Fatal Attractions: Slayings of Intimate Partners
A married couple is walking down a suburban street when a man accosts them, shooting the 27-year-old wife to death and wounding the 26-year-old hus- band. He tells the police that three men shouting ethnic slurs were the killers. But the wife had recently texted her brother that she can’t talk to her husband because he is so abusive, and that “Someday U will
find me dead … he wants to kill me.” The police arrest the husband and he confesses that he hired a friend to kill her and then wound him to mislead the authorities. (Stelloh and Barron, 2011)
As with child abuse, the most accurate statistics are kept about the most terrible of all crimes: mur- der. The FBI’s SHRs can be used to focus attention upon those homicides solved by the police that fit the victim–offender relationship of one intimate partner killing another. An analysis of all the homi- cides committed between 1980 and 2008 unearthed many important findings that shed light on very troubled intimate partner relationships where the degree of violence escalated to lethal levels (Cooper and Smith, 2011):
In those murders in which the police were able to figure out the victim–offender relationship, about 16 percent arose out of a conflict between intimate partners. One spouse killing another accounted for 10 percent, and a boy- friend or girlfriend slaying one another made up 6 percent of all solved murders during that 28-year span.
Every year, male violence greatly oversha- dowed violence by females: The body count from husbands killing wives plus boyfriends killing girlfriends vastly outnumbered the death toll of wives killing husbands added to girl- friends killing boyfriends.
About 40 percent of female murder victims were slain by an intimate, as opposed to another member of her family, some acquain- tance, or a complete stranger. The lowest per- cent of females killed by an intimate was 38 percent in 1995; the highest percent was 45 percent in 2008, the last year under scrutiny.
Enraged intimates pose a relatively minor threat to the continued existence of most husbands and boyfriends; but for females, infuriated intimates make up a growing proportion of all killers, approaching the 50 percent mark.
Over this time period, the proportion of inti- mate homicides committed by one spouse against another has declined steadily, while the
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proportion carried out by a boyfriend or girl- friend against one another has risen year after year. In other words, a declining percent of murders involve deadly assaults among hus- bands and wives, and a growing percent reflect unmarried lovers’ embroiled in deadly quarrels. By 2008, about half of all IPV homicides involved people formally married to each other and the other half engulfed unmarried couples.
Over the 28 years, the percentage of killings carried out with firearms has declined substan- tially, from nearly 70 percent to roughly 50 percent. In 2008, 53 percent of all female vic- tims but only 42 percent of deceased males were shot to death (see Cooper and Smith, 2011; also see Zawitz, 1994).
Further insights about the toll intimate partner violence imposes on American society can be gleaned from the bar graph in Figure 9.1, based
on data from the FBI’s SHRs over more than three and a half decades. The graph reveals that 1988 was the deadliest year for wives and girl- friends: nearly 1,600 perished. The first year tracked by the graph, 1977, was the time period when the most husbands and boyfriends were slain (almost 1,200). The lowest body count for male intimate partners, at about 240, down an astonishing 85 per- cent from its peak 33 years earlier, was recorded in 2010 and was duplicated in 2013. Clearly, violence by females against their intimate partners has dropped impressively. As for males murdering teen- age girls and women they were once romantically involved with, the death toll receded during the 1990s and reached its lowest (best) point in 1999, with fewer than 1,000 female casualties of fatal IPV. But the slaying of girlfriends and wives leveled off during the early years of the twenty-first century, and then ominously reversed course in 2007 and began creeping back up until 2010.