Intimate Homicides

Some interesting findings on murder via a divorce law study:

Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress - Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers - 2003

Our data on homicide come from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The UCR data are derived using a voluntary police agency-based reporting system. The Supplementary Homicide Reports of the UCR provide incident-level information on criminal homicides,
including data describing the date and location of the incident, as well as a range of information on both the offender and the victim. The particular richness of this data is that it codes the relationship of the victim to the murderer, where known.

In this section we will examine three successively broader definitions of intimate homicide. The narrowest only includes spousal homicide, the next group includes homicides committed by any family member or romantic interest, and finally we expand our treatment group to our broadest categorization, which includes all homicides committed by non-strangers.

Homicide Rates: FBI Count (1968-94) / killed per million in the state each year
             Women Mean  Men Mean  Women/Men
by Spouses          7.3       5.5       1.33
by intimates       14.7      18.4       0.80
by Non-Strangers   21.2      56.9       0.37
All Murders        32.8      92.6       0.35