Friends of the Forensic Sciences Club, this week we present the paper “Does she kill like he kills? Comparison of homicides committed by women with homicides committed by men in Spain” by Santos-Hermoso, J.; Quintana-Touza, J. M.; Medina-Bueno, Z. and Gómez-Colino, M. R. (2021), in which authors make an analysis of the differences between how women kill and how men kill.
Criminal behavior studies have shown that most crimes, especially violent crimes, are committed by men.
In the Spanish context, the average rate of crime committed by men between 2010 and 2018 was five times higher than the ones committed by women.
Despite the differences reflected in this data, over the past 20 years there has been a steady increasement of the number of women convicted because of violent crimes. And not only in Spain; in fact, Finland found an increasement in homicides committed by women between 1995 and 2004.
Although the study of women as victims of homicide has been widely studied, the same does not happen if we think of them as victimizers. This is so, mainly, due to the low level of prevalence of female murderers. And within the group of investigations on homicidal women, there are even fewer that analyze the homicides committed by them outside the family sphere.
But what do we know so far? Well, one of the main conclusions drawn from these comparative studies is that women kill mainly members of their family, while men tend to kill acquaintances and/or strangers.
Regarding the gender of the victims, most studies show that both men and women prefer the latter.
On the other hand, it seems that young victims tend to be associated with women, mainly because of the involvement of them in filicide cases.
Regarding the characteristics of the aggressors, literature speaks about the fact that women tend to be married or in a relationship and live with other people, while men tend to be single and live alone. Another fact would be that men tend to have more criminal records than women do.
When it comes about the consumption of alcohol and drugs, it is also more likely that men have consumed some substance at the moment of the incident, while, regarding mental illnesses, it is more likely that women are the ones with a previous diagnosis.
Men kill in public settings and outdoors, while women kill in closed spaces, such as homes. Men, in addition, use firearms to a greater extent, and women tend to use suffocation or knives.
With these data from previous works, authors carry out a study with the intention of delving into the differences between one type of homicide and the other, but not limited to a specific area such as couple cases or filicides.
To do this, they analyze cases corresponding to 577 homicides resolved by the Spanish Civil Guard between 2013 and 2018 (95.5% of the total cases registered in those years).
What were the results obtained?
In the first place, it should be noted that female perpetrators constituted a 9.8% of the total perpetrators analyzed. Of this percentage, 3 out of 4 were homicides committed by women in the family environment, highlighting the cases of filicide.
Regarding the gender of the victims, it was surprisingly observed that women predominantly kill men, and not women as it was believed; while in men, the opposite occurs. Women would also prefer young people, so in those cases where the victim is a young man, the homicide is more likely to have been committed by a woman.
Regarding the psychosocial profile, women kill victims who can be considered vulnerable, either because of what we have just mentioned about youth, or because these victims may exhibit some type of mental illness or difficulty to a greater extent than the victims of men.
Regarding the perpetrators, the information provided by the authors’ study is that women are, on average, somewhat older than men, but the difference is not significant.
An important finding that confirms conclusions from previous research is that, to a greater extent than men, women tend to present or be diagnosed with mental disorders at the time of the incident. On the other hand, men are more frequently under the influence of substances.
An interesting finding is that women tend to commit homicides during the afternoon. They are not usually carried out in the presence of witnesses, probably because, as we have already seen, they prefer closed spaces.
Also, as other research suggested, it appears that women tend to displace bodies. This can be explained because most of their victims are relatives and they may choose to displace the body as a method of disengagement; on the other hand, given that underage victims are associated with women, their bodies are easier to move.
There seems to be a consensus that firearms are used primarily by men and suffocation methods by women. Of the 100 cases in the study in which firearms were used, only 1 involved a female aggressor.
In terms of post-homicide behaviors of perpetrators, studies suggest that women remain on the scene and tend to confess more frequently than men.
This study provides an interesting basis on which to further investigate the differences between homicides by men and those by women. Although an existing limitation could be that, we know that women mainly commit homicides in the family environment, but are there differences between family homicides committed by women and men?
On the other hand, it is still necessary to develop studies that include the analysis of other variables, such as whether or not there is a prior relationship between victim and perpetrator. The authors talk about this point as an idea from which future research could start.
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