental disorder, so when a woman committed a homicide, a psychiatric assessment was often performed. A forensic psychiatry expert was assigned to investigate the offender's psychopathology and mental state at the time of the offense. The root causes of the crime remained unexplained, however, due to the lack of a psychiatric precedent to justify this kind of assessment. The role of psychopathy in homicide has seldom been studied in female offenders, even though psychopathy has an important role in violent crimes. The investigators examined, clinically and historically, a sample of women who committed murder with different levels of criminal responsibility (female homicide offenders found not guilty by reason of insanity, having partial criminal responsibility, and convicted as criminally responsible and sentenced to prison) to identify the prevalence of the psychopathic dimension and its possible role in this sample. Prevalence and degree of psychopathic traits were examined in these female offenders using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. This study showed that females who had committed homicide were likely to suffer from mental illness; most of the homicidal acts were committed impulsively; and most female homicides occurred within the family, especially among women who were psychotic, but less so if they were psychopathic. Psychopathy tended to co-occur more with personality disorders than with psychotic psychopathology. Psychopathy was more evident among female homicide offenders who had been abused or traumatized. Psychopathic women who killed had high factor F1 scores and low antisocial component of factor F2.

Medico-legal investigation of a series of female murders in Sabaragamuwa Province, Sri Lanka

Background From 2008-2015, several female murders were reported from Sabaragamuwa, Sri Lanka. The motive of most killings was not obvious and the attacks were targeted against isolated, elderly females. This study was conducted to analyze the medico-legal aspects of those female murders. Methods Data of females who had been killed under similar circumstances in Kahawatta, Ratnapura were collected from July 2008 to Dec 2015. Results There were 17 female murders. Ten dead bodies were left at the scene and remaining seven were moved. The cause of deaths had been cut injuries to the head (n=12) and blunt force trauma to the head (n=2), ligature strangulation (n=2) and manual strangulation (n=1). There were three double murders. The first double murder and Case 15 and 16 were due to personal enmities. Suspect arrested in 2010 was a paraphilic and claimed for 3 murders with no DNA matches. Suspect arrested in 2015, was responsible for six murders and DNA of three identical post-coital samples matched with his DNA. Features such as “two or more” “independent”, “planned” murders committed at ‘separate locations’ for ‘personal gratification’ by the same individual/s, separated by a “cooling-off” period were found in most murders. Conclusions The three special features found in this series were some attempting to mimic serial killings, some appearing to be copycat murders and in other instances appearing to be an alibi created by the suspects who were in the custody. This is the first ever reported instance of two or more serial killers operated in the same area in the same duration.

Common Sense, No Magic: A Case Study of Female Child Murderers in the Eighteenth Century

This article presents the results of a psychiatric and church-historical analysis of the substantial court records from 21 cases of female child murderers in eighteenth-century Denmark-Norway. We investigated, first, the appearance of mental aspects in the cases and if they allowed for a retrospective clinical hypothesis regarding the mental state of the offender. Second, traces of theological or religious elements and third, trends or developments in the cases from 1697–1758 were considered. After an introduction to the legal framework, we present six cases with mental aspects, comprising existential death wish, depression, acute stress disorder, polymorphic psychosis, psychotic state and personality disorder to illustrate findings regarding the murderers’ mental states. Religious elements and developments proved hard to find. The results of the analysis point to social and mental rather than religious causative factors for the murders. To some degree they resemble present-day “suicide by cop” or homicides committed by mentally ill persons. This calls for a modification of the theory of so-called suicide murders and a religious or particularly Lutheran component in this regard. The in-depth analysis indicates that court procedures were perfectly commonsense and included mental aspects but seldom religion – and no magic.

Violence Against Women: Analysis of Murder News

In this study, the relationship between gender discrimination and violence against women is emphasized. We know that violence against women is not reacted to the same degree in every society and in different time periods. Particularly, we can observe that physical and sexual violence practices are met with reaction by societies. Nevertheless, we also find societies where the women exposed to violence are considered as responsible for violence and violence against women is culturally supported. Today, when violence and awareness of murders has increased, although similar female murders are not drawn enough attention, Özgecan Aslan’s murder in Turkey caused great social reactions and remained on the agenda for days. It is important to reveal what these reactions are and how they are coming to the fore. Society obtains information about events through news in the media. Therefore, qualitative data analysis of Özgecan Aslan murder news is done by using the NVivo11 programme.