Intimate partner violence is all too common throughout the world and takes many forms. The most serious of these is homicide by an intimate partner. The fear of being killed, in fact, is a major dynamic in male-on-female violence and sometimes in motivating women to kill the perpetrator of abuse out of fear or desperation.

In the U.S., estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) are that more than three women a day are killed by their intimate partners. Women are killed by intimate partners more often than by another acquaintance of stranger...