Intimate and Family Murder

After I read the chapter, all I could say is the world's really strange--maybe gone mad. First-off, it's pretty disturbing when you think that love could actually be a key to homicide--that "love" itself could be the very root of motives for murder. Whenever I see the news on TV about intimate or family-related homicides, it awes me and makes me wonder how could they do such a thing. But anyway, I've observed that some do it to hide an affair from the spouse, some are for money, others are for authority (certain family status), and some are just for attention. It usually happens between couples. Intimate partner homicide usually involves a man killing his female partner, often after a long and escalating pattern of woman battering. When women kill male partners, they typically do so in self-defense, although such defense may not qualify as such in a court of law. However, deaths attributable to domestic violence far transcend intimate partner killings. Non intimate partner family members also kill each other in so called "family homicides." Fathers kill children, mothers kill children, children kill their parents, and brothers kill sisters, and so on. Men sometimes kill other men over a woman they sexually compete for. These "sexual competitor killings" are much smaller in number than either intimate partner or family homicides.

In some cases, however, like in the Scott Peterson case, we can see that there's this thing about getting away from responsibility (I.e., fatherhood) and running off with somebody else. Sometimes we can't even expect that homicide would actually occur to such a "happy" marriage, because they appear to be quite normal. Regarding this, there was a time when I had this conversation with a friend about marriage and she just said, "Sometimes I pity those who get married, because I see most of them just stay in the marriage because of commitment but never with love." It's such an irony, but I admit it's true for some cases, since we see them happen in real life now. I'm not saying all marriages or relationships would end up that way, but we never know what's going to happen, because anything's possible.

Some perpetrators, when realizing their actions, also commit suicide. Many more Americans die from suicide than homicide. Most of these suicides involve male victims, some of whom kill their female intimate partners before taking their own lives. Specifically, I think "in most cases we believe battered women are provoked to attempt suicide by the extent of control exercised over their lives." As I've noticed, the proximity between woman battering and women's suicide attempts in general, strongly suggests that battering may be one of the principal causes of the suicide attempts. It is pointed out that a number of studies identify abuse as a factor in female suicide attempts. And most of the battered women, as most studies show, would "visit the hospital with an abuse-related injury or complaint on the same day as their suicide attempt."

As the proportion of the elderly in the U.S. in the population increases, researchers have become increasingly aware of domestic violence among their ranks. Old stereotypes die hard, and social service providers and law enforcement agencies sometimes assume that because people are elderly they are not capable of committing or being victimized by domestic violence. One example is from the chapter itself, with the former military man, Ronald Gene Simmons who executed his entire family on Christmas. He did it because he wanted to control everything in his family.

Speaking of families, there are also cases when the assumption of homicide is usually taken in the form of "mercy killings". I've also seen movies wherein family members just take the life of one sick member, particularly the elderly. And the reason's