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The Decline of Intimate Partner Homicide
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NIJ
Journal No. 252 • July 2005
The Decline of Intimate Partner Homicide
Final report submitted to NIJ, Analysis of Unexamined
Issues in the Intimate Partner Homicide Decline: Race, Quality
of Victim Services, Offender Accountability, and System
Accountability, William Wells and William DeLeon-Granados,
grant number 00WTVX0012, available from
NCJRS (NCJ 196666).
Intimate partner homicide rates have been declining since
1976, and researchers have been studying the phenomenon
since then to determine what factors are responsible. Two
researchers, William Wells at Southern Illinois UniversityCarbondale
and William DeLeon-Granados, then a professor at Indiana
UniversityBloomington and now a principal with The
Criminology and Public Policy Consultancy in San Rafael,
California, conducted a study looking at several topics
they felt had not been sufficiently examined. (See The
Study for more information about the methodology.)
The report discusses numerous issues playing roles in the
decline, including the effects of shelters, gender differences,
and racial differences. This is the first study to offer
substantive analysis of Hispanic victims in both urban and
rural settings.
The key findings were:
Shelters
- In urban counties, federally funded domestic violence
shelter-based organizations were associated with declines
in Hispanic female victimization but not in African American
or white female victimization. The researchers hypothesize
that shelters do not affect rates for white urban females
because these women tend to have other resources for help
(such as attorneys, legal services, friends, and counselors)
and tend not to use shelters, therefore deriving no protective
benefit from them. African American women, the researchers
suggest, use shelters but may find the protection afforded
by them insufficient, since they are often higher risk victims.
- In urban counties, although shelters were not associated
with a decline in African American female victimization,
the presence of shelters for women did contribute to a decrease
in African American male victimization. This finding, according
to the researchers, supports the belief that different motivations
drive female-perpetrated and male-perpetrated intimate partner
homicide and indicates that female perpetrators tend to
resort to homicide as a last resort when they feel they
have no other escape from an abusive relationship.
Criminal Justice Interventions
- There was no statistically significant relationship between
any criminal justice system response and victimization for
either gender or for any racial or ethnic group, a finding
that greatly surprised the researchers.
- Where law enforcement intervention increased in domestic
abuse situations, women experienced dramatically larger
percentage increases in arrest, prosecution, and conviction
than men. For example, over the study, arrests for domestic
violence of male suspects increased a total of 37 percent
while arrests of females increased 446 percent. Convictions
for an offense following a domestic violence-related arrest
grew by 131 percent for males, but by 1,207 percent for
females between 1987 and 1999.
The researchers conclude that more work is needed to explore
the complex relationships among gender, ethnicity, and intimate
partner homicide. More analysis of shelter-based services
is also warranted, the researchers assert, and they suggest
that policymakers facing limited resources may want to direct
them toward shelter-based organizations rather than focusing
solely on criminal justice system responses.
THE STUDY
The study covered a 13-year period, from 1987 to 2000,
and included 58 California counties. The researchers chose
California for three reasons: it allowed them to have standardized
data for a diverse population, including data from both
urban and rural areas; it provided numerous examples of
shelter and criminal justice responses; and it experienced
a much larger decline in female victimization rates than
the average State.
In an effort to better understand any intimate partner
homicide rate variations based on ethnicity, gender, place,
race, and time, the researchers looked at these characteristics
in arrest, conviction, and incarceration records for each
countys domestic violence offenses. Victim services
were gauged by the rate of federally funded shelters found
in each county per 100,000 women, by race.
The homicide data were given to the researchers by the
State of California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice
Statistics Center, which included information such as the
relationship between victim and offender, county where the
homicide took place, weapon used, and victims and
offenders age, race, and gender. In addition, California
provided data on the criminal justice systems response
and on the available shelter services.
NCJ 208710
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