Abstract
Female perpetrators of intimate partner or spousal homicide are a significant and under-recognized issue. The fact that women are much less likely than men to perpetrate violent criminal offenses, and are more likely than men to become victims of spousal homicide, has diverted attention of the public, academics, and practitioners away from women who kill their intimates. A dominant perspective in the field—a gender paradigm—has focused on female victims who kill their male abusers primarily in self-defense or in an attempt to escape the abuse, and thus has also hampered our understanding of female perpetration of intimate partner homicide in its full complexity. This chapter provides a summary of contemporary views of the female perpetrator in the context of intimate partner homicide, including various perspectives that explain it, differential (more lenient) treatment of female perpetrators in the criminal justice system, and more favorable public perception and media portrayal of women who kill their partners.
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Lysova, A. (2023). Female Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Homicide. In: Russell, B., Torres, C. (eds) Perceptions of Female Offenders, Vol. 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45685-5_4
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